1M
PARTISAN REVIEW
no choice but to convert knockabout satire into a fairy story. "For
the first 14 years [of the strip] I reveled in the freedom to laugh
at
America. But now America has changed. The humorist feels the
change more, perhaps, than anyone. Now there are things about
America we can't kid."
And the range of outlets has narrowed drastically too. The cost
of entry into the magazine field is almost prohibitive today. For a
generation freedom of expression in America has survived in part
because one group in the country controlled the government and
another group controlled the mass media. Now the same group
controls both, and we are confronted with the possibility of a com–
munications monopoly unprecedented in our history. The effect of
this potential monopoly will be grave enough in the political field,
where the Democratic party and the liberals
will
be badly handi–
capped in their attempts to combat the right-wing Republican effort
to smear the Democratic party as incurably devoted to disloyalty
and treason; but its effect there may well be less grave than its effect
on the general level of culture. The mass communications, as Gilbert
Seldes
has
pointed out, are dominated by the concept of the "great
audience." By concentrating on the lowest common denominator,
they may in time create the very uniform unleavened mass which
is already the postulate of their activities.
The intellectual in 1953 thus faces an incalculable but depress–
ing combination of factors. He is dismissed as an "egghead," governed
by a party which has little use for him and little understanding of
what he is about. He is the natural and obvious scapegoat for the
country's new rulers; he caused the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor,
lost China, invented the graduated income tax and piled up the
national debt; anti-intellectualism has long been the anti-Semitism
of the businessman. Escape into satire only worsens the intellectual's
position in the United States. Escape into foreign lands only deepens
his
predicament and his melancholy: after
all,
Jean-Paul Sartre is
both far more irritating and a far greater enemy of freedom than
Herbert Brownell. Publication, in general, will be far more difficult
than ever before; the problem of the mass media ever more pressing;
the attack on cultural diversity ever more methodical and effective.
This
is far deeper than a political problem; but, like all prob–
lems in
this
age, it has a political cast. The intellectual should take
