Breaking new: McRebel defeats Commie Pinkos

One of the main arguments in Medovoi's Rebels works to establish the emergent process of the 1950' rebel culture and its natural transition into America's landscape.  As the postwar American workforce began to gravitate into the newly constructed suburbs, the emerging youth of that society defined constraints inherent of their environment and worked to distinguish themselves from their parents' normalcy.  The author parallels the basic premise of suburbs and their nonracial, classless living philosophy to that of communist Soviet Union.  Medovoi suggests that Fordism and the Cold War propagated the birth of the rebellious youth, and that these individuals embodied very "American" ideals.  Sharing motivations with the American Revolution, the rebel threw of the conforming restraints of a "parental" society and struggled to create a new independent identity.  Medovoi spends significant time discussing the newly formed concept of identity and the 1950's development of the adolescent as the teenager to build the foundation for the culturally necessary rebel.  

"Thus, if an adolescent exhibits a properly rebellious spirit before growing into a conforming suburbanite or an Organization Man, then she has effectively displayed the American self's sovereignty without necessarily sacrificing the eventual conformity of the adult" (23).  Simply put, if a teenager rebels and recognizes the importance of not blindly adhering to the collective consciousness, they exemplify what it is to be American.  Youthful questioning of the established system generates ideological prosperity and the weapons to fight communist tendencies.  Medovoi goes to great lengths to describe the new local of suburbia as a limbo between the urban and rural existence: a place that could potentially possess positives of both locations, but ultimately inherits the negative characteristics of both places it is intended to escape.  The rebellious tendency is as American as apple pie.

"A young person, living in apparent dissatisfaction with suburban domesticity, fulfilled the desire of Cold War nationalism.  Such a youth became an exemplary American individualist who refuses to submit to Fordist standardization" (103).  If we, 50 years later, are to study why the rebel emerged and why the rebel has endured, we need to understand the larger cultural context in which the rebel was born.  Not only did these teens (primarily men as Medovoi carefully acknowledges) fight against parental and educational authority, they were the soldiers protecting Americans from the structured collectivity of Communism.  Caged within their track houses and intended communities, they could escape to their teen locals, listen to rock n' roll, and socialize outside the family unit.  Rock n' roll, transcommidified through radio, was the anthem of individual discovery: escape from labor and domesticity.  

Today we still experience this individual expression as well as idolize the originators of the movement.  This American original, most notably the rock star and tormented film character, provide models for teenagers to mimic.  If we stop rebelling and conform to an established order, we forget the American ideal that different and independent is better.  Men like James Dean continued the struggle against conformist submission that men like George Washington began.  

As an aside, I want to share a video clip from John Water's film Crybaby, a satire of the 1950's conflict between the good boy and the bad boy.  It exaggerates the binary of the desired youth and the rebel present in 1950's youth cultural, but also locates specific conformities that teenagers felt restrained by.

www.youtube.com/watchv=cY_nTFXCqOQ&feature=related