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DWIGHT MACDONALD
like bees and ants." So Roger Fry wrote years ago and who will
say that we have become less apian?
III
Like the early capitalism Marx and Engels described in
The Communist Manifesto,
Masscult is a dynamic, revolution–
ary force, breaking down the old barriers of class, tradition, and
taste, dissolving all cultural distinctions. It mixes, scrambles
everything together, producing what might be called homo–
genized culture, after another American achievement, the homo–
genization process that distributes the globules of cream evenly
throughout the milk instead of allowing them to float separately
on top. The interesting difference is that whereas the cream is
still in the homogenized milk, somehow is disappears from homo–
genized culture. For the process destroys
all
values, since value–
judgments require discrimination, an ugly word in liberal–
democratic America. Masscult is very, very democratic; it
refuses to discriminate against or between anything or anybody.
All is grist to its mill .and all comes out finely ground indeed.
s
Life
is a typical homogenized magazine, appearing on the
mahogany library tables of the rich, the glass cocktail tables of
the middleclass, and the oilcloth kitchen tables of the poor. Its
contents are as thoroughly homogenized
.as
its circulation. The
same issue will present a serious exposition of atomic energy fol–
lowed by a disquisition on Rita Hayworth's love life; photos of
starving children picking garbage in Calcutta and of sleek
3 "I know thy works, that thou are neither cold nor hot. I would
thou were cold or hot.
"So then because thou art lukewarm . . . I will spew thee out of my
mouth.
"Because thou sayest I am rich and increased with goods and have need
of nothing ; and knowest not that thou art wretched and miserable and
poor and blind and naked,
"I counsel thee to buy of me gold tried in the fire, that thou mayest
be rich; and white raiment, that thou mayest be clothed and that the
shame of thy nakedness do not appear; and anoint thy eyes with eye-salve,
that thou mayest see."
-Revelations, III, 15-18.
