The Mirror in the Image
ROSS, RALPH
The Mirror in the Image THE IMAGE: OR WHAT HAPPENED TO THE AMERICAN DREAM By Daniel Boorstin Atheneum. 315 pp. $5.00. Reviewed by RALPH ROSS Professor of Humanities, University of...
...But Boorstin never mentions the context...
...Boorstin finds even ordinary sensations blurred today...
...He sees the old line between knowledge and ignorance dissolving as one "knows" pseudoevents manufactured on demand...
...Wealth and leisure, Boorstin writes, have fertilized a civilization in which the cheapest romanticism flowers riotously...
...In the course of a generation, we have changed from a time when motion pictures showed Paul Muni as Emile Zola and Raymond Massey as Abraham Lincoln to a time when the movie is about (if not Muni or Massey) Al Jolson, Lillian Roth or Sammy Davis Jr...
...Reporters have ceased to be what Macaulay called them, "a fourth estate of the realm," and have become the tribunes of the people, needling Presidents, manufacturing pseudo-events, representing the nation to its representatives...
...we act as though everything were possible...
...We see our images in the mirror, and the mirror itself in our images...
...I have read several letters to the editor recently supporting Ronald Reagan for President...
...The extravagant demands of our day are made in the shadow of the sword, with the combined desperation and timidity of pedestrians faced by a galloping technology, betraying the helplessness of a people who cannot control their destinies through the political machinery they, or their ancestors, created for that purpose...
...Daniel Boorstin maintains that we are not victims of the symbolmanipulators, the ad men, the power elite...
...With the passing of the hero, according to Boorstin, we get the celebrity, dressed by the publicity man, assured of his admirers...
...Boorstin's argument is impressive, amusing and more than half right...
...What is otherwise an amusing, witty and perceptive book is smudged here and there by the soot of the scholar's lamp...
...In fine democratic fashion, the Celebrity Register (1959) listed the people with weighty press clippings in simple alphabetical order: Mortimer Adler and Polly Adler, the Dalai Lama and Dagmar (a TV "personality"), Mr...
...This is the world of the self-justifying prophecy...
...As a professional scholar, Boorstin also succumbs occasionally to scholarly pretension...
...It may lose a healthy sense of the real possibilities and limitations of human life...
...And to make our expectations come true, we live in a world of contrivance, substituting the image for the thing, the picture for the baby, the news for the event...
...In this confusion, it is hardly astonishing to read in a newspaper of March 24, 1962, that the President of the United States, after addressing 88,000 people in the stadium of the University of California at Berkeley, went on to visit Dwight Eisenhower on a golf course in Palm Springs and while there stayed at the home of Harry Lillis (Bing) Crosby...
...and try to know about people who are celebrities, that is, who are known...
...He writes as though he is inaugurating the now popular study of "mass culture," and as though his neat phrase, "the Age of Contrivance," stands for a historical phenomenon he has revealed, as Jacob Burckhardt revealed, or invented, the Renaissance...
...And if there is little happening, much can be made to happen: When sound trucks and newsmen rush to a scene of modest tension, they precipitate a riot...
...The small, grey man in front of me turned to look and I saw him clearly: Unrecognized and queuing up for tickets with the rest of us was Albert Einstein...
...One actor plays the part of another actor, one mimic mimes another mimic, and Jack Paar's celebrities are Richard Nixon one night and a night club comedian the next...
...A movie queen, one Nancy Carroll, then featured in the stage show at the Paramount, had entered the street...
...But those spots may themselves simply be additional examples of the blurred distinctions and hazy perspectives Daniel Boorstin finds in so much of contemporary America...
...Only that which is publicized seems important...
...We chase our tails as we try to read what is on the best-seller list, that is, what is read...
...every house is too hot in winter and air conditioning breeds pneumonia in summer...
...Reviewed by RALPH ROSS Professor of Humanities, University of Minnesota...
...The hucksters and hidden persuaders are only our accomplices in an orgy of self-delusion and a headlong flight from reality...
...A literate but uneducated populace with leisure and money ministers to its own mind with manipulated sensations and follies...
...The journalists show they "knew" there would be trouble at the spot where they brought it about...
...We are victims, to be sure, but we are also assassins and we victimize ourselves...
...co-author, "The Fabric of Society" This is an answer to Vance Packard and C. Wright Mills, although neither writer is mentioned...
...I still remember waiting in line at a ticket booth in Times Square some years ago when a near riot exploded across the street...
...John (a hat designer) and Pope John XXIII, Bertrand Russell and Jane Russell...
...As historical and psychological study blanket the flame of hero worship, the Founding Fathers become spokesmen of property interests, Andrew Jackson an expression of the frontier, and great deeds a consequence of unhappy childhoods...
...I recall the lobby of the Beverly Hills Hotel on a hot day, when the air conditioning was turned very high to justify a majestic log fire...
Vol. 45 • May 1962 • No. 10
