Here’s a film about the 1950s – “The World As It Was” – that will tell you a great deal about life in the U.S.A. today, while disabusing anyone of the notion that nostalgia for that mephitic decade is in order, for it was a time when “democracy” tended toward totalitarianism.

In doing so, it sowed the bitter fruit that is poisoning us today. Without understanding the long-standing effects of those years, it is impossible to grasp the deepest dimensions of our current nightmare.