Poor Little Superman

"When I think of contemporary America striving for mastery over nature," writes German-born Robert Jungk in a book* just published in Britain, "[I think] of a young man . . . looking at me out of cavernous eyes with a vague, nearly distracted gaze. And I must return his glance, see again the compressed lips from which the teeth stand out as a caricature. How the skull structure has pushed forward against the flesh of the cheeks which are flattened by a tremendous pressure, the skin of the forehead pulled back, the flesh of the chin sagging . . . Poor little superman."

Author Jungk found this particular superman in an aviation medical-research laboratory in California, whirling around in a centrifuge in an experiment actually calculated to save the lives of jet pilots under stress of heavy-gravity .pull. But Jungk likes the symbol far better than the simple fact. A onetime anti-Nazi German journalist, Jungk covered the U.S. for Swiss newspapers from 1947 to 1953, patiently stalking U.S. science and industry to find poor little superman in a hundred compromising poses. The total provides dazzling new evidence for old-world prejudices about the U.S.--prejudices which most European novelists are content to confirm with a trip to Wall Street, the Bowery, the Deep South and Hollywood. Jungk found other hunting grounds.

Electric Eyes. He made his way to Los Alamos, the atomic-weapons laboratory atop an isolated mesa in New Mexico. "It is as though the country without castles, moats and drawbridges were making up for its lack of middle ages; a town of 10,000 inhabitants behind a wall protected by electric eyes." He notes that the children of Los Alamos play a kind of hopscotch over chalked squares identified as "radioactive" or "contaminated." At the Hanford Plutonium Works in Richland, Wash., he seeks out the red-staked " 'burial grounds' in which radioactive refuse is interred," adding quite correctly that such cemeteries will be an ever-growing hazard to mankind through succeeding generations. He stops at Ellenton, S.C. to shed a tear over the disappearance of the tumbledown little town, which is being removed to make way for the Atomic Energy Commission's Savannah River Project.

All along the way, he turns up quotable but anonymous sources. Says "a scientist" of life in the atomic wilds: "Our experiments have grown so dangerous that we've had to withdraw into regions once inhabited by outlaws. Who knows whether we shan't come to the same sort of end? Captured, lynched, hanged--perhaps society will want to make us the scapegoat for all this damage ..."

Aerial Parades. As Jungk enters Omaha's Offutt Air Force Base, headquarters of the Strategic Air Command, he duly notes beside the gate the Latin motto, Mors Ab Alto--"Death from on high." In place of the real story of SAC's courage and foresight, he sifts out another kind of conclusion. "The heavens," he writes, "have become a vast parade ground on which a general gives his orders with the bark of a sergeant-major."

He goes on to the Air Force's heavily guarded experimental center, Edwards Air Force Base in California's Mojave Desert. There he finds an anonymous wife who confides of her superman: "A jet pilot needs a quiet wife who considers his nerves . . . Passionate romance, moods, worries about love, are things he cannot permit himself . . . Russ was looking for a girl that wouldn't excite him, see? It seems I filled the bill."

Jungk sums up for his fellow Europeans : "The Americans today are concerned with bigger things than land ownership . . . [They] do not aspire to the mastery of continents [but] to complete and absolute mastery of nature in all its aspects . . . The stake is the throne of God . . .

"The pillars of democracy, Christianity and personal ethics in the U.S. have begun to totter. Where formerly belief and conscience were the sole criterion, the names of the new judges are purpose and results."

Nightmare Visit. Through agriculture, industry and government, Journalist Jungk follows the trail of science and the machine. In Des Moines, he learns about artificial insemination and watches in horror as a prize bull is mated to an artificial cow ("Super Anxiety the 65th is restless," says the attendant. "I think we'd better give him service today"). In industry he finds "workers" spied upon by hidden microphones, interviewed with lie detectors and checked by stop watches, in the name of personnel relations. "Our factory has become a world without walls, without respect for individuality, without regard for private life," a Detroit "motor-parts executive" tells him. After a nightmarish visit to Thomas ("Think") Watson's International Business Machines plant in Endicott, N.Y., Jungk decides that U.S. office workers are "melancholy visions of pale, silent people standing submissively before exorbitantly active metal boxes . . ."

In Manhattan, he stands knee-deep in symbolism as he watches a wrecking crew tear down a midtown church to make way for an office building. "The organ pipes . . . fell on the naked rock of Manhattan . . . with dull growls or loud cries." Atop the Empire State Building, he notes: "It is not advisable to look too long and thoughtfully at the improbable panorama, because such starers may be suspected of contemplating suicide by the seven watchers stationed here."

For newspaper readers who recall the great political uproar in 1951 over Harry Truman's recall of General MacArthur, Jungk has news: The whole thing was brought about by the Bureau of Standards' electronic computer. The computer proved that the general's "aggressive action" would strain the economy, and "an outbreak of war . . . would be premature and might easily be unfavorable to us." Armed with the computer's facts, Truman was emboldened to side against MacArthur and his policy. Jungk's anonymous Washington guide confided that the computer was known as "The Oracle of Washington," and the hut in which it was housed, "The Little White House."

"I am afraid for America," Jungk writes in his last chapter, "afraid of its losing the best of itself, the esteem for freedom and humanity, in the struggle for nearly godlike omnipotence." Only at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton did he find a glimmer of hope. There someone told him: "All that you've seen in America ... is not what is to come but what is already passing." "So you don't think the future will be simply an intensification of this alarming present?" asked Jungk. "No," replied his mentor. "In spite of everything, there is hope."

* Tomorrow Is Already Here, Rupert Hart-Davis, London.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.