The Crooked Paradise

THE OPERATORS (284 pp.)--Frank Gibney--Harper ($3.95).

Critics of American civilization, like most specialists, tend to be narrow in their diagnoses of what ails the U.S. David Riesman in The Lonely Crowd worries about other-directedness and herd instinct. William H. Whyte in The Organization Man examines the loss of individuality caused by modern corporate life. Vance Packard in The Status Seekers sees the trouble in a craving for the symbols of importance. Frank Gibney, a journalistic G.P., has a simpler, more sweeping and engagingly old-fashioned diagnosis: the whole place is getting to be crooked, just plain crooked.

Diagnostician Gibney, a LIFE staff writer and author (The Frozen Revolution, Five Gentlemen of Japan), warns earnestly: "Older powers than ours have been fatally undermined when the gap grew too great between the citizen's private sense of wrong and the public morality to which he and his fellows were pledged." To document the gap, Gibney attempts to chronicle every conceivable device of legal and illegal corner cutting, bunching them all into what might be termed Gibney's Unified Sociological Field Theory of the "Genial Society."

Nondeductible Sex. In the Genial Society, everybody is too genial about major and minor fraud. Parents are light fingered with the maid's social security payments; Dad might "gift" the cop on the beat with a fifth of whisky for overlooking his daily parking violation; the children, taking their cue from the elders, might crib on an exam or lie about a date.

From such "acceptable'' forms of petty larceny, Gibney moves on to the more spectacular types that pique the Internal Revenue Department. Among the intriguing cases are the undertaker who tried to deduct his wife's grocery bills because she met so many potential customers during her shopping trips, and the possibly legendary San Francisco taxpayer who deducted the cost of his love affairs as a medical expenditure because his physician advised him that sex would calm his nerves.

From tax cheating Gibney moves on to the kickback artists in business, the most spectacular among them being unquestionably a New York dress buyer named Stanley Sternberg, who worked for a branch of Sears, Roebuck. When he was shown the door in 1952, it appeared that manufacturers who wanted him to place orders with them, in addition to making regular payments, had fed him daily, clothed him and his family, partly furnished his home. One manufacturer was assigned to take Sternberg's aged parents to dinner almost nightly; the wife of another was pressed into service to supply a home-cooked turkey "whenever the Sternbergs craved fowl." Once Sternberg dropped the hint to one seller that he should assign an employee to push his father's wheelchair. Sternberg's total take: an estimated quarter of a million.

Matter over Mind. The Genial Society, with all its deceptions, Gibney believes, has come about because businesses have become too large and impersonal to be readily held accountable; because technological complexity of modern products makes it difficult to see through exaggerated advertising; because aspirations once funneled into spiritual and national ideals have been diverted to materialism.

The trouble with Gibney's warning that the U.S.'s "national future is being misshaped"' by the Operators is that his supporting evidence, however fascinating in detail, is often too indiscriminate to be meaningful and his definition of an Operator too broad to let off anybody (even the Operators' victims, Gibney seems to suggest, are responsible: they have no business being gullible). Is there really much of a common denominator among the housewife who overlooks an uncharged item at the supermarket, the politician who rigs a press conference, the professional "fiopper" who makes a business of suing companies for phony accidents? There is, argues Gibney; even the least offenders are guilty of "selective obedience to the law," meaning that they decide for themselves which part of the law to obey, and that, he feels, may be the beginning of the end of U.S. democracy.

In the meantime, the universality of the problem is illustrated by Author Gibney, who will obviously have to resist some temptations to turn into an Operator himself. There is a LIFE expense account, which a man of weak character might pad. There are the dangerous swamps of publicity and plugs that always lure a successful author. Above all, there is his 1960 income tax return on which The Operators just possibly might provide some handy deductions, including self-employment status as a writer, rent for premises where the writing is done (growing source material, Gibney notes, crowded him out of two successive apartments), not to mention expenses for research and entertainment of informants --after all, an enterprising reporter might want to take Stanley Sternberg to dinner.

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