THE MACHINING OF AMERICA
King, Robert L.
Nixon's interview was the most compelling performance in American politics since Jackie Kennedy walked behind the caisson and the caparisoned horse at her husband's funeral. The two dramas had...
...It may have given some of us pain, but the method did assume that everyone could be trained to be poised and reasonable...
...no one seems to learn new fields or to explore fresh ideas...
...but more and more will you hear "How're ya doin...
...Reason, though, cannot rule a person who runs on a current...
...The word file at Merriam-Webster's shows that in the last decade or so "love" has given way to "it," and as it does so, the emphasis falls on one set of senses isolated from another...
...Here was the revelation that Nixon was the one person we had always feared he was: himself, the person he had always seemed...
...This picture confronts us on TV, posters and billboards...
...history.., one of the most complete histories now" available...
...What we saw on TV that night literally reduced the scale of our feelings...
...Samora and Simon have written a straightforward, objective account of the Mexican-American role in U.S...
...We have always conceived of him as some Byzantine personality putting on a show of clumsiness, sincerity and gall...
...His flashy style and his nickname, "Dr...
...46556 RECONCILIATION AFTER VIETNAM: A Program of Relief for Vietnam-Era Draft and Military Offenders $7.95 THE POLITICS OF POPULATION CONTROL Thomas B. Littlewood $11.95 ABORTION: A New Direction for Policy Studies Edward Manier, William Liu and David Solomon, eds...
...JOHN X~TTE is Headmaster of the Loomis-Chaffee School in Windsor, Connecticut...
...Over two and a half centuries ago, Pope's friend Jonathan Swift attacked some forms of materialism in "A Discourse Concerning the Mechanical Operation of the Spirit...
...If these readings seem unfair, recall what happened when the painful medical and moral issues raised by Karen Quinlan's condition became for layman and doctor alike a question of whether to "pull the plug...
...By the time the court allowed her parents to do so, the nation had pretty much forgotten her even though the ethical complexities remained alive--as does she...
...Both made the distinction between what was fake and what was real meaningless, beside the point...
...Turn on," like "blow my mind," carries only favorable suggestions for those who use it...
...We thought this was our cynicism, our way of being in the know, of being wise to what a phony racket politics is...
...In other words, "How is your machine functioning...
...Where there should be a h e a d - - what Alexander Pope called "that noble seat of thought"--we see a blank dot, a rock-like projectile...
...Or, program yourself, discharge your data, and be done with it...
...A "student" or "scholar" has some kind of intellectual control over his material, but to "get into" an area reverses the traditional positions...
...Desire dominates the grammar of the l i n e - - " I want" gives us the subject and verb...
...The be~nner no longer 27 May 1977:340 studies psychology or history or French...
...Here for certain was more than we wanted to know...
...The thing and its function matter most, as they do in discussions of abortion and welfare reform...
...Technology, in all these examples, overwhelms the person, who is imaged as part of a larger machine...
...his fans outdo one another with stories of Erring improvising a "move" in mid-air as he confounds the mere mortals he plays against...
...we are "terminated...
...The reassuring answer is a repeated "I will...
...one more time" is the rallying cry for an age of statistics...
...In one song, for example, the speaker blatantly asks for selfish, impersonal gratification: "I want to make it with you...
...The one possibility we couldn't face was that he really felt the meretricious, God-awful emotions he professed...
...Library Journal Presents a Christian ethical position and discusses its implications for contemporary concerns such as euthanasia, suicide, medical ethics, and care of the retarded...
...NORRIS MERCHANT lectures on philosophy, mysticism and comparative religion at the Cooper Union ~nd Hofstra University, BEI~qARD Mtr~cm.Al~ is a philosophy professor at Ohio Wesleyan...
...JOHN r. SlSg teaches in the English Department at Gonzaga University in Spokane...
...THE MACmNING OF AMERICA ROBERT L. KING David BrinHey, without trying to be funny, reported on September 21st that Jimmy Carter returned to Plain.~ "to program himself for the debates...
...PAUL R. MESSBARGER is Director of the Honors Program at Loyola of Chicago...
...Ford's ignorant comment on Eastern Europe was, after all, forcefully delivered...
...As upset as Swift could get over the loss of spiritual values in his time, he could at least assume that his readers would, whether Christian Humanists or Deists or whatever, see the point of his profound joke...
...That really turns me on" is said in a tone of near awe of an experience, a drug, or, ironically, a book...
...The two dramas had a lot in common, in fact...
...COLIN L. WESTERBECK, JR...
...I feel like makin' love to you...
...People who would get angry at an open, dehumanizing attack on love can nonetheless hum these songs and buy the records, just as the everyday language of doctors, educators and other professionals implies attitudes toward human nature that they would never openly advocate...
...Our most common everyday greeting, our way of recognizing other people, is shifting to embody new attitudes...
...Both Carter and President Ford, however, were content in their debates to project themselves as robot-like figures more concerned with "image" than substance...
...The University of Notre Dame Press Notre Dame, Ind...
...Such doubt has always been our mistake where Nixon was concerned...
...Would anyone say of Lincoln that he prepared himself for Douglas by stuffing himself with information (or is it "data...
...J," stress his singularity...
...A thing, an "it," takes place independently of the lovers...
...Nixon seemed so absolutely graceless in both the physical and spiritual sense...
...he could really get it all together, man...
...you," the loved one, is the object of a preposition, not of affection...
...Lovers, after all, "do their thing" in the words of a Roberta Flack hit, a song which significantly says "to" not "with...
...j ulius Erving is the most colorful superstar of basketball, the sport without hats or helmets to obscure a player's face...
...Now, many educators do not ask their students or colleagues for ideas as part of a rational exchange--they want "input...
...With no clear irony or selfconsciousness, the editors of The Personnel and Guidance Journal ask their readers, not for letters, but for "Feedback...
...A college president recently addressed a faculty as guest speaker and said that after a Catholic college formulates a statement of its mission, "one plugs into it...
...Like these terms, many of our idioms assume that we do not think creatively...
...One husband-and-wife team, The Captain and Tennille, rose to fame and a TV series on a song with a positive title, "Love Will Keep Us Together," but the lyrics, alas, make the love object no more than an electric appliance who is asked, "When the others turn you off, who'll be turning you on...
...How easy, then, for doctors in Medicaid mills to say that they would "pingpong" patients from one needless examination to another...
...Besides knowing his audience, Swift had another advantage over our contemporaries---his parts were assembled properly...
...Computer jargon constantly and casually runs through everyday usage...
...This is why the Frost interview was a great blow to us...
...Its television ads show us individuals, to be sure, but at the conclusion a hand which looks more like a power excavator than a human thing encloses a Yshaped icon, more a sling-shot than a body...
...The word "love" itself is being supplanted by "it" in one widely used expression...
...Walk across a campus between classes or through an office in the morning and listen...
...JEAN BETHXE ELSHTAm is an associate professor of political science at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst...
...Until then, I think I'll go back to the movies, where the image is, physically anyway, larger than life...
...One more time for all the old times...
...we function as "reactors...
...we are subordinate to a self-contained device with a life of its own...
...ROBEaT L KING teaches English at the College of Our Lady o] the Elms in Chicopee, Massachusetts...
...and has to find release...
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...presumably so that he would not have to think...
...This "it" can indeed be tabulated because the expression puts love outside of meaningful human experience...
...rather than "How do you feel...
...it meant to woo or court before it became a euphemism for sex...
...Like "programmed," many of our most popular expressions show that people who proclaim concern for human values actually worship man as machine...
...the efficiency of the system counts for more than the human suffering...
...Order from your The University of bookstore or from Notre Dame Press Commonweal: $41 see the "right," but if he does not get turned on regularly or have his mind blown, he gets "uptight" (from too much winding...
...Anyone who could get to the top, no matter how loathsome he was, had to be more complex than Nixon appeared to be...
...The Blue Cross symbol fixes a stick-like figure on a wheel of torture...
...FATH~X eRUCE VAW'rER, c.M., is chairman of the Theology Department at DePaul University in Chicago...
...Luckier employees get "retooled...
...It seems that the last syllable of recorded time predicted by Macbeth is to be uttered by Nixon...
...it is a thing to do, not a part of life to share...
...Elliot Liebow, author of Tally's Corner Discusses the Jewish origin and unique traditions of the Xuetas of Mallorca and the possibility of their assimilation into the mainstream of Spanish Catholicism...
...he "gets into" it...
...Almost as pervasive as this greeting are the promotions for the United Way, an organization that can justly be proud of its services to people...
...If, after being plugged in, we no longer work well, our circuit is cut off...
...the irrational takes over, as it does in a Helen Reddy song: You can fill my nights And blow out all my fights Till I see nothing right By emotion my emotion The mechanical man does not have to I r Books That Make a Difference...
...To match the coldness of ,'it," this lyric keeps count...
...SureIy to express a mysterious emotion as a "thing" or an "it" is to debase people in the same way that machine images do...
...Yet, its lapel pin strings out three identical figures, like fossilized paper dolls...
...many people will ask "How are you...
...I f this view were promoted only by the hucksters who breed bionic men and women for television, or who create mecbaniTed societies in movies, we could laugh it off, but even those who sing to the young about love strip it of any serious emotional meaning...
...The first comprehensive overview of piecemeal attempts by government at all levels to cope with the many facets of population control...
...The most comprehensive and practical guide to citizen action available . . . . Must reading for all students of the urban way of life...
...Even though he has no mind, he makes selfish demands...
...In another song, as the couple is about to part, one of them summons up a final plea, "I think that we can make it one more time...
...My frame of mind can not be programmed 100 percent on the game as long as these matters are in question...
...27 May 1977:342...
...When a Doctor Murray Geingold was asked on the "Today" show about h~s program of "genetic counseling," he corrected the expression to "genetic engineering...
...The fictional author of the work, a scientific Modern, was too obtuse to see the ironic contradiction in his title, and he unwittingly satirized himself...
...You" and "us" are grammatically subordinate here in much the same way that people are subordinate to institutions and programs throughout our society...
...How disappointing...
...The misnamed debates dramatize how far we have come from the time when schools tried to teach a student how to think on his feet...
...0 0 0 0 0 0 000 C~CB WALTER ARNOLD has taught philosophy at Hunter College and is Editor-in-Chief of a scholarly press...
...It is only right, perhaps, that Camelot and Watergate should in the end come to the same thing...
...EmC COCHgANE teaches in the History Department at the University of Chicago...
...The Oxford English Dictionary records that "make love" had an innocent meaning for centuries...
...it is accompanied by a slogan that may intend otherwise, but its main subject and verb apply to the impersonal machine: "Thanks to you it works for all of us...
...The New School advertises a course called "The Electric Mind...
...How could we continue to have fai0t in our own system otherwise...
...Addresses major aspects of the abortion controversy in a fresh and cross-disciplinary context and proposes a new agenda for policy studies...
...The trouble with this revelation, as I said at the beginning, is that it makes life seem so small...
...The journal Child Development carries a cover which shows no concern for individual children or their development--sixty-three figures that resemble underdeveloped gingerbread men without features, all neatly punched out in the same mold...
...Despite his flamboyant play and his unquestioned success as an individual among individuals, Erring has apparently caught the disease of our time mlanguage that reduces the person to a thing...
...We were sure there must be something more than that to the man...
...Yet, when he explained why he would not report for the start of practice this year, Erving imaged himself impersonally, as a machine: "I have several unresolved business matters of uncompromising proportions to deal with...
...Nor should there be any solace for us in doubting the sincerity of Nixon's final speech to Frost...
...No further thought required or desired...
...In truth, though , it was just our way of preserving a cock-eyed optimism and keeping our own polities, as they say, "viable...
...We do not grow as we reflect...
Vol. 104 • May 1977 • No. 11
