A Kinder, Gentler America: Melancholia and the Mythical
1950s. By Mary Caputi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
2005. 232p. $58.50 cloth, $19.50 paper.
Given the controversies that have plagued the present administration,
it is little wonder that critiques of neoconservatives have been produced
by scholars from all perspectives. Even Francis Fukuyama, widely reputed
to be one of the great neoconservative thinkers, has released a trenchant
critique of neoconservatives' ideas and policies (America at the
Crossroads, 2006). In her contribution to this growing chorus, Mary
Caputi argues that neoconservatives have used and abused history in
creating a mythical image of America's past, an idealized narrative
about American life in “the fifties” that she contrasts with
the complex historical strata of the chronological 1950s. She argues that
the neoconservatives have cultivated, popularized, and exploited a
misleading and incomplete image of a “kinder, gentler America”
to generate a peculiarly powerful melancholia that haunts us with the
memory of what we (supposedly) were and what we might (erroneously wish
to) be again. Only by seeing through this idealized vision of that decade
can we “understand that America's true identity is not located
in some mythological register of time” and thus “let go of the
worries and sadness that drive the need for foundations” and moral
certainties (p. 27).