After the last World War, creative expression - art - became unleashed from the past. Visual arts, even the avant garde, had always relied on depictions of the world as it's source. In the fifties, American artists began to look inward for their muse and produce images that were not representational of the real world.
Our society also gave up reliences. Fifty years ago, the scientist in the white coat would prove how the world worked and we would believe him. Forty nine years ago, Darrel Huff wrote the book shown in the Irving Geis drawing above, How to Lie with Statistics and we never trusted authorities again.
Being Gary Turner's dyad, comparing weapons of medium destruction to this dna sequence, and Kieran Healy's reinterpretation of the Department of Homeland Security's citizen preparedness website are hilarious reminders that chaos (KAOS?) reigns supreme and none of this makes any sense at all.
In 1959, my neighborhood on Fern Drive in Toledo was pretty much a cookie cut subdivision street of new houses populated with lots of us kids. Two of my close neighbors built bomb shelters. These were underground rooms with thick concrete walls, floor and ceiling, an activated carbon air filtering system, a hermetically sealing door and a pantry that held several months worth of food and water. I don't remember seeing any waste disposal facilities, so I imagine it would have gotten pretty gross in there.
We were told that if you got into the shelter in time, and if the attack were not too close, and if nobody got sick, and if the room full of your crap didn't send you out into the deadly environment, you might be able to survive a nuclear, radioactive or chemical attack.
Those shelters were made of buried steel and concrete. Not tape and plastic wrap.
