Gary McDonogh. Encyclopedia of Contemporary American Culture

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physics

Simply: physics is the study of the physical universe. From the puzzling quantum world

of the very small to the majestic motion of galaxies; from the wonderland world of the

very fast to the almost motionless world of the very cold; from our everyday world to the

beginning of time—all of the beauty mystery and unexpected delights of the physical

universe are the realm of physicists. More fully, physics is many things—a database o

knowledge, a collection of paradigms and mathematical theories, a community o

researchers, teachers and students and a vital and dynamic social institution affecting all

arts of the American and world communities. But, primarily physics is a way o

inquiring into the physical universe. From experience, physicists expect that all of the

operation of the physical universe can be explained by a few general principles and that

these

rinciples can be expressed mathematically. Most people appreciate the beauty of a

rainbow, but physicists appreciate the physical beauty and more. They understand the

rinciples of reflection and refraction and recognize other phenomena described by the

same principles. Physicists also grasp and relish the

mathematics

which describe these

henomena. The general population has a very Aristotelian worldview. These ideas o

motion, energy and light are based on casual observations and “common-sense”

interpretations of these observations. But the operation of the physical universe is subtle

and needs a more critical investigation. The worldview of physicists and the general

ublic began to diverge after the work of Galileo Galilei and Isaac Newton, and are now

(due to the theories of quantum mechanics and relativity) radically different.

Many people retain an Aristotelian worldview even after a course in physics. This has

led to a widespread attempt at physics education reform. The standard texts used in

American

colleges and universities

are now being challenged by texts which are more

aware of the need to alter explicitly the worldview of students. The primary organization

overseeing the teaching of physics in K-16 grades and at the graduate levels is the

American Association of Physics Teachers. The content of physics represents a

formidable collection of observations, theories and applications. Authoritative summaries

of twentieth-century physics have been put together by the American Physical Society the

primary physics research organization in the USA.

The application of quantum mechanics to the structure of matter has revolutionized

technology, leading to the transistor, integrated chips, lasers, nuclear power, etc. Major

theories, which withstood many tests in the latter half of the twentieth century include the

standard model of particle physics, general relativity and the Big Bang. New theories,

which began in the second half of the century and are still being developed and tested,

include chaos, nonlinear systems and superstrings. Since the Second World War, the

American physics community has pursued the Big Science approach to research, and to

Encyclopedia of Contemporary American Culture 876

the education and training of physicists. Yet the collapse of Big Science led to a surplus

of physicists on the world market in the early 1990s and caused the physics community to

re-examine its goals, education system and research sociology.

JUAN BURCIAGA

“pill,” the

contraception

Pittsburgh, PA

At the intersection of the Allegheny, Monongahela and Ohio rivers, Pittsburgh set

roduction records in the Second World War as a grimy steel town. With later shifts in its

heavy manufacturing economy, Pittsburgh planned the first urbanredevelopment

authority in the US; the Pittsburgh Renaissance became the most extensive peacetime

reconstruction of an American historical urban center. The revitalized city has changed

oth civic identity and its economic foundations, stressing medicine and biotechnology

research and development, education, banking and

computer

services, sports (

baseball’s

Pirates and football’s Steelers) and the arts, gaining renown as a highly habitable city o

ust over 300,000.

MIREILLE GOUIRAND

pizza

Circular bread crust with tomato, cheese and other toppings adapted from Italian sources

(New Haven, Connecticut claims priority) has become a ubiquitous American meal.

Strong regional variations have emerged—especially

Chicago, IL

deep dish versus

Northeastern

thin crust—while status and quality are marked by mass preparation as

opposed to hand-crafted pizza at home or in restaurants. Yet as a mass food item—

available frozen, in mixes and by competing delivery services—it has become a staple for

children, parties and even school lunches, while being re-exported through franchises like

Dominos and Pizza Hut. Neal Stephenson’s cyberpunk

Snow Crash

(1992), in fact,

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makes pizza delivery emblematic of a future American dystopia.

GARY McDONOGH

plastic

For many

baby boomers,

the word “plastic” immediately evokes the 1968 movie

The

Graduate

when avuncular advice to young Benjamin Braddock—“Just one word:

plastics”—conveys the materialism and falseness of

suburbia

. Although plastics already

had shaped American life for decades, Braddock would have grown up in a world in

which Formica, vinyl, Styrofoam and fiberglass were considered not only replacements

but also improvements. Yet, as Jeffrey Meickle shows in his

American Plastic: A

Cultural History

(1995) this triumph would end, even while plastic remains the stuff on

which America is built.

“Plastic” refers not to a single chemical family/ process, but to the malleability of these

synthetic compounds—facilitating curving styles in 1950s and 1960s decor and becoming

a metaphor for shifting identities. John Hyatt derived the first plastic, celluloid, from

ulped cotton in 1869. Unmelting Bakelite, identified with art deco, was synthesized by

Leo Backland in 1907. Other plastics became commercially available through US

corporations like Du Pont and Goodrich by the 1930s; some, like nylon, “went to war”

were diverted to military goods in the Second World War.

The peacetime demand for nylons was only part of the plastic wave that shaped not

only new suburbs, but also

Disney’s

house of the future in Tomorrowland. Plastic goods

with bright colors, original lines, flexible shaping and “easy” care—for a home without

servants—

ecame ubiquitous. They were also cheap and disposable, whether diapers or

fast-food packaging. They democratized luxury in household goods, fiberglass boats and

vinyl siding.

Yet, 1960s reactions against consumerist abundance meant that baby boomers also

identified plastics with the banality of suburbia and postwar growth even as they profited

from it. Many championed returns to natural materials: cotton Indian prints rather than

lastic seat covers, or ceramic rather than melmac dinnerware. The difficulties of the

“natural”—care for silk, linen, leather—fitted the opulence of the 1980s when a “Teflon”

resident, against whom charges never stuck, occupied the White House. Plastics became

negative metaphors for older generations, lower classes and falseness.

Plastic also became an environmental enemy. Campaigns have focused on the sheer

ulk of enduring plastic waste as diapers filled up landfills or the rings around beverage

six-

acks were cited in the death of aquatic life. At times, figures have been overstated

and focus on product rather than process (ignoring, for example, the energy required in

sanitizing cloth diapers). Nonetheless, fast-food servers and merchants have offered paper

as an alternative.

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As Meickle notes, this conveys cultural schizophrenia. Information technology comes

sheathed in plastic—no one expects a teak

computer

—reinforcing an identification o

plastic with the future. Plastic infrastructures—

ipes, joints, shoe soles, linings and

enhancements—also underpin natural facades. Indeed, vintage plastics—Bakelite radios,

nostalgic toys, etc.—became collectible “authentic synthetics” in the 1990s. Plastics

define the American century then, not only in material conditions, but also in cultural

interpretations (and concealments) of everyday life.

Further reading

Meickle, J. (1995)

American Plastic: A Cultural History,

New Brunswick: Rutgers.

GARY McDONOGH

plastic surgery

Although medical alteration of the body tackles congenital problems and the results o

accidents and

violence,

molding the body towards beauty stereotypes underpins plastic

surgery’s gender and age configuration. Moreover, since most surgery is elective

(uninsured), the field is associated with the wealth of both practitioners and clients. Yet,

Americans undergo nearly 1 million such operations annually; females constitute 89

percent of all clients. While breast implants have been associated with severe hazards,

they remain popular alongside face lifts;

baby-boom

males focus on abdomens and

chests. Most plastic surgeons also are male, evoking a Pygmalion syndrome within the

profession and its depictions.

GARY McDONOGH

CINDY WONG

Plath, Sylvia

b. 1932; d. 1963

American meteor: Plath won a

Mademoiselle

short-fiction prize, graduated from

Smith, studied at Cambridge, married late Poet Laureate Ted Hughes and published vital,

smart, musical poems

(The Colossus)

and an autobiographical novel about a brilliant,

unstable young female writer,

The Bell Jar

(1971). American martyr: separated (with two

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children), furiously productive (two to three poems a day at the end), fiercely despondent,

Plath committed

suicide

at thirty-one. Hughes edited the angry posthumous

Ariel

(1965)

and critics cite conflict of interest. In America, her tragedy supersedes her work; readers

will eventually acknowledge that the poems suffice.

DANIEL BOSCH

Playboy

Magazine created in the late 1950s, promoting a sophisticated urban bachelor lifestyle.

Others suggested that its then near-nude centerfold endorsed prurient sensibilities that

downgraded women. In the 1960s, Playboy clubs emerged, with waitresses clad in

revealing bunny costumes; while feminist Gloria

Steinem

chronicled her life as a bunny

some bunnies themselves argued that the job provided money and opportunities before

the clubs languished in the 1980s.

Playboy’s

editor, Hugh Hefner, has attempted to

personify the magazine’s ideals as an outspoken philosopher endorsing both pleasure and

consumerism, while Playboy interviews with major figures have produced political news,

ustifying many a man who claimed to read

Playboy

“only for the articles.”

EDWARD MILLER

Pledge of Allegiance

(Hand over heart, standing) “I pledge allegiance (pause) to the flag (pause) of the United

States of America (pause) and to the Republic (pause) for which it stands; one nation

(pause) under God (pause), indivisible (pause), with liberty and justice for all.” This

statement, repeated daily in schools, assemblies and the swearing in of new US citizens,

evokes both verbal rhythms and behaviors in many Americans. Written by Francis

Bellamy for the magazine

Youth’s Companion

(1892), it restates fundamental ideological

values of citizenship. Yet, as an apothegmatic credo, it has both chartered radical social

change (“liberty and justice for all”) and evoked protests in classrooms, especially in the

Vietnam era and with regards to separation of church and state.

GARY McDONOGH

poetry

Encyclopedia of Contemporary American Culture 880

The last gasps of the American revolutionary spirit were choked out in the Civil War,

when the most conservative form of liberal government ever invented unhinged its jaws

and swallowed its antithetical self, the

South,

whole, only to have to regurgitate some o

its bones, of course, every twenty years or so since 1865. The lesson is that no revolution,

no matter how revolting, can avoid the voracious maw of a stable Democratic republic

that will assimilate, digest and even grow fat on anything.

The political is the poetical. America is so huge that any revolution will find its

audience here and none can possibly disturb it. Our pilgrim Protestantism is our special

handicap: American poets believe in a personal poetics the way Luther believed in a

ersonal God; alas, we usually skip any dreary reading of the scriptures on our way to

revelation. (American poets start reading poetry only after they have started writing

“poems.”) American poets don’t even really like poetry (cf. Marianne Moore); it’s a

subject to avoid, like politics or

religion

We cannot agree on what makes poems good. We cannot agree on what defines the

craft. We may praise our diversity publicly, but when we do so we deny our divisiveness.

We bond, when we do, through our dislikes, and we will not be led, or defined, by

anything but our personal constituencies. “Don’t Tread On Me” and “Live Free or Die!”

were the slogans on American revolutionaryera snake flags; those snakes were severed.

The unity in American poetry can be heard in our relatively democratic, demotic

voices. Yet even a plain-speaking American poet is apt to dislike two or more of the

following “schools” for one or more reasons: beat poetry (too loose structure,

antiestablishment rhetoric, often bisexual or

homosexual

as if that were interesting);

formalist poetry (uptight structure for its own sake, dead white pseudo-establishment

rhetoric, often homosexual); L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry (nonce or non-traditional

structure, arhetorical—the last thing it wants to do is convince anyone of anything,

asexual); slam poetry (dramatic structure, antiestablishment rhetoric enhanced by

screaming, pan-sexual); world poetry (sounds like translation, employs traditional

European rhetorics, often bior homosexual as if that didn’t matter); and the poetry o

personal growth (loose structure, earnest anti-establishment rhetoric, pan-sexual—all in

fear of casting judgment). Some poets do cross over: in the Haight-Ashbury for instance,

it used to be cool to hate Ashbery; no more.

Gil Scott-Heron didn’t know how right he was when he forecast that “the revolution

will not be televised.” He didn’t know he was pointing to the impossibility of revolution

in a country where everything is televisual. (Seeing

Los Angeles, CA

burn puts out fires

Atlanta;

Mark Strand on the

Internet

encourages a beatnik in

Seattle

.) American

oetry of the future will certainly be polyglot (the dominance of English will recede),

ublished in cyberspace (less and less print) and defined by performances (preserved on

CD and DVD) instead of text. Everything will be possible and nothing will matter to us

all.

DANIEL BOSCH

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Poitier, Sidney

b. 1924

Actor born in

Miami, FL

Caribbean

(Bahamian) descent. Poitier became one o

the first black

actors

to reach movie stardom in the 1960s. In many roles, unfortunately

from preacher to teacher to policeman, he often seemed to gain equality only by

incredible superiority. Nominated for an Oscar for

The Defiant Ones

(1958), he won Best

Actor for

Lilies of the Field

(1973), the only

African American

man so honored for

thirty years. Primarily a

director

in the 1970s, his career revived in the 1990s; he

received an AFI achievement award in 1992.

GARY McDONOGH

police

After education, public safety is the most expensive service provided by local

government in the United States. Much of the growth in the size and political power o

American police agencies since the Second World War has been fueled by public anxiety

about major social and demographic changes. The migration of

African Americans

from

the rural

South

to northern

cities,

the explosion of

teenage

culture in the 1960s, the

mainstream use of illegal drugs and the sharp increase in violent crime perpetrated by

young offenders have all been raised as justifications for expanding the size and power o

local police agencies.

In response to public demands for action President Lyndon

Johnson

signed the 1968

Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act, which made the federal government a

factor in local crime control for the first time. The Act expanded the ability of law-

enforcement officials at all levels to detect criminal behavior by broadening the legal use

of wiretaps and by funding special units for the enforcement of drug laws. The new Law

Enforcement Assistance Administration (LEAA) in the United States Department o

Justice provided funds for equipment and personnel in police departments in nearly every

urisdiction in the country). The establishment of SWAT (Special Weapons and Tactics)

squads in even the smallest, rural police departments was often funded by the LEAA.

At the same time, federal and local officials became concerned about the image of the

olice. As an adjunct of the political machines that dominated city and state governments

earlier in the century (and continued to dominate

Chicago, IL, Newark, NJ

and Albany

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NY, into the 1970s), the police were viewed by many citizens as either “town clowns” in

smaller jurisdictions or corrupt enforcers of the

status quo

in larger cities. Most of the

race riots

of the 1960s were reactions to encounters between

white

police officers and

African American residents. The recruitment, training and demographic composition o

olice departments became a major issue in the planning and budgeting for law

enforcement.

The idea of police professionalism runs through the modern history of American

olicing. In order to improve the image of the police and justify the rapid increase in

public-safety budgets, states reviewed and updated training curricula. The

Federal

Bureau of Investigation

Academy also began training local police officers, and a

number of departments introduced educational requirements, not only for new officers,

but for promotion as well.

The idea that a college education was either necessary or desirable for the cop on the

eat was hotly debated as the police infiltrated public consciousness through the media.

Long a staple of news, police dramas have become the mainstay of prime-time television

programming (see

crime, television

). Beginning with

Dragnet

(NBC, 1952–9; 1967–70),

a celebration of the new, business-like orientation to policing taken by the Los Angeles

Police Department, the depiction of attractive, articulate law-enforcement figures became

popular with the public, although it was inevitably satirized in the later

Police Academy

movies (1984–9). But Steven Bochco’s television productions from the late 1970s to the

1990s conveyed growing ambivalence about a powerful public agency with increasingly

little contact with the public.

Hill Street Blues

(NBC, 1981–7) explored an urban

environment saturated with crime confronted by a group of quirky fallible police officers

who were often thrown off balance by the chaos on the street. The more benign

Barney

iller

(ABC, 1975–82), a comedy set in New York’s

Greenwich Village,

told much the

same story: the police as the last line of defense in a society slipping out of control.

During the same period that the entertainment industry was exploring the quandary o

modern policing, prosecutors around the country were building a body of law on the

limits of police conduct under federal civil-rights guarantees and state statutes. Police

rutality was increasingly challenged in minority communities where it had always been

present as well as in gay communities in several cities. The 1969

Stonewall Riot

was

touched off by a routine raid by the New York City Police on a gay bar on Christopher

Street in Manhattan.

Suits by federal prosecutors against local police departments in several cities, in

particular

Philadelphia, PA

and

Houston, Texas,

lead to a study by the United States

Civil Rights Commission entitled

Who is Guarding the Guardians?

(1981). The

recommendations of the commission summarized the conflict over police

rofessionalization, finding that even in departments with high levels of education and

intensive training, a separate, defensive police culture had evolved that saw citizens and

particularly citizens from groups not well represented in the department as the enemy.

Elizabeth Reuss-Ianni found that patrol officers in the New York Police Department

were caught between what they considered a hostile and dangerous external environment

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and a professionalized, but remote administrative culture in the upper-ranks of the

department. The “two cultures of policing” cut street cops loose to do whatever was

necessary to keep order: a strategy that further alienated the public in many jurisdictions,

ut which insulated the top brass from legal responsibility when inevitable misconduct

suits were filed.

The Knapp Commission investigations into corruption in the New York Police

Department in the 1970s reinforced the reform impulse built by public attention to

rutality and police handling of civil disorder, and led to a series of experiments in the

structure and function of American policing in the 1980s and 1990s. Team policing and

walking beats, patrol strategies that had been jettisoned during professionalization, were

revived by reform commissioners like Patrick Murphy in New York City. Films like

Serpico

(1973) and

Prince of the City

(1981) followed in the wake of corruption

revelations in New York and elsewhere.

The acquittal by a

suburban

jury of the Los Angeles police officers involved in the

taped and televised beating of motorist Rodney

King

touched off riots in

Los Angeles,

that caused another round of self-examination among police administrators and

scholars. Reforms in the 1990s centered around “community policing,” an attempt to

reconnect the police and the public through the broader involvement of police officers—

sometimes called community patrol officers—in a variety of neighborhood activities.