Whither America? (Contd.)

THE IMAGE (315 pp.)--Daniel J. Boorstin--Atheneum ($5).

Ever since The Lonely Crowd (1950) proved there was big money in publishing serious sociology, the book trade has been gleefully exporting the traditional fascination of Americans with themselves, playing midwife to a new generation of moral muckrakers with a newspeak all their own. With indifferent success, these unHidden Persuaders have warned The Status Seekers and The Organization Man against the perils of The Power Elite and The Image Makers in The Self-Conscious Society. Latest to ask "Whither America?" is ex-Rhodes Scholar Daniel J. Boorstin, 48, who teaches U.S. history at the University of Chicago when he is not lecturing in Asia, the Middle East or Europe (he is now at the Sorbonne).

Boorstin's basic complaint is scarcely original: the high-speed production and reproduction of words, sounds and pictures --portentously labeled the "Graphic Revolution"--have blurred reality and encouraged a plethora of mere images. Increasingly, he charges, institutions as different as Harvard University and the Container Corp. of America are concerned more with manipulating their images than with achieving their ideals.

Even the reality of news has been displaced by such "pseudo-events" as the presidential press conference (all such interviews, as well as all analytical reporting, are just journalistic make-work, Author Boorstin argues); the reality of literature has been distorted by the pseudo-eventful film; the reality of art has been diluted by easily available and excellent color copies. Even God is pseudo: "the Celebrity-Author of the World's Best Seller." Only the world of crime is left as "a last refuge of the authentic, uncorrupted, spontaneous event." Boorstin's buckshot is indiscriminate and incessant; he blasts away at such riddled targets as publicity handouts and celebrity endorsements and searches out new underworlds to conquer. Museums merely conceal the "vital organs of a living culture," air travel "robs me of the landscape," highway travel discourages wayside stops. As a way of "meeting new people," sighs Boorstin, "even hitchhikers are slowly becoming obsolete."

Historically eager for self-improvement, Americans have usually welcomed intellectual reformers. But Boorstin, by confusing rather than clarifying the effort to recapture the fading American Dream, has abused their hospitality.

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