Masscult and Midcult_ Essays Against the American Grain - Dwight MacDonald [153]
The first issue’s feature article is blurbed: “THE NO. 1 HEROIN SUPPLY LINE—Eyewitness report on the world’s largest source of narcotics—Who does the dealing and how.” A comedown from the editor’s lofty exordium, for the article displays no “ideas” and damned little “art”: a pedestrian muckraking job by one Santi Tara, “the pseudonym of an English-speaking expert on Southeast Asian affairs.” The expert gives us only stale revelations of the complicity of Kuomintang, Laotian, and Siamese warlord racketeers in the transit of the stuff from Asian poppy fields to American consumers. Since this is old information to readers of the Times and the newsmagazines, it isn’t clear why the expert needed a false name. What is clear is that editor Cousins had been pre-scooped by editor Manning of The Atlantic,[3] who had already printed extensive portions of the real exposé, both serious and sensational: The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia by the unpseudonymous Alfred W. McCoy. Mr. McCoy, a young ex-CIA employee, spilled a lot of awkward beans about American high-level connivance, for the better prosecution of the Vietnam “war,” with a wide variety of Southeast Asian warlords, including some in Thieu’s cabinet, who were (1) “on our side”; (2) making a buck out of the heroin traffic; and (3) had connected (1) and (2) so as to blackmail our anticommunist crusaders.
Whether from diplomatic tact or simple ignorance, “Santi Tara” omits the whole American involvement and our Saigon compradores’ part in the racket as well. But one shouldn’t underestimate either simple ignorance or diplomatic tact in Norman Cousins, as an editor or writer. Except in rhetorical posture, he’s always been decently respectful of the powers that be, or as we say now, the Establishment: when SANE’s executive committee extruded Dr. Benjamin Spock as a too-fiery particle, Cousins was an active fire-fighter. And he is extensively, I sometimes think a mite deliberately, uninformed on awkward questions, Establishment-wise. In any case, he has been able to infect the contributors to World with this mini-meaching style of thought, as he did on Saturday Review; with exceptions, of course; he’s only human like the rest of us, as he would be the first to admit. To describe it as a melding of Uriah Heep’s humility and Mr. Pecksniff’s pomposity is the kind of simplistic insult our alienated young radicals would have hurled at him had they ever gone to the library, and I reject it as what they would call “overexaggerated.” Slightly.
But it’s ammunition wasted to criticize World as if it were a journalistic effort like The Atlantic or The New Yorker or Newsweek or The New York Review of Books or The Columbia Forum. It’s both more and less, and criticizing it by the usual standards is both easy and beside the point, like shooting fish in a barrel.[4] Since that’s the only kind of criticism I know, however, I must continue that way, with a feeling which must often afflict anthropologists: that making judgments on tribal mores is useless to the tribe. But then, I’m not writing for the tribe but for the readers of this magazine—so en avant!
Cousins is, in World, as he was for thirty years in Saturday Review, after something above, or beneath, criticism—the creation and maintenance of a middlebrow, midcult “family”: a moral-cultural ambience so self-contained and cohesive that it is as impervious to “outside troublemakers” as a real family is. He is after what Lyndon Johnson called “a consensus.” In this endeavor, Cousins has been even more successful than the late Father Divine, whose own “family” never came near the 600,000 readers of the old Cousinsville Saturday Review, nor even the 150,000-plus faithful who so far have rallied to his World. I am amazed that the latter figure isn’t higher, considering it’s the same old formula. But they’ll come, they’ll come, like flies to this honeypot of banality and deep-stuff Uncle Norman has been serving up in his first