Cultural Moments, Cultural Amnesia

Before going on to discuss the present cultural moment, the Age of Trump, let us get straight the definition of the concept of cultural moment.

A cultural moment is the period of duration of a uniform set of preoccupations, emotions and meanings within a community. It consists of the things that people regularly allude to in their thoughts and their talk regardless of what is happening in their personal or work lives. These topics, feelings and images seem to the people of the community to be inevitable references and so not require people to explain why they are so preoccupied. A war, such as World War II, is a public event which defined a cultural moment that lasted from Pearl Harbor to past V-J Day. There may be overlapping events which are fads of the period, that associated with the moment. For World War II, that included swing music and Bond Drives and rationing. There also can be remainders of previous moments that conflict with the prevailing cultural moment but appear to be as such because they are allusions to alternative moments of public consciousness. Labor conflict, a theme from the Thirties, could not hold its own as a legitimate context of experience during the World War II culture, as John L. Lewis found out when public support for strikes disappeared in the context of war production patriotism.

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