The Lounge of the Adventurer – lots of randomness with sprinkles made of comedy and a filling of our finest quality spite

Even as history has called this the “Golden Age of America, it is evident that this has not been the case in the background. Behind every suburban whitewashed home was the desire to be better than the guy next door. There was a hidden desire to conform, in order to appear as well-off as the next person down the lane. Even as the entire neighbourhood and its mother were falling in lock-step with the style of the time – avocado coloured fridge, massive steel cars with tailfind the size of continents, electric appliances – someone was always trying to push on to a newer trend that everyone just had to have. This conformity, leapfrogging, and comparative state of affairs qualifies, to me, as disgusting. I hate the prospect of a culture that has to be the same – whatever happened to the land of the great melting pot?

Even as America proceeds to display imense monetary burgeoning, how was all of this funded? America became rich through the money it gained via warfare. America had its taste of economic prosperity via the suddenly exploding economy of the Second World War period. As a result, the nation thirsted again for conflict to inflate the economy, fitting with [C. Wright] Mills’ belief in the “capitalist brinksmanship” theory of economic prosperity. Indeed, is it not possible to consider that the Cold War, beginning in this 1950s era, is the perfect expression of capitalist brinksmanship? From 1949 to 1991, America was poisted to throw down with the Great Soviet/Red Menace. This Cold War, a period of arms expansion unmatched in previous history, where humanity as a whole could be wiped out with the press of a button, had become the supporter of a massive [American] economic upturn. And it was this upturn that began in the 1950s period. And it was, then, this brinksmanship, the perpetuated fear of the Red Menace and The Bomb, that was responsible for the cars of the giant tailfins, the white, cookie-cutter suburbs of the American Dream, and the lifestyle of the silly conformist 1950s American society.