MASSCULT AND MIDCULT
213
models wearing adhesive brassieres; an editorial hailing Bertrand
Russell's eightieth birthday (A GREAT MIND IS STILL
ANNOYING AND ADORNING OUR AGE) across from a
full-page photo of a matron arguing with a baseball umpire
(MOM GETS THUMB); nine color pages of Renoir paintings
followed by a picture of a roller-skating horse; a cover announc–
ing in the same size type two features: A NEW FOREIGN
POLICY, BY JOHN FOSTER DULLES and KERIMA:
HER MARATHON KISS IS A MOVIE SENSATION!
Somehow these scramblings together seem to work
all
one way,
degrading the serious rather than elevating the frivolous. De–
fenders of our Masscult society like Professor Edward Shils of
the University of Chicago--he
is,
of course, a sociologist-see
phenomena like
Life
as inspiriting attempts at popular education
-just think, nine pages of Renoirs! But that roller-skating horse
comes along, and the final impression is that both Renoir and
the horse were talented.
IV
The historical reasons for the rise of Masscult are well–
known. There could obviously be no mass culture until there
were masses, in our modern sense. The industrial revolution
produced the masses. It uprooted people from their agrarian
communities and packed them into factory cities. It produced
goods in such unprecedented abundance that the population of
the Western world has increased more in the last two centuries
4 The advertisements provide even more scope for the editors' homo–
genizing talents, as when a full-page photo of a ragged Bolivian peon
grinningly drunk on coca leaves (which Mr. Luce's conscientious reporters
tell us he chews to narcotize his chronic hunger pains) appears opposite
an ad of a pretty, smiling, welldressed American mother with her two
pretty-smiling-welldressed children (a boy and a girl, of course--children
are always homogenized in our ads) looking raptly at a clown on a TV
set, the whole captioned in type big enough to announce the Second
Coming: RCA VICTOR BRINGS YOU A NEW KIND OF TELE–
VISION-SUPER SETS WITH "PICTURE POWER." The peon would
doubtless find the juxtaposition piquant
if
he could afford a copy of
Life,
which, luckily for the Good Neighbor Policy, he cannot.
