Cultural References
Several events from the classic film It's a Wonderful Life are also used as stories, such as "Mr. Potter To Pay Fifty Cents on the Dollar" during the Great Depression and "Harry Bailey Wins Congressional Medal of Honor" in the World War II section, with Harry S. Truman quoted in the latter story as saying "we owe a great debt to George Bailey for pulling Harry out of the ice when he was 9" and saying George was declared 4-F because of his ear. Eventually, in the 1980s, George Bailey is indicted as part of the Savings and Loan scandal. Also present is the frequent theme of moral outrage at the amount of sex in popular culture, beginning with a depiction of women's undergarments reproduced from a Sears catalogue, then extending to jazz music (also thought to have sunk the Titanic), and culminating in "Hippies Celebrate Fuck Summer '67".
The space race is repeatedly covered, including such articles as "Bleeping Two-Foot Tin Ball Threatens Free World" about the Sputnik launch "Soviets Ahead in Dog-Killing Race" about the flight of experimental animals, and finally "Holy Shit, Man Walks on Fucking Moon", a recreation of the Apollo 11 landing, complete with a radio transcript filled with profanity.
Read more about this topic: Our Dumb Century
Famous quotes containing the word cultural:
“A culture may be conceived as a network of beliefs and purposes in which any string in the net pulls and is pulled by the others, thus perpetually changing the configuration of the whole. If the cultural element called morals takes on a new shape, we must ask what other strings have pulled it out of line. It cannot be one solitary string, nor even the strings nearby, for the network is three-dimensional at least.”
—Jacques Barzun (b. 1907)