PROFESSOR FROM PLEASANTVILLE

...Every thirty days, a hundred million superannuated space cadets get their sunshine fix from its one-syllable words telling them how somebody just like them got to be rich, famous, and healthy, hung on to his teeth, and never sorrowed, sickened, or died unremarked...

...And so the years, and then the decades, and then DeWitt Wallace passed, and my doctors, dentists, opticians, lawyers, bankers, accountants, builders, and wreckers none of them had back copies of the Digest in their waiting rooms...

...ago) shortage of nurses...

...Is this, too, a Jew...

...He has no way of knowing (1) why the U.S.S.R...

...William E. Griffith was identified as Professor of Political Science at MIT and Adjunct Professor of Diplomatic History at Tufts University's Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy...

...In his sleepless search for a still lower common denominator, DeWitt Wallace developed an inflexible formula for Digest articles, and his editors were rigorously practiced in the house routine...

...Only the U.S.S.R.'s fear that we could use tactical nuclear weapons against Soviet tanks has prevented this...

...he was the magazine's typical reader...

...I am reminded not of Goebbels and his Big Lie, but of his master, the late Hitler, who, in Vienna, for the first time saw a Chassidic Jew with his caftan and yarmulka...

...The Digest didn't digest that article...

...But by 1979 the nibble had become a bite and the Digest, having decided, to its founder's Christian distress, that its readers no longer had moral inhibitions, accepted whiskey advertising...

...As far as Professor Griffith has any way of knowing, it is a lie or, more exactly, a clumsy congeries of lies...

...And I ask myself, "Is this, too, a professor...

...The burden of Professor Griffith's lay was the usual Reagan alarum over the approach of the Redcoats: The Russians have more and bigger than we have, refuse to cut back, compel us to step up, and up yet again as they do, and are not to be trusted as far as the Free World's throw-weight will throw them...

...He excluded liquor and cigarettes—the Digest stood four-square for the total abolition of all forms of sin and never gave off denouncing the bottle and the weed (and venereal disease and automobile accidents...

...VIEWS REVIEWS PROFESSOR FROM PLEASAN7VILLE BY MILTON MAYER Of all the slaphappy swindles of the age the happiest, by far, is the Reader's Digest, Placebo Purveyor to the Gee-Whiz Trade the wide world over...

...It is too bad about professors...

...So I didn't see the magazine until recently, when my left shoulder gave 'way and I betook me to a physical therapist and he had a frayed copy of the June 1982 issue of the Digest with its classic intermingling of ecstasy and horror...

...The lead article, that month, was out of the horror file...

...while it constitutes a fallacy of the undistributed middle, I do not look for syntax in a Professor of Political Science and Adjunct Professor of History...

...DeWitt Wallace, who, with his wife, owned the outfit outright, never divulged its finances, but every second day or so the Reader's Digest Foundation, his legal tax dodge, announced a $10 million grant here, a $10 million bequest there...

...And I dismiss the third sentence because the "thus," if it is anything, is a supposedly irresistible inference from the sentence preceding...

...It is not a forgivable slip in the heat of an oral argument...

...That sentence is not a hyperbole or an exaggeration...

...Or, if somehow he was so fuddled that he thought otherwise, the nonroving inmates of the late Wallace's orderly house, the magazine's editors, can not be supposed any or all of them to have missed the barefaced confection designed to inflame the hundred million readers whom the Professor and the editors take to be slobs...

...Look at that sentence again...

...has not conquered Western Europe or undertaken to do so...

...I was then (as I am now) a free-lance hack and I mastered the rigid Digest formula and peddled a few articles to it, including a Methodist hospital's recipe for solving the then (some forty years Milton Mayer, The Progressive's Roving Editor, is also, it must be acknowledged, a Professor and an Adjunct Professor...

...This Griffith now—"this Bernard," as Dostoevsky would say—with his unabashed betrayal of logic in his unabashed betrayal of truth—I see him in his academic caftan and his tasseled yarmulka in the academic procession...

...It was a put-down of the peace movement—"Though not controlled by the small minority of Communists in it, [the disarmament movement] in Western Europe is tied to the Soviet-front World Peace Council...

...A nuclear NATO thus has been the real guarantor of peace...

...I picture him pocketing that lovely Digest money as an Adjunct Professor of Diplomatic History...

...When I got the manuscript back from Rondo it was unrecognizable...

...He sent it to the Digest, which took it and turned it over to one of its senior editors, Henry Morton (Rondo) Robinson, to make "a few minor changes...

...I once did a piece for The Nation, and when that publication rejected it I sent it to my agent, George T. (for Ten Per Cent) Bye for sanitary disposal...

...I mounted my high dudgeon and bought it back, and that was the end of a beautiful association...

...I pass over the saving "probably" in the first sentence as typical of the professorial skate who is confident that his reader will ignore the sleazy adverb in favor of the jutjawed thrust of "in a few weeks...

...was bent on conquering Western Europe, that it was deterred "only" by that fear and not by something else or something in addition...

...You will get the idea when I tell you that the Digest's founder, DeWitt Wallace, established its offices in Chappaqua, New York, but hauled the copies across the town line to mail them from the office in Pleasantville...

...Nobody ever found out, or even asked, whether the nursing shortage was solved...

...Besides bubble-bathing them in worldly bliss—his father was a parson and his mother and his wife were parsons' daughters—'Brother Wallace kept his readers on their toes with a judicious interspersing of clarion calls to rise from the bubblebath and put on the armor of the Lord (and the Devil) to preserve their oleaginous blessings against those slavering monsters on the wrong side of the Elbe who were planning to take them away...

...What was beautiful about the association was the money in it...

...There was only one publication which declined to accept the Wallace silver, on the ground that it constituted editorial corruption: The New Yorker...

...Forget the ungrammatical Professor's dangling pronoun "this," which has no referent, but which may be taken to have been intended to refer to the conquest of Western Europe...

...No matter how you slice or parse it, it is meretricious...

...Television and rising production costs began nibbling into the Digest's profits in the 1950s, and Parson Wallace, who had not taken advertising and whose pages had, from time to time, indicated that advertising was sordid, decided that money was the better part of valor and solicited ads...

...Every issue of the Digest had, and has, its spate of Warn ing: Moles at Work pieces enjoining copper-sheathed anti-communism, brassbound chauvinism, and, of course, rockribbed Republicanism of the sort that enriched Wallace beyond the dreams of avarice and created the most profitable enterprise in all publishing, second only to the Bible in distribution (163 countries, sixteen languages...

...It paid a junior hack $1,500 for a three-page article and sent him a $500 bonus at Christmas—and that was in the early 1940s...

...Since professors are hacks and hatchet men these disconsoling days, I was not astonished to read that the author of the piece, with the title of Roving Editor, was one Professor William E. Griffith, a twofisted regular on the Digest's antiCommunist tub once thumped by such notorious renegade radicals as Max Eastman and Eugene Lyons...

...Nor has he any way of knowing (3),;/ the U.S.S.R...

...Hitler says he asked himself...

...I envied, and will ever envy, Professor Griffith's Roving Editor take, or stipendium, but I had to concede that he had mastered the Digest formula, short article, short sentence, short word of despair lit, as the curtain descends, by a ray of hope as the republic rides into the sunset with the California cowboy...

...There was money in it for everybody, senior editors and junior hacks alike...

...Where twenty-six Methodist readers worked up a lather, twenty-six (or 126) million Digest readers just basked and basked...

...The nursing article was planted in an impecunious Methodist journal with a circulation of a few thousand...

...It was called Ban Whose Bomb...

...In that publication it produced twenty-six pro and con fan letters...

...Ostensibly stumbled on there by the Digest, and duly abstracted, it was published world wide in all editions and languages, and produced not one response...

...I repeat it: "Only the U.S.S.R.'s fear that we would use tactical nuclear weapons against Soviet tanks has prevented this...

...Either they were not wantons when I was very young, or I was very, very young...

...That's why I went to them...

...It assigned me to do it and planted it (as it did at least half its pieces) in another magazine from which it pretended to have taken and abstracted it...

...DeWitt Wallace kept an orderly house, and in my feckless springtime I was one of its whilom inmates...

...The Professor was full of Digest bull, and I went yawning through his limpid fustian until I came upon the following paragraph (with no modifying context): "The Red Army is so superior to NATO in conventional weaponry that it could probably conquer Western Europe in a few weeks...

...It is a wanton abomination and its author can not, by any stretch, have supposed that it was otherwise when he wrote it...

...This cozy fraud, which continues to be perpetrated, was irresistible to the host magazine, which suffered the implant in exchange for a fat fee...

...It is the second sentence that throws me for a row of ghouls...

...There is no putting a better face on the Professor than I have done here...

...I hear him lecturing the rising generation as a political scientist...

...He has no way of knowing (2) if it was bent on doing so, or (2-a) on doing so and was deterred by the fear he ascribes to it, and (2-b) no possible basis for his ascription...