Tomorrow’s America

After two wars, the United States has entered a period of unprecedented cultural hibernation.

As the turmoil in financial markets threatens the U.S. and protests flood the streets, American lifestyle choices are evolving in a revealing way. At another point in time, the rest of the world saw America as an exuberant teenager, the extrovert of the planet, exporter of rock and roll and flashy Hollywood films. Today, Americans are becoming decidedly retro, or at least introspective. Trends in leisure reflect this change: Thriftiness and ingenuity in boosting productivity are fashionable; conspicuous consumption has become outdated.

This change is due to the fragile economy, of course, but I also think that there is a psychological component. After two wars and a half dozen undeclared conflicts in the past decade, the United States has entered a period of unprecedented cultural hibernation.

Recently, gardening, scrapbooks, knitting and cooking are activities that have become obscenely chic. In urban neighborhoods, where modern youth are moving, inner city gardens and tomatoes are growing in pots in windows, replacing the Lexus and Prius cars.

Other fashionable youth have moved farther into the country in search of a new idyllic fantasy narrative. The young couple — the man with his beard and the woman with a sundress and boots — lives on a farm in the Hudson River Valley with a flock of chickens, or in New Mexico in a green straw bale house. They have replaced the young couple from five years ago —the man with the hedge fund and the woman with decorative interior design in a “McMansion” in Westchester County.

Food sections of urban newspapers that five years ago would have dealt with the latest fusion cuisine now post fantasy profiles of Ivy League graduates who have worked their way out of the system and found success in launching a line of homemade pickles. Farmers’ markets, kitchens with wood, solar panels and Agway farm supply stores are the new focus of dreams and aspirations for those people who, not so long ago, were immersed in unlimited credit, consuming luxury brands within reach of the middle class and fantasizing about the kind of life illustrated in fashion magazines.

Even Hollywood plots today echo the desire to escape to a more “simple life,” with a declared distaste for excessive wealth and luxury. In the upcoming film “We Bought a Zoo,” a single father heals his family by moving to the countryside to live on a farm with a menagerie full of wild animals, a humble house and spectacular natural views that guarantee a liberating environment for domestic life.

Other films show the excess as something nauseating. The blockbuster success “The Hangover Part II” shows three young friends on a crazy night out in Thailand — a night where they are free to indulge in all their desires, from watching transgender sex workers to doing drugs, and getting into mayhem of all sorts. However, in the end, the main character expresses his desire to marry, have a family and lead the quiet life of a dentist. In a parallel plot, the chick flick, “Bridesmaids,” shows a future wife who is about to get “everything” from a boring but extremely rich boyfriend; she then escapes all of the excess surrounding that life to live in her humble apartment.

After the bank bailouts and financial scandals, like those caused by Bernie Madoff, as well as a property bubble that left Americans in the hands of God, it is as if the collective unconscious is redefining the old life of yachts and golf courses manicured to perfection as something distasteful and turning to a thrifty simplicity and searching for virtuous relief in rural areas. Not surprisingly, the last time American culture experienced a reversal of iconography like this was during the Great Depression, when films like “The Grapes of Wrath” showed rational simplicity as a shining virtue in contrast to the wealthy elite’s corruption. “Wherever they’s a cop beatin’ up a guy, I’ll be there. … An’ when our folk eat the stuff they raise an’ live in the houses they build — why, I’ll be there.”

In 1980, Ronald Reagan assured that it was “morning in America,” but today in the United States, it is already the next morning. This trend toward a collective fantasy, fed by solar power and far from the system, where people eat what they grow and travel on bicycles, is unavoidable: Americans were injected with the illusion that the more they consumed, the happier they’d be and, instead, they were left with a pile of debt. They were asked to admire the top of the income pyramid, only to discover that what they were really looking at was actually a pyramid scheme.

Consequently, unsurprisingly, a chic person obsessed with survival before a future catastrophe is now taking on a modern, radical version of chic, as well as that of the 1960s era. Americans have lost faith in those who, in peak times, whispered “Trust us.” The new American dream — a flock of chickens and a jar of pickles — represents the perception that when in crisis, the only people Americans can trust are themselves.