A Fast Buck on Sputnik/part 3

Other imaginative American industrialists are throwing their newts and toads into this bubbling cauldron of inane and enervating agitation. A Ravenna, Ohio, firm has a balloon in the works. Walgreen Drug Stores will soon dispense a Sputnik bubble gum. But all is not right in this best of all possible worlds of play. A Chicago toy manufacturer opines that there is considerable consumer resentment of the man-made star as Russian; such consumer resentment can lead to consumer resistance.

Comments a thoughtful account executive for a Chicago ad agency: “If the United States had launched it first, the response would have over-shadowed Davy Crockett.” As a matter of fact, the manufacturers of play suits are puzzled by the sticky space-suit market; it seems cowboy get-ups, thanks to TV, move much faster. Perhaps, after all, cosmopolitan spacemen are un-American, at least compared with their horse-borne ancestors.

There are other matters for Doctor Pangloss to explain. International Business Machines, which had contracted to sponsor a live TV pickup of this country’s satellite launching, has reneged. It doesn’t take an electronic brain to see how awkward it would be to hitch a corporate wagon to a second-rate star. And Andrew L. Stone glumly junked plans for The Guided Missiles, a documentary to be made at White Sands, N.M., into which he had put months of preparation.

Stone was bitter about the Navy’s getting the satellite program when the Army was so much more advanced. “While in the Pentagon,” Stone harrumphed, “I told the top boys there, that if we didn’t hurry with our missile program, the Russians would beat us. To which they replied . . . ‘We’re not in a satellite race with any country.’’’ When, in The Nation technical consultations with the Army, he found that a crash program could have launched a satellite with in a ninety-day period at a cost of around $1,500,000.

No wonder the gimmick-happy American producer is grateful to the Russian-financed Sputnik; it saves him money. Even the brilliantly executed news coverage of Sputnik reveals the enormous anti-intellectual potential built into our way of life. The aim of the mass media is to get there the firstest with the leastest. Scoop replaces scope. When a system of information careens from one spectacular tragedy to another tragic spectacle, it is in an increasingly difficult position to attract attention; readers and viewers have to be shaken out of a media-induced daze for something really important.

Specifically, Queen Elizabeth provided us with a royally meaningless transition from the national black eye of Little Rock to Sputnik’s international challenge to our technological leadership.

As sober and responsible a magazine as Newsweek succumbed to the hysteria by launching almost overnight a new department, “Space and the Atom,” proudly billed as “the first in any magazine.” “Like it or not,” the publisher pontificated, ‘The fate of every one of us is inextricably bound up with the development of space travel and atomic energy. . . .You will find this new department invaluable in stimulating your thinking about the significance of our atomic future and man’s exciting step-by-step venture into outer space.”

The force of Sputnik’s shock to even the intelligent American is visible in these purple passages emerging from Newsweek’s usual gray columns. But surely the magazine’s intellectual function is to anticipate soberly, but not to panic into a new department that feeds the very hysteria it claims to dispel. Space and the atom and technology and science have been that important for ten years, but each week a publisher must look for new ways to build circulation in a culture screaming with hucksters’ calls.

It is all right for journalists to be constantly racing press deadlines, but when they begin to share their professional headaches with their readers, they give the nation a continuous case of ideological jitters. To use the phrase of that musical master of useless agitation, this kind of informational diet leaves us “All Shook U.” And it is a sorrow to report that the dean of the nation’s leading graduate school of journalism solemnly saluted Newsweek for its grandstanding: “I was truly proud of Newsweek this week,” wrote Dean Edward W. Barrett of Columbia. “You showed superb alertness on Sputnik;” The magazine’s new department, regardless of its merits, simply underscores the fact that “moving fast” has become an end in itself on all levels of American journalism.

We can soon reach a point when “keeping on top of the news” leads to a special form of misunderstanding--contemporamania. Our national metabolism, hyped beyond endurance by advertising intoxicants, needs sedatives, not adrenalin, to meet the perennial crisis of the next few decades. Our media, both as promoters I of merchandise and disseminators of ideas, do not let us calm down enough; as the case of Sputnik shows, we permit crises and all other kinds of extraordinary public awareness to’ be perverted for cheap purposes.

Admen and businessmen use unavoidable agitation to further agitate the public for private goals. Who cares for the commonweal? Some day they will figure out how to use an earthquake to sell earth-moving machinery. But perhaps the infantile and subversive‘ reactions of admen and toy men to the not-very-silly ’ Russian bauble can make us appreciate the insanity of Madison Avenue’s pre-fabricated daily Babel.

Meanwhile, there is a grim irony in the Russian propaganda victory. Their first satellite (too high for optimum scientific observation,, and transmitting on frequencies ill-suited to maximum world-wide tracking) was more a successful advertising campaign than a successfully collaborative IGY venture. That may explain the sudden flareup of cosmic brainstorming along Madison Avenue. Sputnik, rather beat the sky-writing, zeppelin-hiring fraternity at its own game of razzmatazz.