Read Writings from the New Yorker 1925-1976 for Free Online

but we show little inclination to advertise the reasons for the dying. Some critics say that a self-governing, democratic people don’t know what they believe; but that is nonsense. It is simply that a democratic people, who are also an impatient and restless people, feel no strong urge to define what they instinctively comprehend. Also, they do not delegate to government the power to speak for the individual. The disinclination to propagandize is characteristic. Thirty-six billions for a military program, a thin buck for a voice clarifying our aims and beliefs. Many people now think, and we agree with them, that if we are to compete successfully with the throaty call of the Communist heart-land—a call as brassy as that of a tenting evangelist—we shall have to develop a bit of a whistle of our own. We already have the Soviet voice at a disadvantage, and we should exploit it. The Russians limit themselves to spreading what they call the Truth and to jamming the sounds that come from the other direction. They cannot disseminate information, because information would too often embarrass their Truth. We can do much better. We can, and should, spread the material an American reads each morning in his paper—news, definitions, letters to the editor, texts, credos, reports, recipes, aims and intentions. We must reach and astonish with our kind of reporting the millions who hear almost nothing of that sort and who hardly know it exists. We can safely leave Truth to the Kremlin, and can broadcast instead the splendid fact of difference of opinion, the thud of ideas in collision.
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    The Russian charge about us, which deliberately misleads so many millions of people, should be met by a greatly expanded United States Department of Correction, Amplification, and Abuse. Misinformation, even when it is not deliberate, is at the bottom of much human misery. We recall the recent ordeal of George Kuscinkas, the fifty-six-year-old delivery man who pushed his handcart thirteen miles, far into the Bronx, because his employer had written “23rd Street” so that it looked like “234th Street.” This was mere carelessness. But think of the journeys that are being made in the world by those who are pushing a heavy handcart in an impossible direction under misapprehensions of one sort and another!
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    We saw a piece in the paper the other day by a historian who had decided that freedom was shot because frontiers were disappearing. Freedom, he reasoned, can’t survive in the congested conditions of a non-pioneering civilization. If there were anything to this theory, it would be the worst news of the week. We think the historian underestimates the vitality of the free spirit in the individual and exaggerates the role of geography. An iron curtain almost but not quite impenetrable is as challenging a frontier as a forest of virgin timber. Besides, it is perfectly apparent that freedom resides comfortably in areas of great congestion. We walked through such a street this morning.
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    Somehow the letters-to-the-editor page, strange and wonderful as it always is, is one of the chief adornments of the society we love and seek to clarify for the world. The privilege of writing to the editor is basic; the product is the hot dish of scrambled eggs that is America. Take the Times the other morning: a resounding letter headed “Awareness of Issues Asked,” a studious appeal to protect forest preserves (“Let this long and difficult fight be a lesson . . .”), an indignant attack by a Gaines Dog Research man on the superstition that dog days are associated with hydrophobia, a thoughtful essay on world government, and finally a blast from a reader in Monroe, New York: “It just so happens that I attempted to transplant three plants [of orange milkweed] recently and they all had long, horizontal roots.”
    Such a page, together with the Times’ sense of duty in publishing it, suggests