#little boxes

This is important because at the time and ever since, reactionary forces keep trying to jam the nation into that image as some kind of blissful idyllic ideal.

But the image of suburban America in the 1950s was pure fantasy sold to cover over the wounds of a deeply traumatized nation.

The US 1950s ideal of one employed breadwinning man and one unemployed housekeeping wife living with 1d4 minor children in a freestanding house in a sprawling new-built suburb pretending to be an idyllic small town/country estate was invented in the wake of the massive unaddressed generational trauma of the one-two-three punch of the First World War, the Great Depression and the Second World War.

The image was never fully embraced and even at the time was a regular object of mockery.

The image of women as ditzy housewives was violently enforced to erase the gains women had made in employment and the competence they had displayed during the war. Likewise the attempt to crush the Black people who had also demonstrated competence and capability. Veterans’ trauma was swept under the rug.

The very idea that the prefabricated commercial advertiser-driven idyl of the lone nuclear family swathed in its swaddling 1950s housing development, sold to anesthetize a still-war-traumatized generation living in the 1950s of the Korean War, of “Losing” China and the McCarthy Communist witch hunts, of the great eruptions of the Civil Rights movement, of the Cold War and bomb shelters and sundown towns, is the way things are “supposed” to be is utter, ahistorical nonsense.

I have received the calling to turn trash into little pen jars