Masscult and Midcult_ Essays Against the American Grain - Dwight MacDonald [129]
So Alfred Kazin in a most perceptive article, “The President and Other Intellectuals,” reprinted in his recent collection, Contemporaries. Let me add that it is precisely Kennedy’s ability to treat a handshaking session on the same plane as a foreign-policy decision that bothers me most about his presidential style. The decision to invade Cuba by proxy was probably taken in the same spirit; the pragmatic failure has been copiously explored by the New Frontiersmen but I have seen no expression of awareness that there was also a moral issue involved. Morality is qualitative, after all, not quantitative, that is, not factual.
[3] Fact-fetishism is to some extent a class phenomenon, most pronounced among our college graduates, the white-collar “intellectariat” of which the solid core is Time’s two million readers. As Dr. Gallup’s figures here show, the mass audience, though as good Americans they love, honor, and obey The Facts, choose entertainment over information when it comes to making use of their leisure.
[4] Luce had the idea, ten years ago, of starting a highbrow cultural magazine, but after dropping a hundred thousand or so and drawing up, via his then advisor for the arts, Mr. William S. Schlamm, a list of “candidates for possibly sustained contact” that included Mr. Blackmur as well as Auden, Eliot, Orwell and Trilling, he gave it up. Perhaps he realized the hopeless insubstantiality of the field. Or perhaps he decided to merge the unborn magazine into Sports Illustrated, which has printed articles by James T. Farrell on baseball and William Faulkner on ice hockey and by now may well be negotiating with Mr. Auden for a few observations on Pancho Gonzales’ net style.
[5] Whose “merchants of death” theme was so infectious that even Fortune caught it, producing a muckraking feature of its own, “Arms and the Men,” 9,650 of whose 10,000 words were devoted to the infamies of foreign munition-makers, leaving just 350 for the DuPonts and other native sinners.
[6] Nor did it bother Jack Lait and Lee Mortimer, two Hearst journalists who during the McCarthy Era turned out a series of sensational best sellers—New York Confidential, Chicago Confidential, U.S.A. Confidential, etc. These were fact-crammed guidebooks to the seamier side of American life which differed in two ways from the old exposés of the muckrakers: the Facts were marshaled against the underdog (Negro, radical, Jew, labor union) and—they were often not Facts.
[7] I do not mean to imply that all, or even most, of those who “took the Fifth” did so to avoid stating past or present Communist loyalties. Some sincerely believed that inquiries into political allegiances are contrary to democratic principles; more were reluctant to admit party membership in the past lest they be forced to tell on old friends or associates. One can sympathize with such motives and yet admire more the behavior of our pacifists—the heirs in this respect of Debs and Trotsky—who are willing, indeed eager to “bear witness” publicly to their dissident beliefs.
[8] Cf., the Ames experiments, at Dartmouth, in visual perception. In one of the simpler demonstrations, a playing card of usual size is placed some distance in front of one twice as big. The spectator almost always sees the more distant card as the