Our perspective while we live through something is often very different than our perspective looking back on it. We’re sorting out a very strange time, and right now, our cultural expression is one of teddy bears in windows, talk shows produced from living rooms, and mask-making tutorials on social media. 

​

When we look back on this, though, it may seem very different. We’ll filter our lived experience through the narrative we need to move on to the next phase of our lives. I’m keeping a journal of my experiences as my own contribution to the history of this time. Perhaps in the future, a descendent will be working on a school report and want to use it. 

​

There are analogies to the Great Depression and World War II, although most likely this era of physical distancing and related economic disruption will be much shorter. The question, then, is what the return to normal will look like.

​

The first thing we know is that it won’t be normal, because normal is an illusion. 

​

The period after World War II was one in which the US had a strong, innovative economy.  In Western Europe and North America, the era from 1945 to 1975 is sometimes thought of as an ideal time, when the economy was strong and innovation levels were high. In French, these are the Trente Glorieuses, the Thirty Glorious Years. Economists Thomas Piketty and Robert Gordon warn that there is nothing inevitable or typical about this time, although their reasoning is somewhat different. And yet this has come to seem like the archetype for American culture. We have the idea that this was a wonderful time when people achieved the American Dream. We imagine stable, churchgoing families living in new tract houses forming strong communities. Some of this was due to a quest for normalcy after 15 years of depression and war. People aspired to an aggressively orderly life and wanted to enjoy their new access to consumption goods. 

​

To understand the culture of a time, we need to look at works that were created in that time, in the context of that time. It seems self-evident, and yet, many Americans have a view of the 1950s that is shaped by the television show “Happy Days”. 

​

In 1953, only a few years after V-J Day, Hugh Hefner founded Playboy Magazine in the belief that there was a mainstream market for pornography. He was also reacting to the conformity of the era. In 1954, Sloan Wilson published “The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit”, a book that showed what was wrong with trying to make a normal life. 

​

Wilson’s main character, Tom Rath, served in World War II and is clearly damaged by his experience. PTSD wasn’t in the lexicon then (it wasn’t added to the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders until 1980, according to the Third Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary), but that doesn’t mean it didn’t exist. Rath moves from a command and control environment to one that is supposedly more collegial but, in essence, functions the same way.

Someone is in charge, and someone takes orders. There’s a uniform, and there are procedures, and the work takes you away from your family and things you would rather be doing. 

​

In a few years, we’ll be trying hard for normalcy. Our sourdough starters will have died off, our toilet paper supplies will be sufficient, and we will no longer hug or shake hands in greeting. We’ll be trying to go to work, go to school, go to restaurants and plays. On the surface, we will try to act like nothing has happened and that the future is bountiful.

​

But it won’t be back to an idealized American life, because that’s not normal. Instead, there will be upheaval as we react to the issues that have emerged in this pandemic. In the Depression and World War II, conformity brought people together. When that was behind them, the culture tried to move toward a more affluent version of conformity, but that was quickly rejected. It was stifling to pretty much everyone who was not a straight, white male interested in a white-collar job. Instead, it ushered in an active labor movement, a civil rights movement, and rock and roll.  

​

Since the attacks on September 11, 2001, Americans have been questioning who we are. What does it mean to be patriotic? What is the role of the market? How should we relate to each other? The pandemic is the crisis that will force a reckoning. I have no predictions, other than that it will be interesting.