fference of opinion with respect to "occasions that are significant to the group" and "symbolic representations that convey the spirit of a culture or an age." The dropping of atomic bombs on Japan and the crushing of Nazi Germany might be for one American the first step of a golden age of prosperity and peace. Another American, however, might look at the same events in a broader context and conclude that the world had gone mad, leapt off a precipice of horrors in to an abyss of doom. The latter individual---perhaps an abstract expressionist at heart---would view the apparent peace and prosperity of the late 1940s and early and mid-1950s as an illusion, a calm before the next storm. That storm, of course, was precisely what awaited the United States and the world in the turbulent and violent 1960s.
If the power groups in the United States in the aftermath of
World War II had had their way, they would have turned all of
the abstract expressionists into Norman Rockwell's, just as the
power groups in totalitarian countries control their artists and dicta
...