Hey! Squash it!
McCarthy, Abigail
11 OF SEVERAL HIHPS Abigail McCarthy HEY! SQUASH IT! AN EPIDEMIC OF SANITY? very once in a while a book first published in 1841 begins to draw attention again. It is issued once more by a...
...Yes?...Well, did you ever see the whole flight—each mite apparently preserving its distance from all others—suddenly move, say three feet, to one side or the other...
...I certainly would not call this a form of madness, having just purchased two pairs myself—nor, at least as of this writing, a 'great human mass movement.' But all of a sudden there they all are—on roller skates...
...But there are others...
...Actors and actresses are lighting cigarettes for each other (often accompanying the act with long and meaningful looks), gesturing with them, and snuffing them out with finality to mark the end of conversations...
...This version has, however, footnotes dated 1992...
...He found, for example, that "time out" was simply not anything they would say but "squash it" was...
...He has tested his ideas and his slogan on focus groups of Boston inner-city young people...
...Winsten realizes that the problem of violence is much wider in scope...
...Says Tobias...
...for each of us there has to be that first time we learn of this book, that first reading of it...
...A breeze...
...Great human mass movements are slower of inception but much more effective...
...With the passing of the Brady Bill in Congress in the waning days of last year's session, the nation may have finally acknowledged the connection between the possession of guns and widely spread violence...
...It was he who made drunk-driving prevention possible with his designated-dri ver program launched on Martha's Vineyard in 1990...
...Today, when smokers are virtually ostracized as menaces to the general health, that incessant smoking on the screen seems archaic and almost incredible...
...He's the first guy to do what he did—use the media to get across a worthwhile message...
...That is probably the most visible of "good" reversals...
...His understanding of the press and of the media made the phrase "designated driver," dropped into so many network entertainment programs, part of the popular culture...
...Tobias goes on a bit later, Baruch quotes Schiller: "Anyone taken as an individual is tolerably sensible and reasonable—as a member of a crowd, he at once becomes a blockhead...
...But he included also those like "the Witch Mania" and its "terrific progress in Germany...
...But is there any reason why a moral epidemic—this concerted movement of midges—couldn't be a "good" epidemic, or a "good" movement...
...What we learned from our friends on Madison Avenue is if you want to work effectively through the mass media you need a very simple message....I'm hoping we can work with network television, that we can work with cable television, that we can work with rap groups, that we can work with sports stars...
...It is issued once more by a new publisher with a newer, more up-to-date foreward...
...There is in our immediate past a dramatic example of a "good" moral epidemic: Anyone who watches late-night old movies is constantly reminded that only twenty years ago cigarette smoking was seen as a sophisticated and expressive habit...
...Charles Mackay's original book was largely about mass movements that had to do with money mania...
...To my mind a campaign being engineered by the director of the Center for Health Communication and associate dean at Harvard's School of Public Health, Jay Winsten, holds the most promise of seeding a widespread change of behavior for people living in our violent world...
...He left no creative person unturned," Edwards quotes producer Grant Tinker...
...A healthy reversal may be in the making— a more positive one than the current call for toughness on crime...
...They listen to a lot of rap music and they say that they are glued to sports, so if you can get messages on sports programming you're reaching these kids, especially if you involve sports celebrities in a very powerful way...
...These kids, a lot of them, these inner-city kids, they watch all the black shows especially on Fox, 'Martin,' 'In Living Color,' etc...
...But getting it on television "validates it for the kids," say Winsten...
...But try to recall— did you ever see them move directly back again in the same unison...
...I said a quiet day...
...They see it then not as part of a health class but reflected in mainstream culture...
...There are lynch mobs and there are crusades...
...Winsten has a precedent for success in changing minds...
...Have you ever seen," Baruch quoted an unnamed contemporary, in some wood, on a sunny quiet day, a cloud of flying midges—thousands of them—hovering, apparently motionless, in a sunbeam...
...That book, given to me recently, is Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds by Charles Mackay...
...There is for each first reader, he says, the compulsion to recommend it...
...He calls in the "squash it" campaign...
...D 12...
...A 1992 footnote notes that it is now roller blades.] As we begin the New Year I think we can be heartened by certain movements and reversals in popular thought that are sound and should fill us with hope for humanity in the immediate future...
...They included John Law's Mississippi Scheme, the South Sea Bubble originated by Lord Harley of Oxford, and the wild and wonderful "Tulipomania" of seventeenth-century Holland...
...there are runs on banks and there are fires where, if only people hadn't panicked, they would have escaped with their lives....And there was the mass suicide at Jonestown...
...Certainly Tobias in his preface suggests, perhaps inadvertently, that it could at least be neutral and not necessarily delusionary: Suddenly, as I write this, everyone in New York and California, with the rest of the country perhaps to follow, is on roller skates...
...Well, what made them do that...
...Well, what made them do that...
...The girls seem to watch 'Melrose Place.' They watch 'Fresh Prince' on NBC...
...His campaign will include the teaching of conflict resolution to the whole community by means of forums for leaders in business and communications and curricula for the schools...
...If a little thing like a tulip bulb could drive a country mad, can not a small slogan like "squash it" drive a country sane...
...The version I have is that of 1980 with a foreword by Andrew Tobias...
...The slogan means "that it is cool to walk away from a confrontation—that differences can be resolved without violence" (Ellen Edwards in the Washington Post, December 8, 1993...
...His purpose was a general one: The object of the author in the following pages has been to collect the most remarkable instances of those moral epidemics which have been excited, sometimes by one cause and sometimes by another, and to show how easily the masses have been led astray, and how imitative and gregarious men are, even in their infatuations and crimes...
...And President Bill Clinton's rather muted appeal in California to his friends and supporters in the media made the connection between the subjects of film and TV and teen-age violence and moral chaos...
...He points out that financier E Bernard Baruch did just that in his foreward to the 1932 edition...
Vol. 121 • January 1994 • No. 1
