AIMEZ-VOUS AMERICA?
THE IMAGE, OR WHAT HAPPENED TO THE AMERICAN DREAM.
By Doniel
J .
Boorstin. Atheneum. $5.
THE AMERICAN ESTABLISHMENT AND OTHE:R REPORTS, OPINIONS
AND SPECULATIONS. By Richord H. Rover&, Horcourt, Broce ond
World. $4.95.
Nine years ago Daniel
J.
Boorstin, the distinguished American
historian, wrote a book entitled
The Genius of American Politics,
in
which he congratulated America on "the marvelous success and vitality
of [her] institutions." He entitled his concluding chapter: "Our Cultural
Hypochondria and How to Cure It." The
Z eitgeist
moves fast. In his
new book Boorstin succumbs to the very hypochondria he proposed to
cure. He has moved from the American Celebration to the American
Nausea
in
nine short years.
This is a biting and incisive indictment of contemporary American
culture. Mr. Boorstin holds that Americans have become so immersed
in a world of manufactured "pseudo-events" that they have lost touch
with the world they live in. Earlier commentators have already remarked
upon the elaborate industry with which Americans shield themselves
from the realities of death; Boorstin suggests that life has become as
painful to us as death so that we have now blanketed it, too, with a
make-believe world of our own construction, going through more and
more complicated motions jn order not to know ourselves.
In contemporary America, the reproduction of an event has be–
come more "real" than the event itself. Boorstin reports a conversation
between the mother of a young baby and an admiring friend: "My,
that's a beautiful baby you have there." "Oh, that's nothing-you
should see the photograph!" Whenever, he argues, a pseudo-event
competes for attention with a spontaneous event, the pseudo-event will
prevail. What happens on television will over-shadow what happens
off television. Pseudo-events are more dramatic, more vivid, more
intelligible and more reassuring than real events. They are more
sociable, more "conversable" and easier to witness. And they pre–
dominate in consciousness simply because there are so many of them.
Hence, by a new Gresham's law, the spurious and counterfeit drive
the genuine out of circulation. Events that are planted primarily for
the purpose of being reported or reproduced win out over events
which occur spontaneously; the staged visit of a Pakistani camel driver
with Vice-President Johnson, one recalls, got more attention than the
plight of all the millions of Pakistani peasants combined.
