Dennis Claxton wrote:
>
> At 06:45 PM 8/25/2010, Doug Henwood wrote:
>
> >the Cold War put the ruling class in a more compromising mood than
> >it would otherwise have been.
>
> Definitely. It's what got Jackson Pollock on the cover of Life in 1949.
>
I'm getting more uncomfortable about using "ruling cvlass" as though it were a single entity with a single mind. I know neither you nor Doug believe this, but the term itself as the grammatical subject of such sentences seems to carry such a burden.
The CIA's plumping for abstract expressionism (and the picture in Life) was a fairly specific part of the Cold War, planned and implemented to show how unliberal Moscow was and how liberal 'we' were. It isn't a good example of reactions to large movements of varied nature -- such as the Movement of Movements in the '60s. Reactions to _part_ of that would have been planned by _some_ state officials with specific Cold War problems in mind. But overall it's more complicated, is it not.
Carrol