Word: wonderers
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Your Essay on public relations [July 7] is a masterpiece of objective research. Like all other professions, p.r. has its share of phonies. But on balance the wonder is that it's come so far so fast...
Bertolt Brecht, on whom Ustinov relies heavily for his inspiration, was content with the Thirty Years' War for Mother Courage. Unknown Soldier gobbles up 2,000 years of battle history, from Roman times to the present. Small wonder that digestive torpor soon sets in. Ustinov's hero is an unknown soldier who is always dying just before his recurringly pregnant wife can give birth. Like Brecht, Ustinov appears to believe that war is a continuation of the class struggle. The mighty spill the blood of the lowly in a kind of cruel game, a black farce...
There are ill-defined border areas where p.r. blurs into other activities, notably promotion, as in the creation, out of thin air, of a thin ephemeral wonder named Twiggy. Or else p.r. may be used as a label for image cosmetics, as when a p.r. firm is trying to make Frank Sinatra seem more civic-minded and Bobby Kennedy's press secretary is trying to make him seem less ruthless. Thus it is never easy to tell exactly what p.r. practitioners do. One of their most important functions is the least publicized; it lies not in interpreting the client...
...industrial-state "Corporation" has just hauled them out of a tramp car where they had sunk temporary roots, and pushed them into a new Formica wonder in a housing development. They run their, lives not by push-cards, but by a series of such disorderly urges as lust, the desire to kill, hunger, and pressure on the bladder. And they choose to ignore the Health Services, the schools, the police, and the rules in general...
...they do not find Harvard, these thousands who come looking, if indeed such a place is to be found enclosed, and taken home as a souvenir at any time of year. And they probably wonder -- "summies" and Harvard-Radcliffe both--as the heat wave enters its eighth day, draining whatever energy was left for that afternoon jaunt to the Cape, if the Cambridge summer-time mystique was all that it promised to be in the chill of early May. Don't ask them then. Ask about it on some November afternoon, of better yet in the middle of January...