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102 Marshall McLuhan From The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man (New York: The Vanguard Press, 1951): Orphan Annie,” pp. 64–66 and “Superman,” pp. 102–3. The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man, by Marshall McLuhan, is published by Gingko Press. Copyright © The Estate of Herbert Marshall McLuhan. Used by permission. Orphan Annie Harold Gray’s strip finds a natural setting and sponsor in the Patterson-McCormick enterprise. From this strip alone it is possible to document the central thesis of Margaret Mead’s excellent book, And Keep Your Powder Dry. As an anthropologist, Margaret Mead works on the postulate of the organic unity or “cultural regularity” of societies. Her own example of this postulate is that of the sudden fame of a movie star which must be explained to the public as the result not of luck but of know-how. Before being successful, the star had to have her teeth capped, her nose rebuilt, her dresses designed to hide a big tummy, and special music written to distract attention from her clumsy, shambling walk. Her publicity must suggest that any well-fed youngster would have deserved the same success. Working on this postulate of “cultural regularity,” the very strangeness of this version of the Cinderella story suggests to the anthropologist that the pressures behind the movie-star publicity are the same as those producing the normal patterns of the same society. And so Margaret Mead concludes that it is our Puritan view that work must be rewarded and that failure is the mark of moral deficiency which is behind the need to make luck appear to be the reward of virtue. For this Puritan view of work versus luck is socially constitutive. It confers cultural regularity. Seeming exceptions will therefore prove to be variations on this theme rather than contradictions of it. Obviously speaking from her teaching experience, Dr. Mead says: “American girls of college age can be thrown into a near panic by the description of cultures in which parents do not love their children.” In our Puritan culture, she insists, where even parental love is unconsciously awarded to the child who is meritorious in eating, in toilet habits, in dress, and in school grades, the majority of children feel insecure because they know they do not merit this parental love. So they fall back on the instinct of maternal love, which they feel will insure some small increment of affection even to their unworthiness. When they hear an anthropologist undermine this residual conviction, they become very upset. For, as a famous American educator has remarked, “No one can love unconditionally a child with an I.Q. over ninety.” The moron may gather in a bit of unearned love, but not the normal child. The ordinary child must be on its toes, brimful of “promise” and precocity in order to assure himself of human affection. In addition to an anxiety engendered by a parental love awarded on a basis of competitive merit, Dr. Mead points out, the American child is typically limited to the affection of two parents. The very housing conditions nowadays forbid the regular presence of numerous relatives and the generalized presence of the whole community in the form of adopted “uncles” and “aunts”: So the young American starts life with a tremendous impetus towards success. His family, his little slender family, just a couple of parents alone in the world, are the narrow platform on which he stands. The plot begins to get exciting at this point in the success story, according to Dr. Mead. For success consists not only in winning the approval of parents but in surpassing them. On that premise rests the American way of life, she says. We must, in the most signal way, show our superiority to our parents in every department , or we have failed to give meaning to their efforts and to our own selves. In a social and economic sense, success, it would appear, means the virtual rejection of the parents, so that in a symbolic way the child bitten with the success spirit is already an orphan. A Lincoln could stimulate himself with the belief that he was the illegitimate child of an aristocrat, but the child of today, says Dr. Mead, nurses the feeling of being only “adopted.” At this level Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn have a basic position among our folk myths. They are contrasted symbols that focus complex feelings and ideas. Huck is the shiftless, unambitious son of a disreputable...

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