Sit still for a minute, and pause from reading this, OK?

Did you feel it? Did you sense it? Was it a wind blowing across your face, or a chill rising up your spine? Did you tremble, or at least quiver a little?

Try it again, but think about the single biggest thing that happened in the world today. Doesn't matter what it was, think about it. Contemplate it for a second.

Did you feel it this time?

We live the Chinese curse of being in interesting times. Yeah, I know, both Wired and Mac Addict Magazines used the same metaphor in their issues for December. They were looking at too narrow a focus for my tastes, so fuck 'em. I'm talking about the world being interesting. Now, I know, every age thinks things are worse now than then, and God knows I could be accused of being a millennialist, but don't you think our society is at some sort of cross-roads? McDonald's introduces chicken, Russia embraces capitalism, walls come down in Berlin, hockey is popular in Florida, Clinton becomes a Republican while Gingrich practically rolls over for him, and France announces they will join the Internet. What the hell is going on out there?

TV has become Friends-ville, with each new show trying to capture the ensemble spirit of that particular brand of comedy (and God help us for that, because Friends sucks). Every book could have been written by King, Turow, Grisham, Clancy, Higgins-Clark, or Cartland. Movies are either big blockbuster special effects Star Wars- meets-Independence Day blowouts, faux thrillers of the Clancy genre, or what are euphemistically called women's films . And that s not even to mention the fact that Scream has generated its own little cottage industry which will grow in 1998.

PBS is running a new kids' show, and before they even aired an episode of it, they created a huge firestorm by releasing a line of plush dolls! A marketing tie-in not unlike those found on commercial television (and of course, forced by The Christian Coalition's religious war on America, played out through the Congressional budget cuts). And my parents threw a fit when I wanted the Winky Dink Magic Drawing Kit which was a cut out piece of plastic film which you smoothed over the TV screen and drew on along with the television program. Sort of the first CD-ROM game, which in this case stood for Cellophane, Draw -- Raging Of Mommy, when you went outside the lines.

There's a homogenization of culture going on, a calm before a huge storm. This has happened before, and we shouldn't ignore the signs now, because each time its happened, some pretty gruesome things resulted, and each time this cycle has turned, it s gotten more and more divisive before it got more and more conciliatory.

OK, first a history lesson, but a caveat. According to information gleaned from our readers, it seems that many of you are a little older than we originally thought our target readership to be, so some of this is going to be old news to you, stuff you lived through, but bear with me, because there is still a significantly large number of people reading this who are not old enough to remember Donna Rice, much less Donna Summer, much less Donna Reed.

The Fifties were an era of good feeling, in general, as long as you weren't a minority with dark skin or had tits. Calm, placid, even with the war in Korea and the rise of mostly harmless Rock 'N' Roll music, the Fifties were what every family could dream of: a safe time to raise a family in your own house with a good job and safe schools away from trouble.

The problem was that this was an aberration of culture. In my first column for Purr, I made the observation that the break up of the multi- generational household created an imbalance in society in terms of culture that has not yet been righted fully. This occurred in the Fifties, with the growth of the suburbs because of the development of the interstate highway system, the G.I. Bill of W.W.II and the invention of modular tract housing and the shopping mall. I won't go into the details much further here (and sorry, but that column was lost when my laptop was stolen), but if you want me to expound on it, please write me or you can ask the manging editor to twist my arm to rewrite the column.

So, the nuclear family was more nuclear than anyone suspected: it was poised for meltdown. Daddy went off to his job in the city, Mommy sent the kids off to school, and then started balling the milkman or, worse, the neighbors (male AND female) or sat in front of the radio and then the TV and absorbed soap operas in between errands.

This doesn't exempt Daddy, by the way. He got on the 7:27 from Hicksville, got to the office by nine, worked until lunch, had a few cocktails with lunch, finished up work in the afternoon, got on the 5:13 out of Penn Station, grabbed a drink on the platform or in the bar car, and by the time he got home to dinner, was barely able to interact with his children or his wife, opting to go sleep it off in front of the TV or radio. Which then created a vicious cycle of resentment and anger for all parties involved.

Do you start to see where the Sixties come from? The children felt abandoned by both of their parents, which spilled over, and I'm afraid its going to happen again. Let's see what the symptoms of this were.

For all the talk of how economically viable the Fifties were for people, in truth the economy grew at a pace that today would be considered laughably steady, about 2 or 3 percent per year. Just remember that the next time some Fasc--errrr, Republican tosses the Contract On America your way. Even during the Reagan years, the economy's growth in terms of its effect on the wages of the average worker was anemic on a comparative basis, but we'll get to that later.

The differential between the rates of inflation and growth was also much lower, so increases in spending power were limited, but they were there. What allowed the country to move forward, in my opinion, was the built-up equity families had as they borrowed or were given money by rather charitable organizations, like family and the government, to build homes, to get an education, to put the kids through college...they used to call it rainy day money. It rained in the Fifties.

How was all this, the break up of the extended family, the economic stagnation, the rise of suburbia, reflected in the culture?

Well, at the beginning of all this, the dominant media for entertainment and news was the radio. Soap operas, as I mentioned before, were the primary daytime programs. In the evening, people sat down around the radio to listen to shows that had pretty much exhausted their creativity, or were imitations of other shows that struck a vein of interest, hence game shows (which were cheap to produce, to boot), and comedies that all told the same jokes.

Television was a fledgling industry, although it had started to lay down roots. But new industries, new technologies, take risks in attempts to understand their boundaries. There were the three big radio networks, of course, that owned the lion's share of the TV business, but smaller networks like Dumont ran with the big dogs for a while. These networks syndicated their shows to affiliates across the country.

A side note: imagine how different this country would have been if cable had been the preferred vehicle for broadcast back then. Over-the-air signals were cheaper (of course) and thus demanded expanded capital to get the stronger frequencies in a given region to go around obstacles, which explains the dominance of the three networks. But the technology for cable existed, and in fact had been around for decades when someone tried to broadcast music over telephone wires into homes.

Television was exploring boundaries. TV was a kid's medium, new and exciting, easily understood if you didn't carry preconceptions in with you. Radio was the safe medium, the family medium. Cut and paste television into the third sentence and insert The Internet in its place in the first two, and there's the Nineties for ya!

set in after World War II, when we had visible enemies and a hot war. The dominant news story of that decade was the fight against Communism, here and abroad. The McCarthy hearings were the most closely followed radio and television programs for many months. People could be ostracized from society, banned from working, shamed into seclusion and even suicide, simply by being called before the committee (HUAC, the House Un-American Activities Committee).

Substitute liberal for Commie. Substitute Gingrich for McCarthy. The reactionaries are among us, even to this day, people like Helen Chenoweth and Bob Barr, idiots whose only agenda is to further their ambition by constructing a new and improved Nazi Germany, in which of course, they'd be Reichsfuhrers.

Plus ca change, plus ce meme chose.

Underneath all this, however, was a groundswell of emotion building to an ignition. The dark side of the Fifties was there: violent radical reactionary behavior in the South, like lynchings and kangaroo trials, created a backlash as blacks realized that they, too, had a stake in the American dream that their fellow soldiers had attained. They were kept down, and now were being brutalized, because of their skin color. The savagery was intensified as a result of the changing behaviors the realization wrought. The white men, angry white men, were keepin the Nigger in his place. Civil unrest was touched off in small outbreaks.

And women, restless in the suburbs, wanted more out of life than to keep a house for a man who would hardly appreciate their efforts when he got home. Earlier, married couples were too tired to notice how bad marriage could be, the husband would be exhausted from ten, twelve, or even fourteen hour days, the wife exhausted from busy schedules of child care, cleaning, cooking, shopping, and interacting with relatives nearby. They'd collapse in bed at nine, waking up at sunrise. The children respected the hard work their parents did each day, because they could see the sweat.

But now, the wife with the dream house had a dishwasher and a laundry machine and a car and a vacuum cleaner, and if she was well-off, a maid came in once a week. And keep in mind that, during the war, many of these women tasted economic independence as they went to factories and offices to fill slots that men shipped off to war had held. Remember Riveting Rosie? We shouldn't denigrate her memory by trivializing her.

Hell, no wonder the wife was bored! And no wonder she took offense at this husband of hers! She was envious of him, angry at him for stealing her job back, and now with plenty of time on her hands, because these were labor saving devices, not time contracting , she could contemplate the inequities in society. Again, the media were powerful influences in this regard: Queen For A Day and other game shows where fabulous prizes were to be had, as well as daytime shows that explored the problems people, mostly women, had dealing with other people, mostly men. Don't you think that watching someone win a washer-dryer combination and having it presented to her as the culmination of her life's fantasies for having struggled and fought life at its basest (which was the premise of Queen For A Day ) wasn't just a little insulting on some sub-textual level?

We see three, possibly four, conflicts in the Fifties that spilled over and combined and mutated into out-and-out wars in the Sixties and Seventies: racial issues, women's issues, and the question of Communism, which extended to become the Vietnam War. The fourth? Generational conflict.

But the kids of the Fifties were well taken care of, you'd say, and you'd be right in some respects: more money usually means better treatment of kids, but then there's that whole nuclear family thing to deal with. If Mommy's angry at Daddy, and Daddy gets home so late that he doesn't care, then who's watching the kids, really?

Mommy? She's home, but she's bored, and looking for something a little more emotionally and intellectually stimulating than See what I did, Mommy?

Daddy? When he's home, all he wants to do is sit in front of the TV and drink. He tells them to be quiet (well, OK, Shut UP! ) and go do their homework. And this is where the multi-generational household was so important, because often it was the grandparents that watched the kids grow up, or at least gave advice to the struggling parents. It really does take a village. It relieves the pressures of parenting.

With that link gone, children lost guidance and role models, and were pretty much left to fend for themselves with growing up and all. Some, many, became self-absorbed (which helps explain the Seventies and Eighties me themes), many others turned to TV and the radio, music, to soothe themselves and to find out what the hell was going on out there.

Think of it this way: could any generation other than the early rock generation have had Wolfman Jack or Alan Freed or Murray the K or Zacherle? Not before, because radio was about cross-over entertaining: you had to have bona fides to have a radio show. Not after, because TV was too important, and MTV hadn't been invented. In many ways, rock delayed the diminution of radio to background noise precisely because of this new music form and the need for escape from the humdrum suburban world.

I guess we're lucky, because it could just as easily have been Cousin Charles Manson as Cousin Bruce Morrow. These guys seemed to have their hearts in the right places, at least.

So the children listened to music, and they heard Elvis, whom their fathers hated (maybe Mom didn't. He was handsome, after all), and who had to be censored on TV for his suggestive dances and his Negro music of Rivvimnblues.

And so they paid attention, most of them, when Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat. And they heard the McCarthy hearings, and Joseph Welch shaming Tailgunner Joe into submission and ultimately death for his manipulation of American fears of the Soviets and Chinese Reds. And they realized that the government isn't necessarily the benign instrument of good they were taught it was, and they started to read Marx and Lenin, and then there was Beat poetry and music, Allen Ginsburg, and a raw awareness started to set in that things not only could change, but they had to.

Independent thinking. This was a new phenomenon for young adults and children, never experienced before in any society anywhere. Remember that it was a relatively recent phenomenon that most children even went to school, and further remember that the abiding credo of child rearing was children should be seen and not heard. Now all of a sudden, that was tossed out the window. The Fifties were the last real gasp of the patriarchal America. That was really the last time men, white men, were the absolute sovereign rulers in this country. Like it or not, it did provide continuity through the first 180 years or so of this nation. Whether that was a good or bad continuity remains to be seen.

And there is how the Sixties developed. OK, it's skimpy and short on research, but there's an abiding truth to the abandonment theme.

How does all this relate to today? Well, I've touched on many of the ways it has: cultural memes, new information technologies, social and political straw men set up to take the fall for society's weaknesses.

Their Hula Hoop is our Tamagotchi.

I want to explore the family life issue a bit closer though. If the dissolution of the extended family bought about the Fifties disillusionment and the Sixties discontent, what will the dissolution of the nuclear family bring to the Nineties and then the Aughts?

See, things were bad enough for children back when one parent stayed home, but the Eighties saw a phenomenon take full flight that is even more destructive: the DIPs.

Double Income Parents. As women stretched their economic wings, they started to understand the value of a career: it was an accomplishment, it meant independence from the male wage earner, and financial security in a time of uncertain marital status. And they pursued them as voraciously as men did. Almost.

OK, I'm no feminist, but I also acknowledge that certain generalizations can be made about most women that are very positive. One is that they feel a tremendous pull towards raising their children. Doesn't mean they all feel that way. Doesn't meant they always feel that way. Doesn't even mean it s accurate, correct, or even appropriate to give women all this credit. Just means it's reinforced into most women, early and often, starting with dolls.

And many men, myself included, feel that urge as strongly as any woman, and therefore restrain themselves from pursuing a career as wholeheartedly as their peers, getting on the slow track.

But pursue careers these women did, and the children suffered for it, because no matter how you slice it, you can't balance the needs of children for the parents they imprinted upon and the needs of a career, and believe me, the career has a thicker skin. Mommy comes home now, and needs the drink and the TV (or increasingly, the Internet chat room), just like Daddy, and so the kids get pushed aside in favor of both parents relaxation. This is especially true in a single-parent household and especially since in those households, children need even more attention and don't get it because of the self-involvement of the parent.

(Introducing the element of the computer as relief from the humdrum raises an even more frightening specter. Put it this way: even at its worst, television is a medium that can be shared with the entire family. If Mommy or Daddy are watching a show, the kids can sit in the room and see it easily as well, but many of the new technologies for entertainment media, such as the chat room, almost demand that you be isolated from your physical inter actors. Would YOU let a six year old look over your shoulder as you sat in most IRC rooms?(and even if you would, its not physically so easy to pull off.)

Now, please. This isn't a knock on women. If it was men who were second class and suddenly found the means to get out of the house and found equality, I'd be writing the same theme about them as well. The truth of the world is that women left last, and while responsibility for child rearing is mutual, and therefore the blame is mutually attributable, the traditional dictates of women's role as nurturers tends to make them the target of this complaint.

And remember, men took their abandonment lumps, even if it wasn't acknowledged at the time, in the Fifties. Of course, women were around to pick up those pieces.

The signs of the impact of this trend are already showing. The only age group that shows a significant increase in criminal activity is that under 20. Crime committed by preteen children is growing alarmingly fast, in particular. And midnight basketball ain't the answer, because the time period that has seen the largest jump in criminal activity, surpassing even many of the periods in the middle of the night, is that time from 3 to 6 PM weekdays.

After school.

And it isn't the inner cities that are seeing the highest jumps in teen crimes: its the suburbs, where the two parents probably grew up and now live, commuting many dozens of miles to an urban office setting, just like their fathers, coming home in time to pop the microwave meal in the oven or to call Domino's. To make a safe home for their kids, to have a little more.

Marlon Brando and James Dean were the teen heroes of the Fifties, along with Elvis, rebellious youth turning against the old folks. Pay attention, folks, to this: among the most popular figures among teens today is Tupac Shakur, a dead gangster rapper who admitted to criminal activity, not just criminal activity, but bloody violent activity. And he was gunned down by a rival gang .

Now to be sure, some of this is marketing, but whether its actually true or whether its all some A&R guy's idea of a sales pitch doesn't matter. Entertainers ARE role models whether they like it or not. They shouldn't be, but just as women shouldn't be held solely accountable for the Latchkey Kid Syndrome, the way the world turned out is that they are. That's reality. Deal with it.

And the marriage itself is more stressed than ever, which means not only are both parents exhausted, but they re also in a non-nurturing environment with someone they are constantly at odds with, trying to hammer out who gets what chores around the house. And yes, men are worse about it than women, because they see their fathers and mothers having worked it out so that he got the money, and she got the chores.

With the marriage doubly stressed, that leaves even less energy for the children to impose on, even less nurturing available. And that means even more alienation, more independent thought, more exploration of the Internet (remember the new technologies meme), more awareness of the world outside the family, because you have to be in order to keep up with your peers, who have now become your family. Now does Prodigy seem like such an unlikely band? Or Nine Inch Nails? Or Marilyn Manson? No more so than The Beatles.

In fact, I'd put forth that Marilyn Manson is the icon for the Nineties: stealing his name from towering cultural influences of the Fifties and Sixties, he's got the idea that I'm typing out here: alienation is the sum total of our society's imposition on the family structure and we've been here before.

There is an economic need for women in the workforce. Recall that I said the Fifties boom was measly compared to the Nineties? And the Eighties boom really didn't affect the average wage earner? Now, I'm going to look at why.

During the Fifties, there had to necessarily be a boom to the American economy, because, frankly, we were the only industrialized country not digging out from the rubble of war. There was demand for our goods and services (more goods than services, which is why the boom was not as strong as it could have been: it costs money to make goods, and lots of it.). This boom would have been stronger for consumers but for another reason: a glut of post-war labor, which depressed the wage rates, allowing for cheaper labor.

During the Eighties, however, the boom was massive, but...

Two side events conspired to keep much of this increased wealth out of the hands of the average family: one, there was far more foreign investment in and competition to our businesses, and second, most of the wealth created flowed to the richest one percent.

I'm going to let you in on a really pornographic little secret of the Reagan years:

In real dollars (1990 basis), the wealthiest one percent of Americans sees their wealth increase a staggering 254% from 1981 to 1990!

Think about that. Two and a half million Americans saw their wealth more than double, and nearly triple, during the Eighties and early Nineties.

All other income groups, by default, drop in real dollars.

During the Eighties, we had inflation of roughly 3.5 to 4% annually. Real wages for your typical American not only didn't keep pace with inflation, they actually contracted. We were all worse off than in the Seventies, and in the Seventies were worse off than in the Sixties, the last decade that we truly had a booming economy (not surprisingly, overseen by Democratic Presidents) that raised all the boats. And we managed to wage war on poverty without any cynical gimmicks like Laffer Curves.

Increasingly, though, women used their college degrees and entered the workforce to pick up the slack in wage growth for families. They had to.

Now, you'd think this would have hurt wage growth because of the increased competition, but that would be a very Caucasi-male-centric perspective. For women (and by extension of this diversification of the workforce, minorities), earning power increased in the Eighties.

By the by, think about that for a second: women go to work because the real income, the real purchasing power, of their primary breadwinner has declined, the real income for their entire economic class has declined AND their own gender income rises. It says something about from how far down women came.

That's not to say there was a magic expansion of jobs and earning power. The staying power of the Bush Depression of the late Eighties, early Nineties was in large part due to the absorption of this new labor pool, which depressed per capita wages. But this was soon overcome by something that I mentioned a few paragraphs back: the increase in global competition and therefore, trade.

Still think Nafta is a bad thing? You shouldn't, because it has, in part, contributed to the overwhelmingly rapid surge in real income in the past six years. Women are now an integral part of the workforce and production economy. Trade deficits are leveling and, in spite of the dicey political de-stabilization domestically, and in Canada and Mexico, has strengthened the North American alliances. This bodes well for the economic future of this society, but what about the children?

See, this doesn't just affect the US. In this, as in many cultural areas, the U.S. has become very much a bellwether for the rest of the world, which has certainly adapted more American culture than America has the worlds. In such nations as Japan, where family ties and reverence for the elder generations is not decades old, not centuries old, but millennia old, the multi-generational structure is dissolving quickly. Transistorized decoupling, you might say.

I can only speculate on what all this bodes for the future, but looking at the last time this all happened, one is struck by the upheaval and sharp contrast of the ensuing decades. The Sixties, the Seventies, and the Eighties all echoed with the themes of the nuclear family and the deterioration of the traditional urban and rural (multi-generational families were most assuredly not an urban-only feature) family values of unity in the face of hardship and strife.

We speak of community. We try to enforce community by walling off housing developments, in the hopes that it will not only keep bad people out, but good people in, but community has never been geographically defined. Physical proximity is not causative of a community, but an outgrowth, so walling in strangers is only going to make things worse, and add to a siege mentality.

And in sieges, children band together for safety in numbers. Remember that parenting is weak, at best, in DIP families, even in the traditional stay-at-home-Mom-commuting- Dad families. This forces children to look outside their families, and since the pickings are slim in any closed system (like a suburban street), there's little to choose from in terms of people with similar interests. This creates a disharmonious competition of viewpoints and values, and in situations like that, we can expect that extreme POVs will be given more weight than they probably deserve.

Like in the Sixties, we can see that there will probably be some very deep generational divides. we've seen many of these already as Gen X-ers have voiced their strong opposition to many of the values of their Baby Boom Yuppie parents. As the X-ers grow older, and gain more economic influence by earning real wages, this discontent will only gather momentum.

Culture is a pendulum, and just as artists are now under siege from the right, there will come a time shortly when the contributions of the arts to society will be recognized for the value they contain, just as Kennedy invited poets and sculptors and musicians to the White House in the early Sixties. The Boomers art appreciation, to put it mildly, runs to reruns of Gilligan's Island and Andrew Lloyd Webber musicals. Shortly, the culture will be such that art will have to strive for more than mediocrity, will have to take risks, in order to gain attention.

As an actor, this both inspires and threatens me. The soap-opera-level of acting that passes for performance in films nowadays (I mean, really...Tom Hanks TWO years in a row?) is easy for anyone to do, anyone can master the form of The Method that's accepted in Hollywood now, but soon it will fall by the wayside, and I can only hope to be able to fight through to become among the best of what's yet to come. But it will mean something to win an Academy Award then, and the struggle will have been worth it.

And yes, there will come a day when Marilyn Manson is on an Oldies tour in Vegas.