THE MADISON AVENUE VILLAIN
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these rewards by thwarting and stunting his true potential. In
helping to undennine culture, he has actually undermined his
own spontaneity and creative life.
What can we do in the face of these conditions which now
seem so fixed and irremediable? Here one runs the risk of sound–
ing
visionary, or, what is worse, impudent and hortatory, for we
are so far from solutions that even a beginning requires a tre–
mendous effort of the moral will.
As
an immediate objective, one
might work toward restoring the failing values of the intellectual
community-honor, dignity, integrity-by returning to the tra–
ditional intellectual postures of idealism and dissent.
If
this
means the isolation of thought in places where thought is still
free (the academy, the little magazine, the scholarly journal, and
listeners supported FM radio), then this is still more honorable,
if
less profitable, than that "worldliness" where the intellectual
is
tempted to soften or suppress what he knows for the sake of
an expanded pocketbook; and, at least, we will no longer be
giving our sanction to the mutilation of culture. The ultimate
objective-the wresting of the organs of communication from
the persuaders and the profiteers-demands more utopian solu–
tions, for it will not be accomplished without renewed radical
debate about the complete transfonnation of society.
As
a
start, we must first partially re-adopt the Wall Street al–
legory-its insights into the motives of the villain, not its sen–
timentalization of the hero-stripping it of its melodramatic
features and introducing changes appropriate to our time and
problems: a cultural radicalism designed to preserve a pocket
of America where truth and art may still survive. I realize this
defines an attitude rather than a program, but we may have
reached the point where an honorable act of resistance is the
best we can do.
If
this seems too little, consider the alternative:
truth and art on the marketblock, everyone in a grey flannel
suit.
