Media and the American Mind, from Morse to McLuhan (review)

reviews 183 friendship token at first, the non-Indian couple come to invest spiritual meaning in the corn-bundle and see the Indian rituals as "more lighter than we've ever been led to believe." In another story, "Men on the Moon," an elderly Indian sees his first television program. Though he doesn't "know many words in Mericano," he discovers with the help of his grandson, that the ApoUo spaceship is about to blast off for its trip to the moon in search of knowledge. Wondering whether "men had run out of places to look for knowledge on the earth," he is told they have already brought back rocks from the moon. He "laughed quietly. The scientist men went to search for knowledge on the moon and they brought back rocks." Hethen resolves to spend moretime watchingthe wrestUng matches on TV in which Red Apache bests the white wrestler. There is in these stories both deep tragedy and quiet humor. "Kaiser" tells ofthe "crazy" Indian who refused to go into the army and hid at Black Mesa instead. As more and more Indians are paid to go out and find him, the reader can almost here Ortiz chuckle. Yet the personal tragedy of Kaiser comes to the surface, too. Jailed for draft-dodging, he becomes so Uke the "Americans" (a term rich in ironic connotations when juxtaposed to "Indians") that he alienates himself from everything Indian, continuing to wear the grey suit issued to released prisoners. The characters that Oritiz evokes, Uke those of Bulosan and Harjo, are speaking languages other than EngUsh. The essential problem for such writing is to convey a sense of ethnic identity in a language alien to the characters. Ortiz and Bulosan intersperse words and phrases from the original languages to achieve that effect. Ortiz explains EngUsh what a character is thinking in Acoma or Laguna. Harjo evokes names and places. Plumpp's proto-African retains his hold on the original culture only by struggling: when i remember i chant shango i sing ogun i dance obatala i hum orishas. But ultimately, "they beat production/ from my bones/ and track up my mind/ with their language." There is a confluence of cultures, and this is what all four of these books are about. Plumpp asks: What is this hip yearning smooching hot In my breath with passion cut by young Southern language? what is my Ufe But a little cup of knowledge? What is Pain joy sadness love happiness And despair but a gumbo of Ufe simmering In pots of your wonder days? . . . Bulosan's description of his own method shows how Plumpp, Ortiz, and Harjo tap the authentic ethnic experience. In "How My Stories Were Written," Bulosan tells us that his stories of FiUpino life in America have the ring of authenticity because they "were based on Philippine folktales and legends" and because in his words, "I humanized my legendary and folktale characters, so that reading them, it would be impossible to determine which is fact and which is the flight of imagination." ROGER J. BRESNAHAN Daniel J. Czitrom. Media and theAmerican Mind,from Morse to McLuhan. Chapel HUl: UNC, 1982. 254 pp. $9.50 (paper); $19.50 (cloth). "A modern-day Whitman," David Marc reflects in a recent cultural Correspondence," would have to watch television or else be forced to give up his connection to the masses of people who find their wishes, dreams, and role models therein." That could be the epigram 184 the minnesota review for Daniel Czitrom's book not because it deals at length with the contents oftelevision programming but because the perspective Czitrom adopts is infalUbly the eye of the Whitmanesque observer upon industrial-commercial popular culture. Czitrom's study extends back to the origins of mechanical communciations and up through the projection of the video disk. His teleological aim—to recover historical traces of the "as yet uncompleted dialectic"—has only been sketched out; but the dialectical tensions, the Utopian possibiUties, which reside within even apparently one-dimensional developments, may be seen as our options when we recover media technology from class society and put it to democratic, visionary purposes. From Samuel Morse and his electric...