A Threat to Consensus
Erwin, Robert
As i always tell my students at Johnson City University, it was not easy for educated Americans of the last century to throw off the yoke of European culture, especially that of British...
...Out of sight...
...After all, the sport of rugby was turned into the time-and-motion exercise of American football...
...One day when he actually opens an issue, he discovers what seem to him the exotic marvels of combat in print...
...By the time a callow American has figured out the rules, he concludes they can all be subsumed under one grand principle of never admitting you are wrong...
...Then, the British (and to a lesser extent the French and Germans), being what they are, had no idea what was happening...
...It will be perceived on the screen as having the magnitudeof a sizable disc...
...Now We Can Breathe Easier Dept...
...This principle is adhered to at all costs...
...A letter from the Friends of Cross Country Running, for example, automatically carries weight...
...Furthermore, American publications are not so bland as some people would have us believe...
...Strikingly enough, the inadvertent transposition of names underlines my main point...
...I myself have engaged in polemic in the Rio Grande Symbolist and Cookout Review...
...If the journalist worked for a small-town newspaper, he would copy the blurb on the dust jacket for his review...
...A reviewer whose praise of a book last time was reviled by a correspondent has this to say: I fail to see how even simple geography canbe taught to a generation, so-called, which rejects the admittedly human virtues of Mrs...
...but with a laser beam...
...Until the recent development of an alarming trend, I did not worry whether my message took effect on students immediately...
...In short, a background lesson from me, the unpleasant traits of European intellectualism, and the genuine advantages of the American way were supposed to reduce to a minimum Quotidian could be expected to grasp the 5...
...A return to those traditions is urgently needed...
...Says an author whose book was spat upon the previous issue: I can well imagine how Quigley happened tomisquote me...
...But a simple hypothetical case shows the difficulties...
...Instead of allowing arrogant and pedantic prima donnas to monopolize the letters-to-the-editor space, our publications are representative...
...Formerly this sort of thing did not happen except in the limbo below five-figure circulation...
...ArthurJones who assisted in the movement to legalize exhumation...
...Let us suppose that the journalist Tom Wolfe visits Latin America for 48 hours and writes a book...
...Working for me I had the negative features of European style...
...But to carry on before the wider public in this vein introduces disagreement, perplexity, and involvement...
...Finally, hunting for and coaxing native literary talent took time away from enjoyment of such foreign masters as Bulwer-Lytton...
...Namely, the most expertise shall be lavished on the least important matters...
...M'LUHAN ASSERTS BOOKS WILL GO ON Tells Booksellers Alphabet Is Basis of Cirilization —New York Times, June 3, 1969...
...Since the year of Marx'sbirth, 718 revolutions have occurred in the area-designate, accepting Floesmann's typology...
...A second rule can be abstracted from the British review columns...
...As i always tell my students at Johnson City University, it was not easy for educated Americans of the last century to throw off the yoke of European culture, especially that of British literature and opinion...
...Yet free themselves from cultural imperialism our forebears did...
...NOTEBOOK As drama critic or in any other position, impulses toward acerbity...
...The distinctive American framework was eventually built so well that today we take the lyrical flights of a Herman Wouk and the exacting standards of a Bosley Crowther virtually for granted...
...Seemingly a disciplined adaptation of European disputes would be feasible if we must have One World...
...After fluoride, say, has been proved effective and produced at low cost, an average individual's statement may help to prevent the children in his town from getting it...
...Therefore they can put up with interminable public exchanges in which no one is right and no one is wrong...
...We Americans can't—not without marring our superbly integrated culture...
...wi in teresting lines in his face...
...The author's reply runs in part: You and I peel down the concourse any timeand glim the scene...
...For that matter, the New York Times and the Washington Post appear to be admitting a lesser but still culturally upsetting amount of militancy to their columns...
...Thus Americans lacked the stimulus of the only relationship, other than a sale, of which they approve—a contest...
...And as long as an essentially alien system is aped, there will be discord...
...Assistant professors of xerography and even followerless persons from East Orange, New Jersey, may be found sounding off in letters to the editor, and not only in the publications named above...
...Had he written a book it would be reviewed by another journalist to defray a bar bill...
...point well bfa ore became a man th Now, however, a counter-trend, perhaps engendered by America's 25 years of foreign entanglements, has broken out...
...Ormes's poetry...
...In the first place, bindings were durable in those times, so there was little hope of father's books falling apart...
...Introtypes, though, have NOTEBOOK to go step by step like an old guy with a hernia...
...Little prescience is required to foresee the time when Woman's Day will be laden with bickering about condiments and Reader's Digest rent by unauthorized schemes for reforming death...
...I've seen hairs split...
...The boy from San one stays on the attack: Mr...
...His reviewer in Playboy, a political scientist from the RAND Corporation, lambastes him for saying that Pancho Villa conquered the Incas and that 99 per cent of Latin-American revolutions are Communistinspired (whereas, according to the State Department, the true figure is 97 per Cent): The counterproductive effect of Wolfe's datadistortion may be compared to a dot situatedon the lens of a film projector...
...Do the very young and ignorant nowadays criticize the depth of oceans...
...For instance, if a certain news magazine receives 300 letters crudely classifiable as half in favor of a truce in Vietnam and half in favor of stepping up the war, it will print one hawk letter (for bombing), one moderate letter (for shelling), and one peacenik letter (for small arms...
...Thuswise Wolfe's putatively slight quantuminflation when projected on the continent looksnot so slight insofar as it attributes the wrongcausal agent to 14.36 revolutions...
...Our publications properly recognize private organizations...
...Of course room for controversy exists in America...
...This is all right in unpopular literary, political, and technical publications, because everyone knows these exist merely on the fringe of real life in America...
...They do not cultivate the efficient spirit which penetrates to the heart of a matter, telling us, for example, how many square feet Giotto painted...
...It is partly this taking for granted a hardwon achievement which leads me to emphasize to my classes that the United States had to struggle free of European ways...
...In art and thought the true ground of the excellent is the good, or a high average level of performance, and the latter requires a supporting social framework...
...Although America is a violent country, he may never have personally witnessed such brutality as is displayed around the English book review columns—surely not in widely circulated, commonly available periodicals...
...If he worked for a big-city outfit, he would paraphrase the jacket...
...Protest the location of continents...
...We all know what lies in wait for the young American on the rise to the intelligentsia from say San Quotidian, California...
...It can be observed above all in the New York Review of Books, where ever more intricate rejoinders unfold, composed in that cocksure manner which hitherto only radical youth f iirted with...
...On the lower levels of power, where the national image will not be spoiled, some community newspapers, trade journals, and the like are quite open to sincere differences of opinion...
...The rule here seems to be maximum provocation and maximum retaliation...
...I simply tried to insure and hasten a recovery from foreign allurements that was probably going to come anyway with maturity...
...More important, I had working for me the positive features of the American style...
...Thus an essay on current foreign policy is damned for an inexact reference to the Canaanites...
...There was a time when the RAND analyst would be teaching grammar and Tom Wolfe would not go to Latin America (except Havana...
...In his incessant reviewing—almost a medical problem—he no doubt forgotwhich book he was devoting his customary quarter hour to...
...But it ought to be kept at the technical level in special media...
...Subscribers to the periodical in which these blows are traded have not read the book, and they are not going to read it...
...As long as all parties insist on their own interpretation, the question will not be settled...
...Some nations do not conceive of the world primarily as an arena of right and wrong...
...Leary's rather laborious citation of scenes, for heaven's sake, to reprove me for not notic ing that Margaret is missing from the third act because she died in the second, may ac count for the absence of the character but does not justify it...
...At some point, especially if he is poor in languages, he affects to carry the Spectator, the Economist, or some other British publication in a highly visible manner...
...And the following sort of information is liberally supplied: Although your would-be authority does notmention it, Lady Alice who planted the treeby the inn was a cousin of that Dr...
...Did Pancho Villa conquer the Incas, and was he Communist-inspired...
...0 The author wrote this article with the aid of a grant from the Friends of Cross-Country Running...
...I of course meant to write Andrew Johnson rather than Andrew Jackson, and I am grateful to Professor Lansdowne, with his impressiveknowledge of the colonies, for correcting aslip of the pen...
...Partly also I feel that older and wiser counsel must inveigh against the dangerous foreign attractions the young are increasingly exposed to...
...They only want a little information on the cheap...
...It is undesirable for readers, writers, and editors to hold one another to account over words and ideas...
Vol. 16 • September 1969 • No. 5
