Odd Angles on the 1950s

The author’s intent in presenting these ten stories early in 2017 is to remind Americans and right-leaning Europeans that there is a cost to attempting to return to a bygone era which was never really a paradise. The stories deal with themes such as the degraded position of women before the advent of birth-control pills; education in an anti-intellectual country; ill-starred youths and ghosts in the Japanese-American community of Los Angeles; ghostly and grisly Chinese traditions; the dark underbelly of the American musical scenes in the 1950s and 20-Naughts. ‘The Joys of Trumpery’ and ‘The Last Trump’ provide a caricature vision of the deepest fears of anti-Trump liberals who resent and even resist the Presidency of Donald Trump. The author is decidedly not ‘anti-Trump’. Nevertheless, having lived through the 1950s without being lobotomized, imprisoned, wounded in battle or strapped in an electric chair, he is grateful for benefits provided by many who, deservedly or not, suffered and are forgotten.