![]() ![]() So we arrive at the Age of Trump, another cultural moment that takes its name from the Colossus who heads the nation, Franklin Delano Roosevelt having given his image to two cultural moments as Dr. Sometimes social commentary makes a difference, as was the case with the Progressive Era Muckrakers, or the influence of Michael Harrington and various reports on poverty on the War on Poverty, an essential part of the Democratic Sixties, but sometimes, as in the past decade, political commentary has not risen very far in enlightening the theatre of public opinion, perhaps because those who voted for Trump don’t read books, and also because the writing of social commentary is mostly left to journalists rather than academics, like John Galbraith and Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., who so enlightened the Fifties about what was going on in the American economy and in American politics. The Industrial Revolution was a structural event rather than a cultural moment, but it is one that is emblemized in the novels of Charles Dickens as the conflict between the various social classes arising in Victorian England, the political debate moved ahead by Benjamin Disraeli’s portrait of the two nations that inhabited Great Britain. So Churchill unleashed not only a political confrontation but also the beginning of the age of atomic confrontation, an age that answered only to the logic of deterrence, of mutually assured destruction, and which lasted until the destruction of the Berlin Wall in 1989 signaled the end of the Soviet Union.Ĭultural moments respond to and incorporate the social structural and political forces which explain how society is changing, but they can also serve to propel underlying forces onward or act contrary to social structure. Churchill’s Fulton, Missouri speech about an Iron Curtain descending upon Eastern Europe is quite properly used to define the start of the Cold War, though one might say the true beginnings of the Cold War resulted from George Marshall deciding he was not going to be able to negotiate anything of substance with Mao, Marshall the last holdout against turning the Soviet Bloc and its allies into adversaries rather than uneasy allies. But sometimes particular moments not only symbolize or highlight a moment but help it come into existence. Particular events within a cultural moment can serve as just additional data about the moment, as is the case with hula hoops and big money quiz shows and so serve as no more than emblems of their moment, even if one can also make a case that some of those emblems, like “Ozzie and Harriet”, are symbols of the period in that an appreciation of them deepens an understanding of the moment. ![]() Lewis found out when public support for strikes disappeared in the context of war production patriotism. Labor conflict, a theme from the Thirties, could not hold its own as a legitimate context of experience during the World War II culture, as John L. There also can be remainders of previous moments that conflict with the prevailing cultural moment but appear to be as such because they are allusions to alternative moments of public consciousness. For World War II, that included swing music and Bond Drives and rationing. There may be overlapping events which are fads of the period, that associated with the moment. A war, such as World War II, is a public event which defined a cultural moment that lasted from Pearl Harbor to past V-J Day. These topics, feelings and images seem to the people of the community to be inevitable references and so not require people to explain why they are so preoccupied. It consists of the things that people regularly allude to in their thoughts and their talk regardless of what is happening in their personal or work lives. A cultural moment is the period of duration of a uniform set of preoccupations, emotions and meanings within a community.
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