From the one to another, there was a shift, from the bohemian values of the sixties to the bourgeois values of the eighties. In 1967, The Graduate, one of that year’s most successful films, depicted its hero in the form of Benjamin Braddock, who rebelled against conformity and the sexual depravity of the WASP (White Anglo Saxon Protestant) middle-class 20 years later, its director, Mike Nichols, created a hero out of a stockbroker’s secretary who finds her way to the upper echelons of corporate America in Melanie Griffith, with Working Girl. ![]() Probably the best illustration of this shift can be found in the movies. David Brooks, in his clear accessible account of this phenomenon, Bobos in Paradise, contends that what transpired was the substitution of one way of thinking for another, a substitution that was short-lived, as the return of the corporate culture of the seventies and the eighties proved. But these were relatively prosperous years, probably the most prosperous of 20th century American life. Almost overnight, the bourgeoisie, so accustomed to their way of life, found their culture eroding with the onslaught of the bohemians, the heroes of the counterculture who found their icons in the novels of Norman Mailer and the Beat Generation and the politics of Abbie Hoffman. ![]() The fifties and sixties were clearly epoch-making decades for much of the Western world and particularly for the United States.
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