Word: utopia
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...were all a little mad that winter," wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson, recalling the emotional excitement of 1840. "Not a man of us that did not have a plan for some new Utopia in his pocket." As common as a handkerchief and as casually displayed. Today, pockets seem to be empty of anything so inspiring. People are doubtless as distressed about social conditions as they were in 1840, but what has happened to Utopia? Those once myriad visions of ideal societies have all but disappeared, or have been transmogrified into the demonic dreams of science-fiction. Gone are the blessed isles...
Pimps obviously have unconventional views on male-female relationships, but their material values are relentlessly middleclass. As Bruce put it: "A player is striving for the same things that a square is striving for-security, Utopia, annual income." The latter ranges from $25,000 to $50,000, out of which the pimp pays lawyers and bail bondsmen, buys food, cars, clothes, and sometimes drugs for himself and his stable. A communal apartment, with a pimp and several women living together, is one way of saving money, but Iceberg Slim had only scorn for that arrangement: "That...
...happy thought that here (unlike the world outside, full of successful villains and downtrodden good guys) infractions are almost always caught and the referees are almost always right. Here. if nowhere else, the wicked are penalized, and the honest are rewarded. A football game gives us a glimpse of Utopia; a society where freedom flourishes under law. Here the police intervene only when necessary. The decisions of the judges are not only final, but prompt and fair. Hulking titans submit their quarrels to a midget arbitrator-and go along with the call. Finally, note that whereas in the real world...
...ever lived." He is certainly the chronicler of one American dream, with its gawky Huck Finns, jolly G.I.s, laundered blacks and apple-cheeked mothers in bifocals; its flags, turkeys, sneakers and little clapboard banks. Today Rockwell's America may seem almost as distant as Thomas More's Utopia, but this sumptuous tome pleasurably suggests why his genre pieces, painterly apple-pie to the last brush stroke, defined a whole area of solid comfort and nostalgic selfesteem...
...such a Utopia, how can we lose...