Tuesday, March 6, 1961
Farewell To TV
Television no longer deserves
daily criticism on a serious level.
Intermittent criticism is good
enough for its increasingly lonely
big shows. Silence is the only sen
sible greeting for most of the
dreary new ones.
Thirteen years ago television
came out o fthe laboratory a-glitter
with great expectations. New tech
niques sprouted on experimental
programs like "Omnibus," educa
tional programs like "The Search"
and "Adventure" and travelogues
like "Wide, Wide World."
Today, filmed TV series are
being turned out by bored profes
sional hacks. Today, a television
show seems designed only to kill
time. Today, television isn't awful.
It's a bore.
I am appalled that this great
medium of information and educa
tion is to totally dedicated to utter
vacuity. Don't be misled by the
professional apologists that this is
Florida Not Like School
By MARILYN SPONSLER
While the majority of Behrend
students spent their semester vaca
tions entrenched in snowdrifts
combating the elements, three
hardy fellows courageously forged
to summer climes. Larry Dunst,
Bob Johnson and Joe Gallagher
packed up their bags and in true
capitalistic style embarked on a
two week vacation south of the
Mason-Dixon (Hoverland, so to
speak).
Although Ft. Lauderdale was
temporarily the main center of
operations, their nomadic tenden
cies did not limit them to any one
locale.
The boys were particularly en
thused over the unique floral array
all television can afford to do or all
the public wants. The people want
something better. As for what tele
vision can afford, all I know is that
it annually grosses $1,163,900,000,
and for that kind of money it ought
to do better.
If I limit myself to TV much
longer, I'll go stir-crazy. Television
—as Sam Levenson has remarked—
is turning us into a nation of
starers. We don't watch it, really.
We stare at it—uncritical, unde
manding, half awake and only half
alive. The television set has ceased
being an instrument of entertain
ment. It has become an anesthetic.
The other day I was arguing
with an Englishman who hates our
commercials. I found myself say
.ing—it just slipped out inadver
tently—"l don't mind the commer
cials. It's just the programs I can't
stand."
Dirge
A hollow man with shrunken eyes
Used to sell sepulchres built to size.
Buy you a family size
Built for three,
Sold with a death-time guarantee.
Beaten in bronze and bound in brass,
Lined in lead 'till the atoms pass.
Buy one now and lay it away,
And do not open 'till judgment day.
Cherish your mortal remains in death
As you did when they held your breath.
Buy one now, while there still is room,
A color TV in every tomb,
Set on an altar for all to see
Who worship the goddess: Futility.
Thank you for calling; stop again
And we'll sell you a gilded garbage can.
at Cypress Gardens. Of course, Cy
press Gardens is also known for its
beautiful and talented female
water-skiers; but this fact rates
only brief mention in comparison
to the tremendous opportunity for
botanical study the Gardens have
to offer.
In keeping with the Penn State
tradition of friendliness, the boys
visited the Georgia Southern Cam
pus at Statesboro, where Larry
was forced to impersonate a mem
ber of the Penn State Press ( ?) in
an attempt to ward off co-ed ad
vances.
Because they anticipated the be
ginning of Spring classes, the Don
Juan's of Behrend Campus wel
comed an end to their adventures.
THE NITTANY CUB
John Crosby,
New York Herald Tribune
John Reeder
Generation of Vipers
By EUGENE NUTTER
The following is to be a series of excerpts from Philip Wylie's
Generation of Vipers which is a criticism of all facets of modern-day
America Written in 1942, it is a Thesaurus of Wylie's opinions, obser
vations and predictions concerning this country's failures and abject
needs. Judge for yourselves.
"Remembering my own years in college, and listening to the postu
lates of those who have attended colleges twenty years later, I cannot
but come to the conclusion that ,our universities would be better abol
ished, so as to be turned into something fresh and vital, than to be
allowed to carry on the revolting enterprise of stowing into every brain
a few slices of science, a tenth of language, a one-semester course of
pedantic gibberish concerning obsolete philosophy, and the brittle preju
dices of some young upstart in the non-existent sciences of sociology
and economics and, after that, of informing the container of this un
congealed morass, via diploma, that he is 'educated.'
"Our universities are hard at the chore of sending out into the
world a tassled rabble Of reformers who skid so hard and fast upon
their pink profundaments that they pick themselves up, get a job, and
try to forget all about the college years. A college graduate who has
been nowhere, like the majority, but has only belonged to a commer
cialized 'athletic club' in which it was necessary to do a little required
miscellaneous reading to maintain the membership, should never have
gone to college in the first place, and there should have been no such
clubs opened to him at so impressionable an age, for he is bound to go
on trying to re-create the atmosphere all his life.
"What the colleges need is, first, undergraduate bodies who are
there for hard study only—all others being tweedy morons and a waste
of human effort; second, courses not in economics, but in Sin. The only
reason for the existence of learning is the maintenance and increase of
some kind of morals—the more realistic or homogenous with natural
law, the better. Thus a college earnestly seeking to abet mankind would
have, along with its science, its arts, and history, such courses as:
How to Tell Your Mother from a Wolf
The Life and Times of Frank Hague—A Study in Americanism
The Culture Corporations
Horst Wessel and Some Union Leaders—A Review of Pimps
Rabble-rousing and Wrapping Yourself in the Flag
Public Speaking for Future Leaders
Middletown—What's in its Bureau Drawers ?
Is the Bok Tower the End of the American Dream ?
Domestic Failures of Prominent American Women
The Double-Cross of Protestantism
Virtue—A Field Course in Juking
Clean Cities and How to Have Fun in Them
One Million Peeping Toms—A Survey in American Advertising
Students trained in the nature and reality of Sin by such courses as
the above would go into the world prepared to meet life squarely. Fore
armed with great learning, they would be hard to fool.
"Colleges never see man as a person or as a whole. Whole man is
not just physics and chemistry, nor altogether the creature of his
muddy past, nor yet entirely a producer and consumer of goods, but all
three, and the creature of the future besides, unless he destroys the
future by carrying to its ultimate end his preoccupation with the ma
terial aspect of now, alongside his denials of other• kinds of time.
"But the students, still young and still with some instinctual sense
of proportion because of their youth, are tearing down the colleges
themselves, for it is the august want in education that has converted
the campus into an athletic club—not the innate perversity of youth
and the times. The proliferation of great stadia, crushing the discpline
out of the libraries and laboratories, and the attendant parties, proms,
minor sports, social events, sartorial activities, fraternities, sororities,
packed parking lots, and predilections for courses that are piddling fun
—all these manifestations are youth's mighty rebuke to age, a testa
ment of youth's discovery that the leaders cannot lead, that education
merit of youth's discovery that the leaders cannot lead, that education,
because it is of little help to a man or woman in these parlous times,
might better be converted into trivial amusements lest the years spent
at it be altogether lost in starving."
head elephant, Sam Igof, related to
his master that he knew a short
Yesterday provided a laugh or cut to Carthage. Foolish Hannibal
three within the dormitory. It was followed Sam's advice. This proves
invaded by Hannibal and his ele- a known fact—you just can't trust
phants. It seems that Hannibal's elephants named Sam Igof.
BEHREND FLASHES