Section I: 1. Mrs. Lingk Mrs. Lingk is the wife of Jim Lingk, who makes a deal to buy Glengarry land that she does not approve of. She is the subject of Richard Roma's controversy in the play because she wants the check her husband sent to be canceled, or she will make Jim call the authorities, but Roma wants to see the deal through. She represents the rising influence of women in the household in American culture after 1945, and in the play Jim Lingk is terrified of what she might do if he does not cancel the check. 3. Donald Cox Donald Cox is the Black Panthers' Field Marshal from Oakland who makes an appearance at Leonard Bernstein's party in his Park Avenue suite in Radical Chic by Tom Wolfe. He is one of the characters described as &quot;funky,&quot; and has an Afro, a goatee and a black turtleneck. At the chic party, he gives a speech that outlines the fallacies and injustices of such establishments like all-white juries and &quot;pigs,&quot; as well as his support for disruption and dissent, all the while answering questions about the foundations of iniquity against Black Americans. He was an important leader figure to the violent transformation and dissent of young Americans in the 1960's. 4. Judith Stoloff White (&quot;Jude&quot;) Judith Stoloff White is the mother of Isadora Wing in the novel Fear of Flying by Erica Jong. She is characterized as a tall woman who wore exotic clothes and was never the ordinary Betty Crocker type mother &quot;with a capital M,&quot; which often embarrassed Isadora in her youth. She embodies ideas in American culture that came into being in the revolution of the 60's that being ordinary and conformist is the last thing she would want her child Isadora to become, ultimately resulting in the concept of sexual freedom for women. By this, she is nicknamed &quot;Jude&quot; for the patron saint of lost causes. 5. Total Eclipse of the Sonny In the defeat of heavyweight boxer Sonny Liston in 1964, Cassius Clay spoke the line &quot;The crowd did not dream when they put down their money that they would see a total eclipse of the Sonny.&quot; It was one of the events in the legacy of Muhammad Ali, which was important to the development of American culture and the maintenance of the idea of the American tough. 7. &quot;I am profoundly sorry for what I did and said to trigger these events.&quot; Former President Bill Clinton said &quot;I am profoundly sorry for what I did and said to trigger these events&quot; in a speech addressed to the nation in 1999 regarding his impeachment and Senate trial. The subject of the trial was the Monica Lewinsky affair, and it is important to American culture because of the myriad of trials that were going on in the 1990's such as the trial of OJ Simpson, except that this involved the president himself. 8. &quot;Oh, c'mon, Edna, we both know these children have no future.&quot; Principle Skinner of the elementary school in the television series The Simpsons says this at a PTA meeting to Edna, a teacher who tries to convince him to increase funding for school resources. Although the line is meant for the humor of the show, its presence in a widely broadcasted show like The Simpsons brings out the idea that started in the 1990's of praising the stupid man and overall anti-intellectualism. It follows a trend that began with movies like Dumb and Dumber, and is an important step for understanding the development of American popular culture in recent years. 11. Alan Freed Alan Freed is the DJ who coined the phrase &quot;Rock and Roll&quot; and first used the term in 1951, taken from the song &quot;My Baby Rocks Me with a Steady Roll.&quot; The term Rock and Roll itself is a reference to sex, and it signifies the change in the style of popular music in the 1950's from mellow and happy traditional songs to songs with strong tones and youth-driven lyrics that often involve sexual elements. Rock and Roll was one of the biggest, most controversial paradigm shifts in American popular culture after 1945, and Alan Freed's term captures its essence very well. 12. &quot;Where's the beef&quot; &quot;Where's the beef&quot; is an American catch phrase that found widespread popularity with American television viewers when it was used in Wendy's' fast food advertising commercials. In lecture, we learn that the candidate for president in 1984, Walter Mondale, said to Ronald Reagan &quot;where's the beef?&quot; and everyone knew what he was talking about because everyone was familiar by then with the commercial for hamburgers on TV that used that catch phrase. It is an example of how advertisements on television are what people are familiar with in the age of television, as opposed to Shakespeare in the Nineteenth Century. Section II: Essay 1 The American family is the central structure that falls apart in many American novels due to principle internal and external stresses for which the characters try to but cannot mitigate. External stresses include important historical events or changes in American culture for which the family structure cannot single-handedly affect, but by which it can be affected. Such external stresses in the second half of the Twentieth Century would be the rise of Rock and Roll, the Vietnam War, television or the women's and Black rights movements. Internal stresses are induced by the external stresses, and may cause family members to turn against each other, thereby causing the family structure to fall apart. They include the rebellion of the young generation against values of the older generation or a woman's break into sexual freedom. The effects of these stresses on American families is on the whole very negative in the time period between the post-war period and the present day, owing largely to extremely controversial changes in American culture that make the collapse of the American family no surprise. The general representations of the American family have also changed radically in the past half century as a result. Before the 1950's, the traditional view of the American family was one in which the father pursued the <a href="/keyword/american-dream/" >american dream</a> and made a lot of money; he was the de facto breadwinner. The mother was a housewife that was largely confined to the home and attended to the housework and the kids. The children would obediently go to school and boys would aspire to be like their fathers and girls like their mothers. It was a neverending cycle, an attempt at economic and psychological efficiency that was supposed to keep the American family functional and happy. In lecture, Professor Altshuler discussed that in the late 40's and early 50's, the woman would &quot;rejoice in a 3-5 child family that lived in the suburbs&quot; and did &quot;nothing but housework, work to keep their bodies beautiful, to get and keep a man, train the children, and that was supposed to be fulfilling enough.&quot; However, an external stress on this ideal was the release of the book &quot;Feminine Mystique,&quot; which realized that women were by and large often unhappy and depressed. This was the beginning of a movement in which women came to the realization that they were destined for more of a share of their husbands' <a href="/keyword/american-dream/" >american dream</a> . This ultimately lead to a women's' rights movement in the 1960's alongside the Black rights movement and Vietnam War protests, further giving women privileges and top jobs in American society. This caused a disruption in the American family unit that eventually settled, but for a while people were afraid of what might happen if a woman went to work all day at the expense of the baby, who would be left home alone. Perhaps the increase of women's share of the <a href="/keyword/american-dream/" >american dream</a> was a dramatic change to the family unit, but even more controversial was the woman's sexual freedom. In Fear of Flying by Erica Jong, Isadora represents the American woman that resulted from that same women's' rights revolution mentioned before. She is a married woman, but shakes her fist at the conformity to that marriage just as many Americans were shaking their fists at the traditional cultural establishment of the <a href="/keyword/american-dream/" >american dream</a> and the government, which promoted such things. Isadora does this by running off with Adrian, away from the conformist life she led with her husband Bennett, in a rebellious tone. Such acts by women and men (for example, the Monica Lewinsky affair of President Clinton from lecture) were internal stresses that became much more prevalent after 1950 and carried the potential to tear apart the family system. Another external stress on the family system was the controversial topic of the Vietnam War. In the novel American Pastoral by Philip Roth, the Swede's family was depicted as the pinnacle of the <a href="/keyword/american-dream/" >american dream</a> . Swede Levov was the perfect blond high school athlete who everyone expected would go very far in life, while his wife Dawn was an American beauty having been Miss New Jersey. Their child, Merry, was destined to carry on the combined <a href="/keyword/american-dream/" >american dream</a> s achieved by both her parents, but ultimately because of the external stresses induced upon her by the television imagery of the Buddhist monks burning themselves in Vietnam, about which she says &quot;Do you have to m-m-melt yourself down in fire to bring p-p-people to their s-senses?&quot; (p. 154), as well as internal stresses such as her distrust of older generation ideas induced by her father's ten second kiss, she becomes a ticking bomb that destroys the post office and subsequently her own family's structure. Among all the depictions of American families in the course, this was the hardest situation for characters to cope with because there was such a perfect outlook for the family and it all fell apart. Instead of confronting the situation, the Swede simply tries to shut it out of his mind and convinces himself he still loves Merry, but this tears him apart inside even more on an unconscious level. This rebellion against the older generation's values is also depicted in the play Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller. The young character Biff's feelings about his father Willy can be summed up in his statement at the end when he says &quot;He had the wrong dreams...he never new who he was&quot; (p. 138) at his father's funeral. The family in the play was already torn apart, due to the unfortunate circumstance when Biff walks in on his father cheating with another woman in another city. Like Merry, Biff is given the &quot;wake-up call&quot; of trauma in his childhood, which leads to his distrust of the older generation and causes him to give up the <a href="/keyword/american-dream/" >american dream</a> in search for his own. This, like in American Pastoral, has a disastrous effect on the family structure as Biff leaves home with a shameful view of his father, having grown to believe his father was as Holden would say a &quot;phony,&quot; ultimately clashing with him in argument when he visits home in the play. This clash between the child and father figure is a recurring theme of novels in American popular culture of the 50's and 60's, and the nature of this clash is explained in Robert Bly's Iron John: A Book About Men. In the book, Bly explains that the American family has come to the catastrophic point at which the father is a working figure that no longer has time to be a father, so children grow up filling that fatherly gap with demons of mistrust. It is a stress that Biff copes with by running away to the nature of the countryside, and similarly with Merry, who becomes a hippy. Both actions ruin their lives and tear them apart from their families. The American family in the latter half of the Twentieth Century began as a seemingly perfect representation of a functional family, but it was determined that proponents in that family system were dissatisfied and depressed as a result. The average housewife rebelled by gaining prominence in American society and the average child rebelled by listening to Rock and Roll and/or protesting Vietnam; this in addition to other changes caused by external stresses such as the Vietnam War resulted in internal stresses in the family system. Many American families were torn apart because of this, and many strategies were used by members to cope with the downfall but were ultimately selfdefeating. The resulting representation of the American family, one that survives to the present day, was one in which the family members are more autonomous and able to better cope with the freedom they were given in the revolution of the 60's. Section II: Essay 2 The vision of an alternative to American consensus mentality first started after the Second World War when the youth of America began to see the fallacies of the established American system and the &quot;<a href="/keyword/american-dream/" >american dream</a> .&quot; Throughout the 1960's, the idea of becoming successful by being a money-making machine and product of the <a href="/keyword/american-dream/" >american dream</a> became less and less attractive, and the youth of America rebelled against these ideas with their own culture. This culture consisted of elements such as Rock and Roll music and the hippy revolution of free sex, drugs and ideas, culminating in the clash with the most fundamental establishment, the government, in the Vietnam War protests. Since then, the idea of alternative to American consensus mentality was not killed off or absorbed in any way, but continues to grow in a non-influential, barely noticeable day-today manner. The idea is not likely to ever have the same dramatic effect on American popular culture as it did in the paradigm shift of the 1960's era. The birth of alternative to American consensus mentality can be traced to the Black community residing in America. All along since the Nineteenth Century, Black Americans were already aware of the grave injustices found in the <a href="/keyword/american-dream/" >american dream</a> : after all, the success of a White man's business that lay on the back of Black slaves was already apparent to them. However, Black America in its minority, underrepresented status in American popular culture and politics, was unable to do anything about it and lay relatively dormant until the Second World War. When World War II came around, so much of the White American male population was caught up in the wartime draft that there was a need for Blacks to support the war on the home front. This was the first time almost the entire population of America was united in its efforts to win a war, as women and Blacks flocked to work 14 hour shifts at the munitions factories in the name of American victory. After the war, America suddenly opened its eyes when it saw that Black America valiantly did its duty but was still mocked and abused by the establishment. Dissent for this injustice found its way into literature of the 40's and 50's, such as in Catcher in the Rye when Holden listens to Estelle Fletcher sing and says &quot;If a white girl was singing it, she'd make it sound cute as hell, but Estelle Fletcher knew what the hell she was doing.&quot; This leads to the idea of listening to &quot;Black music&quot; as a form of dissent, because at the time there was a fear by older generation White Americans of interracial mingling of White and Black kids because of the advent of Rhythm &amp; Blues, and its hugely successful evolved form: Rock and Roll. Rock and Roll was such a huge leap in American culture because it was radically different from traditional music of the time. What is meant by traditional music in this sense is something like Patti Page's &quot;Doggie in the Window&quot; mentioned in lecture, which paints a somewhat perfect picture of life and the perfection of the <a href="/keyword/american-dream/" >american dream</a> . However, the youth of America was at the time questioning how perfect the system really is and found that the music of the older generation did not address issues about the imperfections of the system and in fact tried as hard as possible to shy away from them. Rock and Roll's style and content provided a way to let loose these intense feelings of outrage and anti-consensus. Ultimately when the Vietnam War unraveled, the idea of sending American troops to die for an unjust cause in the view of the American people, as well as the idea of unnecessarily ravaging a country with bombs and napalm, became an almost concrete object of disagreement for American youth. This idea is best illustrated in Philip's novel American Pastoral, in which the character Merry rebels against these injustices in her own self-defeating manner and in the end becomes what many Americans at the time became: the free idea/sex/drug love-centered radical hippies of the late 60's. As Jerry says in the novel, &quot;That was '68, back when the wild behavior was still new. People suddenly forced to make sense of madness.&quot; (p. 69). It was the hippies' massive voice of dissent that made this era so turbulent, because it was alongside the rising power, and subsequently dissent, of Blacks and women who lashed out from feelings of their own oppression. Extreme events such as the Kent State massacre signaled an era of paradigm shift resulting from the birth of a vision of an alternative to American consensus mentality. Since the birth of Rock &amp; Roll and the Vietnam era, the idea of alternative to American consensus has certainly evolved. This is most noticeable when examining the topic of my paper &quot;Evolution of Sexuality in American Popular Music Since 1945,&quot; in which I mention the best candidate for the alternative representation: sex in music. It essentially makes the point that sex and music have fused even more tightly since the outrageous (at the time) sexually suggestive performances of Elvis, having also made a significant jump in the early 80's popularization of the music video and culminated to the present day rapper or hip-hop artist's renditions of &quot;skeet, bitches and hoes.&quot; We can see from the rise of sexual elements in music to the present day that proponents of American popular culture are still actively searching for an alternative to American consensus, or rather a way to challenge what is generally accepted by establishment. However, it is important to note that the effect of such dissenting elements as sex in music is much less dramatic as it was in the first days of exercising the alternative in the 50's and 60's, because in this day and age the American public is much more adaptable and accepting of new ideas (the road was initially paved by the 60's revolution) and this is reflected in the &quot;older generation's&quot; establishment, who themselves were the young dissenters of the turbulent 60's. As we move ahead into the future, we may glance back at American culture beginning in the post-war era, moving ahead into the Vietnam and Black/women's rights era and finally following time toward the present day, and we may notice that the vision of alternative to American consensus mentality has not died nor lost momentum. However, like most radical ideas in the past, it gained significant attention when it began in the 1950's and climaxed in turbulence and in some cases self-destruction (Merry in American Pastoral) in the Vietnam age, but then became routine and no longer noticed in the future beyond that point. Once upon a time, the long prevailing idea that the world was the center of the universe was challenged, but is now routine thinking among all people in the world just as the alternative to consensus in America became so after the struggles of the 50's and 60's.