Joanna, gave me a link to Ted Morgan and a discussion of his book:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lEjOAqRvTA8
I was 17 in 1960 going to high school out in the perfect suburban life. I was starving to death. There was nothing to eat. Except for a few things in English Lit. there was nothing. The other potential was black music in various forms from fast to slow dance music and quick snippets of jazz. The was a gosepel station on Sunday nights from a famous black church somewhere in the general metro area. One friend was trying to learn guitar and had some blues, a little classical, and flamenco records... His family were old line communists, his father had gone to Spain, etc. They were my main contact for somekind of culture. They had books on shelves and painting reproductions on the walls.
At school social life was divided between the petty criminals or the socialites who were all getting into fancy colleges, if they were going to college. I had already had a few part time jobs and there was nothing in work either.
This life was portrayed on tv as the good life, the American Dream. For me it was a wide awake nightmare of bland. After a summer of working, I decided going to college had to be better than that. After a pretty good semester at Pierce I got to Northridge and went wild. For some reason, CSUN had professors who were doing all sorts of interesting things, anthropology of film, figure drawing, philosophy, even intro biology...
None of that student life was portrayed in media. College was for drinking and parties...
This is just a sketch of how and why media played a role in my revolts which were also shared to some extent with a very few friends. I was experiencing the profound alienation between my actual life and its imaginary twin in US pop culture. This came more and more in focus, as I deverged from the script. I was supposed to go to college, but I wasn't supposed to learn anything. After that freshman year, I started reading on my own, following suggestions by a local bookstore owner, named Lewis. He must have been another of the mysterious communists since he knew the family and my friends older brother used to get his books from Lewis. That summer I didn't have a job and took some summer session classes to get out of working, so I had time to read. I started with Stendal's Red and Black, Flaubert's Sentimental Education, following leads from my French teacher at Pierce. Lewis led me to the Russians, where I took on War and Peace...
These books changed me in the sense of opening possibilities of a different sort of life that did not lead to a getting a job. Maybe painting, reading, some writing... But of course the world would not leave me alone. The fucking draft was out there. The urban poverty of blacks and latinos, something I had seen on playgrounds in elementary schools, etc.
So some of that underlays the reason for the dissociation between life and media, which only got worse and worse as riots and war built up and up. Real events formed a vast critique of the American Dream. It was particularly stunning with the Cuban Missile Crisis, early events under Deim in South Vietnam, and coupled with Freedom Summer... I vaguely wondered, when was some of that coming to LA? I didn't have to wait long. Meanwhile European films were starting to show up in art-theaters where I watched a lot of them, portraying lives that had nothing to do with the US dreamland. So they acted as a critique, even if that was not the intended effect.
The fact was that events were destroying the pretence of the American Dream, crafted by the same media that now had to report those events.
There really is too much to write about. It was a decade and a half, counting the early 70s before the steam ran out, and or was the beginning reactionary counter forces gathered their forces and re-consolidated a newly hatched version of the American Dream, which is now called neo-liberalism. I got to watch up close the cooptation of two guys who had been very active in the disability movements. They were appointed by Jerry Brown to state agency positions where they did very little to advance their previous achievements...
I am getting a lesson in this myself, through a new part time job where I seem to have a way that infuriates the upper level managers of this community organization. They specialize in servicing their grants and funding sources, without doing much in services. I would say tokenism with good stats...
CG