Melvin E. Matthews Jr.

Melvin E. Matthews Jr. is a freelance writer who has been studying American cultural trends of the 1950s for forty years. The eerie fact is that a complacent population was addictively drawn to fantasies and improbable scenarios on the screen – with the “willing suspension of disbelief” – while just such implausible stories in the news were swallowed just the same, without batting an eye or raising one question. Is there a circular cause-and-effect cycle here, so that the gullible become more and more accustomed to believing whatever they are told?