Popular Culture Review Vol. 2, No. 2, July 1991 | Page 97

The Astro-Turf Garden

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deteriorate in the workmanship as corporations
improve their advertising, wars shift from carnage
and patriotism to carnage and surrealism, sex shifts
from whiskey to drugs. And all the food is poisoned.
And the waters of the sea we are told. And there is
always the sound of an electric motor in the ear.
American society, Mailer (1963, p. 178) contends, has adopted the
contours of the plague, a form of plastic cancer, the common
denominator of the disease of form:
Everywhere we are assaulted by the faceless
plastic surfaces of everything which has been built in
America since the war, that new architecture of giant
weeds and giant boxes of children’s colors on
billboards and jagged electrical signs.. . . It is an
architecture with no root in the past and no suggestion
of the future, for one cannot conceive of a modem
building growing old (does it turn dingy or will the
colors stain?) there is no way to age, it can only cease
to function.
The modem landscape, Mailer maintains, is becoming increa
singly inorganic and artificial, dislocating from instinct and emotion.
Infected by the totalitarian nature of society, man fled from the
consequences of his life and sought salvation in the institutions
outside himself, in a terminal anesthetized cancer war dispensing
synthetic drugs and societal cures.(2)
These dissident radical voices of the sixties saw society as a
delicate organism whose parts could not be tampered with without
grave risks of damaging the whole. Nature, as the organic and the
erotic, was envisioned as the touchstone of individual and collective
virtue and health. They believed that a relatively homogeneous and
placid organic society had, through industrialization, been replaced
by a pernicious mechanistic society which was turning men into
machines and nature into a wasteland.
A common strand of the pastoral impulse in the radicalism of
the sixties has been especially clear in numerous references to the
emergence of a plastic society. Unlike earth, water, or air, plastic is