576
ROBERT BRUSTEIN
-the college-bred son of wealthy parents who begins his career,
perhaps, with ambitions towards the
Kenyon Review
before sett–
ling down in the "creative department" of Kenyon and Eckhardt.
Seen through the neutralizing haze of the social sciences,
in other words, he may not be an attractive figure, but he
is
hardly a threatening ogre like his Wall Street counterpart.
Rather, he seems the confused victim of the complexities of
modern life, and it is in this role that he first comes to public
attention in dozens of best-selling works of popular and high
sociology. Through these, it has been revealed how intensely
he depends on the opinions of others, how desperately he seeks
security and a sense of belonging, how anxiously he desires a
"home" with his firm. Mountains of statistics record the inci–
dence of his weekly sexual activity, the average price of his ranch
house, the mean number of his TV sets, automobiles, and
freezers, the rate of delinquency in his child-centered suburb,
and the extent of his debts when his salary is $40,000 a year.
Tons of descriptive material identify
him
as a Status Seeker, an
Organization Man, an Exurbanite, an Expense Account Aristo–
crat, a Waist High Culturist, a citizen in the Genial Society,
and a member of The Lonely Crowd, for he has been so care–
fully analyzed that there is hardly a private corner of his life
left to be examined.
This detached exploration of his anxious personality, how–
ever, is now being accompanied by a scorching critique of
his
professional activities where he is held accountable not as a
social victim but as a cultural victimizer.
In
the press,
in
the
pulpit, in publishing, and on political platforms, the Madison
Avenue villain is frequently identified, at least in his
function,
as the Machiavelli of modern life. Since his Machiavellian
activities have been so well rehearsed over the past few years,
they require little elaboration here. I shall only suggest the bare
outlines of the mystique which the mere phrase
Madison Avenue
is now sufficient to invoke: the manipulation of consumer
and
voter opinion by commercial repetition; the ·false, misleading,
