Popular Culture Review Vol. 2, No. 2, July 1991 | Page 99

The Astro-Turf Garden

91

Charles Reich (1971, p. 246) noted the "plastic artifical quality
of everything." In Mike Nichols’ film The Graduate, Benjamin, a
recent college graduate, is given a word of advice by one of his
father’s fatuous blow-dry friends—"plastic.” The line embodied in
capsule form the demonology of an artificial industrial society. To
the radical consciousness of the sixties that "fresh green breast of the
New World" had become an Astro-Turf garden, a plastic "valley of
ashes."
As used by radical dissidents in the sixties the image of a
plastic society had two distinct but related uses. On one hand it
described the soul sickness of a society that was inauthentic. On the
other hand it sought to regenerate a lost intensity of feeling, and
revive a fascination with the uncivilized, the uncanny and the
inexplicable. Although it would be an over-simplification to think of
the cultural and political radicalism of the sixties solely as a
chapter in American pastoralism, the transfiguration of that world
view helps to explain many things about the sixties. A central
impulse of these dissidents, in short, was resistance to the dominant
culture as artificial.
If there is a central conclusion shared by these dissident voices,
it is that the conquest of nature is achieved at a considerable price—
an even more thorough conquest of all human, social, and natural
possibilities. The technocratic celebration of progress is held to
perpetuate a grim determinism and to legitimate historical
domination. The conception of society which takes shape under the
technological perspective is held to stress the necessity for the
institutionalization and extension of science and technology to
everything within reach, perpetuating an unsparing determinism.
Just as an earlier industrial society was exposed by Marx as an
ideological justification of private ownership of the means of
production and the subjugation of the worker, so contemporary
advanced industrial society is shown to be a justification of the
subjugation and defilement of nature.
Concord College
Endnotes

Roger Neustadter