At the time, America’s total embrace of TV and suburbia during the 1950s didn’t seem like symptoms of a national immersion in fantasy. To the contrary, all serious observers saw reason and rationality cruising to victory on most fronts, led by America. The United Nations was established. Colleges and universities were growing fast. Science was unchallenged, the genetic code was broken, computers and transistors were invented, government and big business and even the big churches were run by technocrats, and ideology seemed passé. “Our culture is unique,” a historian and sociologist of the
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