Word: mcluhan
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Dates: during 1970-1970
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DESPITE noise, television, Marshall McLuhan, and the much publicized decline in public school reading skills, quality children's books sell and sell. Such literary prosperity owes a good deal to the fact that more than 75% of juvenile sales are made to libraries that buy carefully, and often have federal funds to help them do it. Yet much of the allure of the children's book trade is due to the continuing output of a handful of illustrious, variously gifted and apparently inexhaustible authors and illustrators...
...program obeys an iron law of show business: the greater the hit, the louder the detractions. Marshall McLuhan, in a sense the show's godfather, considers the whole thing naive. "Kids have graduated far beyond Sesame Street," he declares. "TV has already exposed them to the lethal adult world, they know about that now, and that's why they have no intention of growing up. They know that adult life brings the biggest game of all; whether it's Mannix or Mission: Impossible, it's all man hunting. TV is the cyclops, the eye of the man hunter...
...short, McLuhanesque gloom as usual; the juggernaut future is here, so let us all lie down. But as Lewis Mumford indicates in The Pentagon of Power, what McLuhan is asking for is utter human docility. "The goal is total cultural dissolutionor what McLuhan characterizes as a 'tribal communism'McLuhan's public relations euphemism for totalitarian control." Thus Sesame Street is indeed opposed to the message, if not the medium, of the Master. The show's civilized magic and surrealism seek to increase a child's sense of himself, to dilate his imagination and his capacities...
...conversation with TIME Correspondent Mary Cronin, Mrs. Cooney countered her critics: "McLuhan believes that content is irrelevant. I say, arrant nonsense. Can we doubt that if every time a commercial came on for the last 20 years and it said, 'go to church,' it wouldn't have had a profound effect?" Toward traditionalists, Mrs. Cooney is reassuring: "TV has a very important role to play in education. Still, it's just a big cold box, and just can't replace a loving teacher who cares about a child...
...suggested that the smaller nations be given "associate" membership but no General Assembly vote. Another proposal is that each nation's vote be weighted to reflect the size of its population. With its steadily growing membership, the U.N. promises to become an ever more faithful mirror of Marshall McLuhan's "global village." But unless some measure is adopted to deal with the small-nation problem, it will also become less useful as a forum for quiet, fruitful diplomacy among the powers...