Masscult and Midcult_ Essays Against the American Grain - Dwight MacDonald [154]
But I doubt it. In choosing his two big-gun regular contributors, for example, Cousins was wonderfully perceptive of his family’s kinky appetites. The anchorman in the “Peace and Politics” department is no other than U Thant, who accomplished so much for world peace in his years as head of the United Nations; and in the “Planetary Planning” department one can depend on a biweekly vaticination by Buckminster Fuller in person, assuming he exists that way. The two most eminent global bores I can think of. (Henry Wallace, Wendell Willkie, and Hendrik Willem Van Loon are with us no more.) Thant is the official, Bucky the avant-garde bore.
“There are certain advantages that go with the Observation Post on the 38th floor of the United Nations,” the former began his first column. “One of them is the opportunity to observe trends in the world without the limitations on one’s vision that are inevitable to the observer from one particular nation or region. This perspective was what enabled me to call attention several years ago to the rapidity with which major world problems were converging to create a crisis of nothing less than planetary dimensions.” Even without benefit of that thirty-eighth floor, I’ve never felt any “limitations” on my “vision,” and certainly not from my inhabiting “one particular nation or region.” Thus I can dislike our flag—a design-botch, off-center and too “busy” compared to the British, French, and Japanese; and our national anthem, hysterical and unsingable compared to the Marseillaise and the one Haydn ran up for Austria. Since U Thant has always struck me as a time-serving officeholder—a “pork-chopper,” in trade-union slang—timid and bureaucratic and a great comedown from Dag Hammarskjöld, and since a few random sentences of his prose confirmed my suspicions, I didn’t finish his “Reflections of a Mediator.”
I did read through Bucky Fuller’s first “Geoview.” (Not the least of Uncle Norman’s talents for amazing the kids in the “family” is devising interesting names for World’s departments, others being “Human Resources” and “World of Research.”) Bucky weighs in with the modest title “The World Game and How to Make It Work.” The column was only a page long, and I have a weakness for avant-garde rhetoric. I wasn’t disappointed: a heady cocktail of nostalgic ideologies—futurism, technocracy, cybernetics—with a dash of Bucky’s Angostura sweets: “...We are going to undertake an extraordinary computerized program to be known as ‘How to Make the World Work.’” Fair enough; fills a long-felt need; and the specifics are even more exciting: “Major world individuals [Norman? Solzhenitsyn? U Thant? Senator Fulbright? Susan Sontag? me?] and teams [Rand Corporation? Ford Foundation? Pittsburgh Pirates?] will be asked to play the game. The game cannot help but become major world news. As it will be played from a high balcony [no locale given; maybe Thant’s thirty-eighth floor?] overlooking a football-field-sized Dymaxion World Map with electrically illumined data transformations [sounds like the Houston Astrodome scoreboard] the game will be visibly developed and could then be live-televised the world over by a multi-Telstar relay system.”
In World’s second issue, Thant deserts “Peace and Politics” to join Bucky in “Planetary Planning,” his article being called “The U.N. and the Planetary Concept” (what else?), while Bucky’s “Geoview” takes off into the wide blue yonder with a three-page explosion of that freeform sub-Whitmanesque doggerel he has lately invented. You know it’s poetry because the right-hand margin isn’t squared off. Bucky concludes, if that is the word I want: “Einstein said, ‘What a faith in the orderliness of Universe / Must have inspired Kepler / To spend the nights of his life alone with the stars’, / Which inadvertently revealed Einstein’s own faith / And that of the billions before him / In the integrity of Universe / Which has ever inspired humans / To commit themselves in all-out love, / Hopeful thereby of increasing human understanding / Of the a priori mystery