490
PARTISAN REVIEW
But he did offer up the next to
last paragraph to certain 'unsolved
problems,' like India. Then he
concluded: "But this is jumping
fa~
ahead of the story. For the
story is a serial, and a good serial,
and a good serial reader must learn
to contain his impatience while he
enjoys his suspense. And what
magnificent serial writers the
United Nations powers and their
leaders are." We lost politics at
about the second bounce. It's like
an easy and interesting game, you
see. And the 5,000,000 Indians
dead of famine must enjoy their
"suspense," patiently rotting in
British-dug graves, while the next
round of the game is prepared . . .
or while Max Lerner writes an–
other editorial, with his affectedly
naive style, mildly manufacturing
"sincere logic," which consists
mainly in the use of popular fig–
ures that catch on quickly; the re–
petition of a word or rhythm in
successive clauses, rocking the
reader into a nice feeling of sec–
urity; and the sweet aura of a
hopeful commonsense that will
surely carry us through.
,The opening paragraph of an
editorial by
I.
F. Stone called
"Meet John Smith" is a classic ex–
pression of a strain that permeates
the entire mentality of
PM-
ism :
"Meet John Smith. He cannot be
described as an imaginary charac–
ter, since there are 11,000,000 of
him in uniform." Alternative pseu–
donyms are Joe Doakes, G.
I.
Joe
or Josephine, etc. These have a
delightful feel of simplicity and
concreteness: Just another guy, like
anybody else. Actually, they are
just simple: by no strain of the
imagination can they be considered
concrete. They are, in fact, the
wildest, most unwarranted abstrac–
tions that a first adventurer into
theory could dream up. But notice
how Stone insists that "John
Smith" 1s
not an "imaginary
character." This whole technique
of simulating realistic thought is
part of something larger among
PM
-ers - their chummy, over–
simple attitude, with which they
seem to be saying, "We're no bet–
ter than you, we scratch under
the arm, yawn at concerts," and
so on.
P
M's attempt to bridge (or
ignore) the class contradictions of
its audience, leading as it does to
a simplistic and hazy kind of pop–
ulism, is responsible for much of
the paper's cultural vulgarity. In
neither art nor politics can folksy
journalism overcome the elements
of alienation in society. But
PM
tries all the same. Examples:
1)
the "OK, Joe?"--cheesecake they
print every week: "We just can't
get Esther Williams off our minds,
Joe. You and us both, eh ?" Just as
if they graduated from the same
whorehouse together. 2) Two ad–
jacent photographs, the first of a
handsome
Frenchwoman
who
"wears a bathing costume made
of mottled green parachute silk.
This invasion material is much
sought after in France." The other
is of a pitiful refugee family, one
of the several millions on the roads
of Europe.
In the entire American press,
probably the all-around worst
column is William McCleery's
"DEAR JOE" letter that appears
