Masscult and Midcult_ Essays Against the American Grain - Dwight MacDonald [149]
In the next Saturday Review another long editorial, signed “John J. Veronis,” excretes some even less penetrable clouds of printer’s ink: “Norman Cousins is an extraordinary man. [The last adjective that I’d have thought of; his career seems to me an exploitation of the opposite quality.] He is part editor, part world citizen...lecturer, author, humanitarian, president of World Federalists. [So they’re still around!]...We have developed respect, admiration, and an abiding affection for this unique person....Norman Cousins and his staff have edited what many consider to be America’s foremost thought weekly...in the forefront of man’s continuing struggle to build a just and secure peace, to strengthen the United Nations, to defend civil liberties and organize a more compassionate society...improve the environment [etc., etc.].”
But it seems that—Veronis edges into the point—John and Nick had taken over with some “objectives” in mind, not being in business for their health. “These objectives entail development of circulation, promotion, advertising, finance...and ancillary activities [ah!] as well as the editorial product itself [ah, squared!]....Norman Cousins...understandably was most interested in them. As might be expected, he understood and embraced a good part of what we were doing. On the other hand, he also seemed a bit uncomfortable with a few new developments.” As the headmaster, another evasive type, would put it: “Norman has had a little difficulty adjusting but he has made many friends and we hope he will come back to see us soon.” Again, no vulgar specifics. Just a few crocodile sympathies.
What the new masters of S.R. will do with its barnacled hulk, beyond adding fresher barnacles, I can’t predict; I haven’t seen any of those quadruple amoebic spin-offs, there being a limit to my appetite for midcult. But it’s a bad omen that President Veronis of “Saturday Review Industries,” in puffing his colleague, the new Czar Of All The S.R.’s, Nicolas H. Charney (“an uncommonly gifted thirty-year-old...son of...Jule Charney, the noted meteorologist now at M.I.T.”), mentions among their achievements as “equal partners” the “launching” of Communications Research Machines, Inc., which in turn launched Psychology Today and Intellectual Digest.
I’ve missed the former but its ads are as aggressively vulgar as those of Time-Life Books. I did catch one issue of the latter, though, because it had digested an article of mine. Next time I’ll forgo their $100, since it’s not an ambience I feel comfortable in: cramped format tarted up with mini-pictures and the editors’ hard-sell come-ons above each truncated article. Hurry! Hurry! Hurry! The spiel for mine was: “A SOCIAL CRITIC EXPLORES THE 38-YEAR HISTORY OF DOROTHY DAY’S CATHOLIC WORKER AND THE PARADOX OF ITS TRADITIONAL THEOLOGY AND RADICAL POLITICS.” Fair enough, in fact quite ingenious—and accurate. But why not let me make the points—and the reader discover them, or not, all by himself? Why do midcult editors do all our work? Same reason the old Hollywood “mood music” told the suckers just what they were feeling at any given moment.
Three months after the minuets I’ve described were danced in the Saturday Review, there appeared in The New York Times of March 19, 1972, a full-page ad (repeated a week later), signed by Norman Cousins and headed: “AN OPEN LETTER TO THE READERS OF THE NEW YORK TIMES.” The text says: “...My colleagues and I have decided to launch a new magazine....It will be called World