The fruits of the economic and technological growth of the nineteenth century leads to the mechanization of warfare, the blanketing of cities in concrete, and the replacement of agriculture to heavy industry as the center of economic power. Transportation and communication, almost unchanged since the time of Babylon, now shrink the world with terrifying speed.
The Naughty Nineties to Roaring Twenties
Time Frame – 1890 – 1929
Politics/Economics – By 1890, the United States felt that at least for the lower forty eight states, there was no area left that could be called a frontier. Rail service quickly connected almost every village to a metropolis, and the feeling of isolation between the civilized world and the more remote areas of the country slowly faded. Even oceans were no great barrier to movement, as what once was a two or three week perilous journey on a sailing ship from London to New York could now be done in six days in the comfort of a stateroom aboard a luxury steamship.
As the workplace becomes more machine oriented, effective production using machines requires that the flow of work accommodate them instead of the workers. Focus on the craftsman must be left behind as assembly-lines transform factories. Even social services follow this trend, with ever larger hospitals, prisons, orphanages thought to be the most efficient way of taking care of the less fortunate. The electrification of cities, automobiles, aeroplanes, subways – all of these incredible advancements were only in their first stages, but captured the public imagination immediately. They felt as the century drew to a close that they were witness to a grand beginning in the life of humanity. It was a heady time; full of optimism that human endeavour could conquer any problem.
Along with this confidence came a certain amount of decadence, with upper society allowing themselves a certain libertine license. The two decades that bracket this period have more dissimilarities than commonalities. During the Naughty Nineties, the sense was that Christian Man had finally conquered nature and the heathen, bringing the fruits of God’s bounty to its rightful owners. The capitalists and industrialists who created this massive change saw themselves as the next aristocracy, the true leaders of the civilized world. A new century was about to usher in a future of promise. This was a male-centered world, with women providing a diverting background and taking care of some domestic concerns, but even in entertainment the men were catered to almost exclusively. It is at this time that men withdraw to smoke their cigars after dinner, or retire to private clubs after work, or visit burlesques where decent women were not allowed. Wherever men of power congregate, that is the center of the social world.
But by the time of the roaring twenties, many things had happened to shake that confidence. Disasters large and small – the flooding of Galveston, the sinking of the Titanic, the San Francisco earthquake – took the lives of both rich and poor, sinner and saint. A World War wiped out half a generation of young men in Europe, and the influenza pandemic of 1918 wiped out millions more. Yet at the same time, cities had become modern, no longer made of low wooden structures, but towered above the landscape in concrete and steel. As the postwar world began to regain its economic footing, people were ready to enjoy all that a bustling city life could offer. Light and heat came on with the flick of a switch, hot water came out of faucets in every floor of the house. It didn’t matter that the United States had passed Prohibition. Speakeasies were open, nightclubs were available, jazz was playing and whiskey was flowing. People were ready to party.
Fashion/Manners – There was difficulty in adapting 19th century manners to 20th century realities. A bustling city requires practical manners, better to deal with the fast pace of city life. The formal bow and then even the bow en passant fade into disuse. On the street, a wave of the hand to an acquaintance might be quite acceptable. The hat may be removed with the right hand then transferred to the left, leaving the right free for handshake. Removing the hat was expected in any private room, but not in a public place. But in a crowded city, this was often difficult to establish, especially as multi-office building. By convention, an elevator was deemed a private room, so off came the hat. But you would put it back on in a building hallway or corridor, which was considered to be the equivalent of a public street. Tip the hat to a stranger; remove the hat to an acquaintance. But when tipping the hat to a lady, do not make eye contact, for that would require her to return eye-contact, and that would be a serious lack of propriety. Nor should a man smile to an unknown or only casually known male or female on the street, as it makes an assumption of familiarity.
In the 1920’s, by contrast, there is a palpable feeling of people throwing out old ways by the shovelful. Informality is the rule of the day, with people greeting each other directly, male or female. Introductions are appreciated, but no longer necessary. A cosmopolitan flair was striven for, and an easygoing stride and a boyish enthusiasm for fun and nightlife and entertainment in all its forms. And while there was still a strong line between the upper class and the serving class, the stuffiness and gender isolation of the Edwardian period was tossed out in favor of elegant sophistication and thoroughly modern sensibility. Everyone had seen too much of death; dance now, was the theme, while the band is still playing.
For formal wear, men’s fashion, as usual, mimics the military uniform of the time, even going so far as to put a satin tripe down the legs of Tuxedo pants, mimicking the parade dress uniform. That satin sash, black on black, is still the distinctive feature of men’s formal trousers.
Civilian Conflict –
The great influx of both immigrants and of former agricultural workers into the largest cities also brought about the gangster era, made even more powerful by the wealth they were able to amass during Prohibition. So while the rest of society went about without so much as a penknife in pocket, city criminals begin to carry any manner of hidden weapons. Brass knuckles, switchblade knives, and small revolvers are all designed to kill someone from a very close distance. Even the Tommy gun was a close-in weapon, for in attacking in a city environment there is no need for accuracy or distance.
For urban dwellers, pistols are not only hidden when worn, but are also somewhat hidden when used. The elbow is kept close to the body as the forearm is extended, and the rest of the body keeps a normal stance without trying to brace for recoil. From across a crowded street or even in a large room no casual bystander would even notice that a gun was being held. Naturally aiming the gun by looking down the sights is impossible, but it is assumed that the victim is going to be no further than twenty feet away. For all of these reasons, pistols tend to be of shorter barrel length and of lower caliber.
But just as in the previous century, cost kept guns from being commonplace items. For example, in 1900 the cheapest handgun of inferior quality cost $5, while a decent handgun ran about $20. A box of fifty bullets would set you back another 50 cents to a dollar. This at a time when the going wage for a construction worker was 28 cents per day. And at a time when there were no unemployment benefits, whatever you earned had to also last through the rainy season when there was no work. So buying a reasonably decent revolver was comparable to someone flipping burgers at McDonald’s considering buying a Ferrari.
Side note: It is thought that the lethal game known as Russian Roulette began in this period. It didn’t. As a matter of fact, it didn’t exist until a writer, Georges Surdez, invented it for a magazine short story he wrote in 1937.
“Did you ever hear of Russian Roulette?’ … with the Russian army in Romania, around 1917… some officer would suddenly pull out his revolver, anywhere, at the table, remove a cartridge from the cylinder, spin the cylinder, snap it back in place, put it to his head and pull the trigger.”
It was only after the story was published that the first accounts of anyone playing Russian Roulette (though with only one live cartridge rather than five) become known. And accounts continue to this day, almost always involving adolescent males. What a wonderful legacy for that writer.
Warfare – The beginning of this time finds us at the end of Victoria’s reign in England. Western ground forces are armed with manually operated (usually bolt action) rifles with fairly long detachable bayonets. As the rifles could hold only six shots at most before reloading, and it takes a few seconds to work the action between each shot, most warriors can expect to engage in hand to hand combat once the lines draw close. At that point, the rifle with bayonet serves as a combination quarterstaff and spear. Most European armies are engaged against poorly armed and inadequately organized rebellions in their third-world colonies. Due to the disparity in arms and training, European forces often have the upperhand in battle even when severely outnumbered. A sense of complacency develops within the Western military, believing in their own invincibility. They were completely unprepared for the carnage that WWI inflicted.
In the decade before the war, all armies have discontinued colorful uniforms in favor of drab khaki, brown, or green clothing for service use. With radio communication and rifles now capable of accurate fire up to 300 yards, there is no longer any point in having lines and columns of soldiers exposed in the open. Better to try to blend into the background if possible, limiting the enemy’s view of your position and numbers. But with trains and trucks able to transport millions of troops, armaments and supplies to the very edges of battle, a stalemate quickly developed during WWI. Both sides were outfitted with high-powered machine guns, semi-automatic pistols and fully automatic submachine guns, yet the standard response by the generals was to attempt direct charges at the line of the enemy. Each such charge ended in hundreds, even thousands, of deaths. In order to feed that vast military need, universal conscription is imposed, draining the civilian economy of men, material and money.
So the infantry/cavalry dynamic is in a state of unequal stalemate. The foot soldier with his bolt-action rifle is still the heavy infantry, and he is pinned down by an extremely effective light infantry in the form of three-man machine guns. But there was no effective countermeasure, which was normally the job of light and heavy cavalry. Slowly the battle became that of trench warfare, with soldiers hiding in long ditches to escape the rain of artillery shells and a wall of machine gun bullets, and then chemical warfare, with poison gas lobed into the trenches. When opposing infantry would meet, it was usually in the trenches, where the bolt-action rifles were cumbersome instruments. Medieval weapons make a comeback in the form of steel helmets, spiked clubs and trench knives. Since tanks and airplanes were in their infancy, neither side had an effective answer to the new style of war. In the end it was the simple attrition of materials and men on both sides that made the parties sue for and accept terms of peace. After this, no war would ever be described in the romantic views of the past.
Relativism
Time Frame – 1930 – 1965
Politics/Economics – Rise of Fascism, Communism, Socialism. The rapid decline of colonialism.
The Great Depression did what Prohibition couldn’t – sober up America. Interestingly, it also made entertainment more powerful. With the wide availability of radio and film, people were willing to spend a few of their hard-earned pennies on escapist entertainment. And yet the realities of the world were never far away. The 1930’s gave birth to modern jazz (with its darker tonalities always bubbling underneath even the happiest tunes), screwball comedies (where normal can become surreal in a second) and superheroes (because a normal guy is no match for the brave new world). Counterpoised to that is the underlying presumption, especially in the United States, that any problem can be overcome so long as we put our collective minds and muscle to it. Not just engineering challenges, but social ills, natural disasters, environmental concerns, finally even reaching the moon – all are bendable to the will of science and technology.
The two greatest effects of WWII was the catapulting of the US as the bonafide world power, and the decline of the European countries, even the victors. Strict colonialism could no longer survive, and most colonies of the old European Empires quickly gained independent nation status.
The United States largely won the Second World War on the strength of its industrial power. It was able to produce the tanks, planes, bullets, guns, and ships to outfit itself and its allies, as well as provide the petroleum to power them. American society took two lessons from this. First, that if industrial bureaucracy could crush fascism, it could be used to handle any task. Companies large and small copied military protocols and organization. In short order hospitals, schools, department stores, public housing, suburban residential developments – all became industrialized. Large works better than small.
The second lesson was that the war was won by the average Joe, not by the snooty aristocrats. America turned away from looking to France and England for its art and culture. So begins the era of the common man, and with it the dominance of American culture worldwide. Even as early as the 1920’s, but certainly by the end of the 30’s, upper class entertainments are viewed with ever more suspicion. Opera, ballets, symphonic music, poetry; these have little place in the new culture of the common man. Film is the main art form, the only one that reflects popular sentiment and is actually seen by most of the population. There is less production of what had fed aristocratic desires, supplanted by a flood of lower luxuries fulfilling the American Dream.
Warning: big digression coming up: Here is where I start to part company with the many books on theatre history and period style. Too many of them take their cues from art criticism and art history. These tend not to follow popular art, but rather at this point delve into modernism and post modernism. But when trying to follow period style, it helps not a bit to focus on the “art for art’s sake” schools, which unfortunately is most of what is considered “serious visual art” of the twentieth century. Those artists, geniuses to be sure, are interesting to only a small subset of the population at large. In effect, they become an aristocracy of art, looking down on the majority of people for whom cubism and deconstruction and ambiguity of theme have no meaning. It is not to the fringe that one must look when trying to find a period style.
Fashion/Manners –
Instead of proscribed manners, it becomes more important to act directly in a personal way to whatever is happening in the moment. A man was expected to stand straight and have a firm handshake in the business world, but was expected to relax and “loosen-up” when at home or with friends. The body begins to slouch into a comfortable chair, and the legs can cross in any way that is comfortable for the sitter. Formal introductions are completely gone, and most people feel completely at ease in simply introducing themselves to a stranger in any situation.
Civilian Conflict – Continuing unchanged from the prior period, most men are unarmed. At most, a hidden gun or knife might be worn, as most countries pass laws prohibiting the wearing of weapons.
An interesting side issue is the development of the activity known as Russian Roulette.
Warfare – Armies replace bolt-action rifles for the infantry with semiautomatics, and then finally fully automatic rifles. Aviation and tanks redefine the infantry/cavalry dynamic. The foot soldier can become both the heavy and light infantry, but now tanks can barrel past trenches, filling the role of heavy cavalry. Helicopters and airplanes become the light cavalry. Because the expense of war rises exponentially with each technological improvement in weapons, smaller armies or poorer ones use irregular fighting strategies, now called “guerrilla” warfare. The concept is ancient, and resorted to when facing a force superior in numbers and weaponry. In short, it involves attacking when the enemy is in retreat, disappearing when the enemy wants to attack, and disrupting the enemy when it is not prepared for engagement.
Youth Culture
Time Frame – 1965 – present
Politics/Economics – Power shifts from mere heavy industry to entities that can expedite and control all levels of production, from raw material to final consumption, with minimal restraints from geographic boundaries. Of the three descendants of the free market form – communism, fascism, and corporate capitalism, only the last proves to be a successful economic model. Global technologies allow for multinational corporations, entities which no longer are restricted to sharing in the successes or failures of an individual “home” country, but can move resources and production facilities quickly from one country to another as best befits the immediate need.
The availability of leisure time and the affordability of the tools of entertainment increase exponentially. The widespread use of air conditioning and central heating allows people to remain largely isolated from the effects of the natural world whether at home or at work, or for that matter even when commuting between the two.
The trend of commerce to emulate production line techniques leads to the creation first of supermarkets and then multiplex theatres, the “big box” warehouse stores and finally the “mega-stores”. Large volume sales are aided by the introduction of prepackaged units of food and clothing, man-made materials including “disposable” plastic items. Nearly every type of vendor moves to incorporating self-service, in whole or in part, in order to expedite the movement of customers with minimal staff. This parallels the trend of consumers to limit the amount of “face time” they need to endure as they go through their daily schedule.
Fashion/Manners – With an unprecedented rise in living standards and the explosion of mass media, entertainment becomes not merely a diversion but the goal of living. Almost every home worldwide turns on a radio, a computer, or a television set – every day. The contemplative life, formality, articulate speech, intense scientific inquiry are all viewed with suspicion. A new concept – retirement – develops, and in western society becomes an assumed entitlement. By mid-century, business attire resembles the new architecture; big, bland and boxlike. By the end of the century, even business attire is no longer considered necessary in order to run a business.
In daily life, the increase in commercial consumerism allows two trends – perpetual infantilization and performance identity – to play out to every sector of the population. The backlash in American society to the Vietnam War accelerated the post WWII trends that were already in play. The male ideal slowly continues its devolution in age, from that of a successful 40 year old man-of-the-world, at ease in any social situation, to the archetypal wired 16 year old, in-your-face and disdainful of social manners. Body posture is, as we shall see, by contrast apologetic and fearful. The concept of the inherent nobility of the common man becomes twisted into the emulation of traits that are common. This combination of youth worship and disdain of formality has led to an elevation of the acceptability of childish behavior well beyond what had always been the loose cut-off point of adolescence. Notice the increase in crudity used in popular media. Although scatological humor has existed uninterrupted since ancient Greece, it was always used for its shock value, and those characters who demonstrated it were themselves objects of ridicule. The current trend uses it in order to sell products to the general population. Crudity is the status quo, the great equalizer, proof that you and I are equal because we can all sink to the lowest common denominator. In what other society would you sell fast food by showing people who are unable to put the food in their mouths or cannot eat with their mouths closed? Advertisers know that we will relate to hands and faces smeared with undigested food but not to someone who eats small portions neatly and without the need of a napkin.
The current adult has kept the same food stuffs with which he was familiar as a child. Instead of a simple cup of coffee or tea, highly sweetened lattes, mochas and chais soothe the child/adult palette. The candy bar has been repackaged as an energy bar, milkshakes become smoothies, but these are mere changes in nomenclature so as to please the buying public. We still want our highly sugared pacifiers that we got as treats when we were four.
In clothing, leisure wear is accepted as standard wear for nearly all daily activities, and, with oversized pants, loose shirts and sneakers worn for nearly every occasion, young and old alike emulate the attire of toddlers, for the societal norm is to look in the mirror and see youth. With prices of clothing having dropped to unprecedented lows (relative to income), people can choose their “look” according to their mood. Yet it is interesting to point out that while a man’s complete business suit can be purchased for $50, most adults see no need to own a suit. [Most will spend that much or more on running shows and will never run a mile in their adult lives.] For different occasions, people no longer simply dress in their best apparel, but instead costume themselves as the character they wish to portray. In some ways we are a performance society, going so far as to the wearing of slogans on T-shirts as a way of subtitling our lives for the benefit of the viewing audience. Lost in an impossibly complex and isolating world, we wear these articles not only to express ourselves to others, but more importantly to define ourselves to ourselves. Like good method actors, we then strive to take on the characteristics of the characters we have created. At the same time, by the end of the century rare is the person not branded by a corporate logo on at least one article of clothing every day. It’s as though the character we create defines his meaning by the corporation he represents.
There is a continuing conflict being played out between our nineteenth century cultural heritage and our twentieth century desires (it’ll take several decades before a new 21st century style develops). Most of our current forms were structured around a semi-agricultural life-style. We take summer vacations, our holidays set long ago by the down time between ripening and harvest. We put away our cars in a garage exactly as our forefathers put away their horses in barn. We bypass an unused dining room where at one time a large farm family would have sat down twice a day to eat. We sit in a family/living room laid out for genteel conversation, but have to turn the chairs and sofas to face the real central feature of the room – the television set.
It is easy to dwell on the changes to our society since the invention of television, beginning with reminding you that whereas all prior peoples would look for entertainment by either going out to see live performances or by enjoying the fellowship of neighbors and friends, we moderns relax in front of a box. Live performances, movie houses, neighborhood pubs, even informal activities such as the bridge party or sitting on a front porch and talking to neighbors are all losing their appeal. As the television became less expensive and a single family could afford more than one set, entertainment became personalized. No longer would the entire family sit and watch the Ed Sullivan Show. The universal spread of information and ideals that was the hope of television has mushroomed into a flood of fragmented and tightly focused programming to targeted market segments.
When the automobile was invented, it was treated as the natural successor to the horse, so we built garages that look like barns in which to house them, and the style we wanted to see for the vehicle itself was that of the elegant carriage. The automobile was the public representation of a family’s position and aspiration, even built so as to parade the entire (nuclear) family in its journey to town and church.. In the current period, the car has become another of the entertainment devices which we purchase not to fill a need but to more tellingly enhance our childlike pleasure. Notice the shape and color of vehicles of the past twenty years: it is not an accident that Detroit has given them the unmistakable look of the old Matchbox cars and Tonka trucks of our childhood. Purchase for practicality here again has given way to fitting the products to a film in which we cast ourselves as the central star. Reality need not interfere with fantasy. Notice how car ads on TV show the driver doing 70 mph on winding country roads, even though we all know that the actual driver is going to be going about 7 mph in bumper-to-bumper traffic.
In the vehicle or out, at work or at play, we also keep a running sound track to fit the self-image we create. Stereos and mobile music players allow us to change the mood of our surroundings just as we costume ourselves to fit the scene we are living out at the moment. Especially in the United States, this dovetails with a rejection of communal ritual. Weddings, funerals, really all of the rites of passage, are individualized rather than conforming to tradition. Traditional elements may still be included, but the focus is on making every event a reflection of the individual rather than a recreation from an ancient template. The elements are picked buffet style, so that no two weddings should ever look alike. Even as we value our anonymity, we strive to be different, just like everybody else.
A youth culture chooses to ignore the reality of aging and death, so even as retirees use plastic surgery in order to look twenty-nine, we move our cemeteries far away from neighborhood churchyards and isolate them into park-like “death-ghettos”, away from view and away from our thoughts.
For a moment, think of how different we moderns are from any other people in history (then consider the subset which is the vast majority of actors; usually under thirty and middle class), and how that affects our world view. Whether born in city or country we have in reality been raised in a suburban life-style, not connected to the land in any real sense, have not seen a dead body outside of a hospital or funeral home (even there we often never see the body). We have access to information from around the world but cannot look at the night sky and tell what week of the year it is. We do not know what it’s like to walk down a street and have most people recognize us by name and know most of our family history. Our supermarkets offer us every type of produce known without a thought as to seasonal availability. We have always assumed an unlimited and immediate supply of electricity and water and access to instant communication. Cut off those things from a modern person and you have the set up for a horror movie. And all of what is considered meaningful information either arrives or is confirmed by television and the internet.
Originally, this increase in the availability of resources and information was supposed to usher in a feeling of empowerment, but oddly, the opposite has occurred. Paranoia is the societal norm. Compared to other generations, we live in a nearly constant state of fear and anxiety. All public discourse centers on defining what we should fear most. Commercial products are sold to us based on eliminating what we should deem as constant threats. We live with the assumption that our streets are not safe, that our children are not safe, that our water, food, air, strangers, homes, germs, wildlife, odors, books, movies, insects, philosophies … all of these and just about anything else with which we come in contact are sources of grave and immediate danger to us.
We stand and walk in such a way as to hide from the public eye, with slumped shoulders and arched back, eyes cast to the ground. As we walk, this feeling of collapse continues with each step, so much so that the torso drops into the hip. This, combined with the slumped shoulders, restricts our lung capacity and reduces our speed and placement of our body center. As a result, we tend to lead with the feet or with the forehead.
Of course, youths have been told from time immemorial to stand up straight and not slouch. But as they reach adolescence, they naturally look to the adult ideal of the time and begin to shape their mannerisms and postures to fit that model. It just happens that the current adult ideal comes from entertainment and sports, themselves eschewing the image of sober adulthood and taking on the persona of irresponsible children. Indeed, anything associated with the traditional image of responsible adult, sober in demeanor, is ridiculed as being uptight and repressed. This causes a great problem in business situations. For men, this often translates into a strange double life – dressing for the boardroom, but maintaining the frat-boy persona.
Our natural default facial expression is one of veiled hostility, the better to hide the latent fear. Except in business situations, the handshake greeting has been reduced to a very limited hand clasp or touch, with countless variations to establish social placement. Sitting in a chair involves a full collapse into the contours of the seat and back, one step away from reclining, as though attempting to disappear from the room.
Warfare – As potential battlefields expand into the air, and even above the atmosphere, soldiers become either operators of war technology or guerrilla fighters. The days of large numbers of individual infantry fighters taking a field en masse is over. The set-piece battles of WWII with clear battle lines have given way to rapid assaults by combined forces using primarily aircraft in both the light cavalry and heavy cavalry roles, with infantry being highly mechanized and shifting from being either light or heavy, or both, as situations warrant. Direct infantry fighting is now handled by small units of specialized regular forces trained in guerilla techniques, and the bulk of the army either providing logistic support or operating explosive weapons from a distance. The model used in the Vietnam War of using large numbers of lightly armed ground troops to do the bulk of the fighting is no longer seen as effective, although, as is common throughout history, generals are the last to learn those lessons.
Fully automatic firepower and high energy explosives are available now to even the poorest faction. Bladed weapons have no place in battle strategy, although combat knives and bayonets survive as weapons of last resort for ground forces. However, these close in weapons serve more to bolster a feeling a warrior invincibility rather than as a realistic tool of battle. It is interesting to note that in 2010 the US Army finally discontinued fixed bayonet training in boot camp. Generals finally acknowledged what frontline soldiers have known since the 1950’s: Spear and quarterstaff techniques have no place in battles using fragile and short automatic firearms. The oldest form of the sword, however, is still in use, although no longer for soldier vs. soldier fights. Machetes are used by combatants to massacre unarmed civilians in many parts of the world.
A worrisome trend has been the use among many insurgent armies to use children as soldiers. Although children have been used as drummers, tenders, and deck-hands for centuries, their numbers were limited and their application was in minor support positions and not in combat roles. What we are seeing now is something else entirely – entire armies in which only children are recruited [or stolen] as combatants. The reason for using children is obvious – they are far more susceptible to the brainwashing and character break-down during indoctrination and training that helps turn decent civilized people into killing machines. [That’s why regular military forces don’t like to take in recruits that are older than twenty-five.]
What is most troubling about this isn’t that it is some diabolical aberration, but a horrifying realization that the historic barrier to using children has disappeared. Unfortunately, there has never existed a societal taboo on using children by itself to keep it from happening. The barrier was ultimately practical, not emotional. Young children simply don’t have the endurance to be able to march nor the strength to handle the fighting. That is no longer the case now that soldiers can be trucked in to even the most remote areas. As far as the actual fighting, modern weapons such as the AK-47 variations are light enough for a child to carry and simple enough for a child of twelve to disassemble, clean, reassemble, load and fire 50 rounds into a village with only one hour’s worth of instruction.
Civilian Conflict – Continuing the trend of the beginning of the century, most men are not armed when outside of the home, gang and drug-related tit-for-tat killings notwithstanding. Most weapons used in anger are pistols using high powered ammunition, and confrontations are usually one armed belligerent facing an unarmed one. The youth gangs of the last two decades of the late twentieth century differ from those in mid-century in that the drug trade provides a baseline income that can easily allow for the purchase of even high-priced modern weaponry. That, and the flood of cheap assault rifles coming in from former Soviet Union client nations, has made assault rifles such as the AK-47 available to even low-income teenagers in urban areas.
Also new, and especially seen in the United States, is the development of anonymous violence, made possible by the ubiquity of the automobile. And as is common in youth cultures throughout history, lack of self-control leads to a much faster resort to lethal violence.