Popular Culture Review Vol. 2, No. 2, July 1991 | Page 98

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The Popular Culture Review

an unnatural material. The term plastic evokes the false, the
artifical, the synthetic nature of modem industrial society. The term
recurs often enough to constitute a leitmotif in discussions of industrial
society. Again and again the term is used to describe a society that is
seen as fabricated, ersatz, and false to the genuine needs of people. In
seizing upon the image of a plastic society the radical dissidents
inverted the metaphor of the garden to describe the conditions of
twentieth century American society.
Technology in their view had become a totally pervasive force
on life, creating a totally controlled, synthesized, and plasticized
environment that had incorporated the natural world. Norman
Mailer, as we have seen, pictured American society run by an
insidious plastic artificiality. "The country," he (1963, p. 183) noted,
"had a collective odor which was reminiscent of a potato left to
molder in a plastic box." "The republic" was (1966, p. 160)
"managing to convert the citizenry to a plastic mass." Kurt Vonnegut
(1971, p. 105) suggested what Horace Greely would say today, "Go
plastic young man. That's what Greeley’d say.” The Big Nurse in
Ken Kesey’s (1964, p. 74) parable of American life sometimes lets "a
clear chemical gas in through the vents and the whole ward is set
solid when the gas changes to plastic." The Underground Press
Syndicate (qtd. in Romm, p. 27) noted that their emergence was "a
primary reaction to the plastic computerized society." Chip Bartlet
(qtd. in Peck, p. xiv .) described the underground press as "cultural
shock treatment and metaphysical alternative to plasticized
consumerist materialism." Abbie Hoffman (1970, p. 84) inveigned
that the U.S. was a "plastic land of death." Theodore Roszak ( 1969,
p. 250) fretted that:
Perhaps someday we shall inhabit a totally
plastic world, clinically immaculate and wholly
predictable. To live in such a completely
programmed environment becomes more and more our
conception of rational order of security. The object
almost seems to bear out ideas of Otto Rank’s return to
the womb psychology, with our goal being a
worldwide, lifelong plastic womb.