Dear Editor
DEAR EDITOR FARBER ON LUBALIN? As a reader of your excellent magazine for some years, I have recently been intrigued by the juxtaposition ot Manny Farber's prose and Herb Lubalin's design. What...
...One suspects that profound, and unconscious, feelings of guilt and the need to sacrifice and suffer are major factors in our rush to the "flaming pyre...
...They may be hard to find, but in a world where McCall's and Ben Shatm increasingly see eye to eye they are worth noting...
...He more or less implies that Khrushchev's promise that the foundations of full Communism would be begun by 1981 represented no change from Stalin's last promise that it would be attained in "three Five-Year Plans...
...I cannot accept the "miracles" of Lourdes, but this hardly makes me a partisan of disease and suffering...
...Toronto Robert Fulford SHELTERS AND VOODOO There are two comments I would like to make about J. David Singer's letter ("Dear Editor," NL, November 27) concerning my article, "Do-it-Yourself Survival" (NL, October 30...
...I was not aware, however, that Voodoo is now providing us with insights on the conduct of foreign affairs...
...I was examining the response of the American community to peril on the basic level of values, not on the superficial level of mechanisms...
...In fact, the attainment of full Communism, like the Second Coming in the early years of Christianity, is steadily receding into the distant future...
...Perhaps something like this: Typography Underground By M#nny F#rb#r Though the sanitary engineers of new-type ad-art draw the prizes at the best annual festivals of kitsch, there is an underground of design which insists on rejecting unsubtle sophistication in favor of a muscular directness which is in the end probably more truthful than any Lubalin-esque glibness can ever be...
...The underground designers who work these unfashionable alleys (most of them have never even seen an Art Directors' show) have all the edginess of a Daily News feature story, a Howard Hawks automobile chase or an early Nat Hentoff record review...
...Would society afterwards be closer to a realization of the brotherhood of man...
...The kids on Yugens and Kultur may think it bright to use flappy binding, type that looks like typewriting and obscure drawings, but most of these things were pioneered in the early Terry and the Pirates, the later Captain WhizBang and the titles for some of the bestperiod Bowery Boys movies...
...Second, Singer suggests that because I argued "that if fire insurance doesn't add to the likelihood of fire, then shelters-as-insurance don't increase the likelihood of war " I am therefore "ignorant of the social process known as the 'self-fulfilling prophecy.' " I first became aware of "the social process known as the 'self-fulfilling prophecy' " when I studied Voodoo in anthropology 20 years ago: People apparently died of psychic disorder occasioned by an enemy's sticking needles in a waxen image...
...Would Americans, and the rest of the world, have a more sensitive appreciation of moral values...
...Every attempt at definition I have seen rests firmly on retrospective omniscience...
...The life and death question is now whether the mad drive toward self-destruction can be halted long enough for the weak voice to persist...
...There has been a steady trend, represented by Stalin's last prophecy of 15 years and Khrushchev's 20 "years, for the leaders of Communism to put the apotheosis of their doctrine farther and farther into the future...
...Taking into consideration all such statements from the 1917 revolution to the present, we are in a position to follow our Communist colleagues and propound a Great Historic Law...
...Like that long-ago Burr, with his face like a championship potato, these designers project a raw, nervy masculinity that will never catch on with the fashion-mongers uptown...
...This chokes off even the possibility of that nervous, fanged intensity which 'turns up in Confidential, Our Sunday Visitor, I. F. Stone's Newsletter and the early Swank...
...That most of us will not listen to them, nor act on them is surely a psychological problem of appalling proportions...
...To talk of "morality" and "community" in connection with the planned extermination of millions of human beings exactly like ourselves in their capacities for good and evil, indicates the incredible degree of collective madness that engulfs us...
...Their stabbing pulpy reality fights a losing battle among the slickly limp new weeklies and monthlies, but it retains, anyway, the hard freshness of Stash Clemens or even the bulky versatility of the pre-TV Raymond Burr...
...e.g., the assignment of gas masks to American troops in World War II was not a "self-fulfilling" prophecy, nor was our research in biological warfare, because the enemy refused to cooperate with the prophets...
...Seattle Mary Farquharson 'FULL COMMUNISM' Richard Conquest's recent article ("Khrushchev's 'Conservative' Opposition, NL, November 27) is his usual brilliant job, but in one instance he is not as penetrating as he might be...
...First, Singer maintains I helped "perpetuate the illusion of a profound moral difference between individual and community fall-out shelters...
...What would happen if Färber decided to discuss Lubalin...
...One might expect that, as Communist control of Russia grows older, the time for achieving full Communism would come closer and closer, but the human mind does not work that way...
...Waltham, Mass...
...Freud said that the rational side of man is weak but persistent...
...The new Big Design has all but swamped the newsstands with its ready-made cliches— the thick black lines (a morbid camping reference to small-town newspaper obits...
...These and other scraps from Madison Avenue's army of imitation Mondrians have captured the surface of everything from the Satevepost to the New Leader, not exempting even the grandmotherly New Republic, which (typically) got there first with the least...
...The tendency now is to suck away the magazine's crackling vitality, rarify the page, lift it out of the muck of the streets and into an eerie half-world of un-design, where white space equals profundity and jagged, nerve-attacking changes of pace equal liveliness...
...the severely cropped photo, printed so huge the subject becomes a monster...
...The men who turn out True Confessions (with its rough-edged cuts, its old-fashioned bleed pages, its dyed-in-theMcFadden typography), reflect the harshness of the streets better in one issue than the new-style but shrewdly respectable Redbook can do in a bound volume...
...But the persuasively jazzy Susskinds of the drafting board have obscured the anonymous art directors who persistently carve out tiny areas of back-street truth...
...Unless those addicted to the phrase are willing to distinguish for me between a "selffulfilling" prophecy and a non-self-fulfilling non-prophecy on an anaytical basis, I shall continue to include it in the Cabala of political sociology...
...No one can disagree with the cri de coeur in Singer's last paragraph ("The real issue is not whether we burn or choke together or alone, but whether we must accept that obscene fate at all"), but I do object to being castigated for recognizing an obvious peril and not taking refuge in a secular version of faith healing...
...Note, however, that this law is only approximate...
...They may not be "smart and impressive," as a recent kiss-of-death note from a dean of religion says about Lubalin's New Leader ("Dear Editor," NL, October 16), but in their smeary concreteness they reflect the streets and the people around them rather than the glumly introverted self-images of what passes for intellectuals on Madison Avenue...
...the graceful serif type, given the old switcheroo by being run persistently in bold-face...
...Suppose that by some miracle in a thermonuclear war we could save nearly all Americans but could "burn and choke" to death most Russians and Chinese—or even just their leaders...
...Beside these grimy unstatic rockets, the recent Encounter (with its pastel gentility), the new New Leader, the deadly elegant Commentary cover, and even the gasped-over foodpages in McCall's all lie dead on the table, tombstones for the new sophistication...
...Thus, during the 1967 celebration of the 50th anniversary of the revolution, we may expect an announcement of the impending arrival of full Communism in 1992...
...Columbia, S. C. Gordon Tullock...
...Apparently, he did not read my article with any conceptual literacy: At no point did I endorse "community shelters...
...John P. Roche J. David Singer's remarks in his letter, "Shelters and Survival," ought to be shouted from the housetops—if only we would stop exploding bombs long enough to hear them...
...If it were exact, the Communist today would be talking of the arrival of his Utopia not in 1981 but in 1984...
...At any given time, the Communists will expect the coming of full Communism at a time which is approximately half as distant in the future as the 1917 revolution is distant in the past...
...the words which run together in a baffling spaceless sequence which can only be seen, not read...
Vol. 44 • December 1961 • No. 39
