A Bigger Bomb

W HEN I returned to America recently after a two-year assignment of teaching in Japan, I was dazzled by the prosperity and pleasantry I saw everywhere; yet even while at San Francisco Airport I felt the surface nature of the scene. The ubiquitous big grins seemed only a product of absurdly exaggerated optimism and no little toothpaste propaganda. The phoney continental tire covers and the utterly useless airplane fin fenders on our amazingly variegated and monstrous automobiles seemed symptomatic of make-believe. The radio and television announcers seemed more breathlessly and girlishly ridiculous than ever as they eulogized the exciting qualities of beer and cigarettes. The newspapers and flashy slicks vulgarly blared the pseudo-luxury of ivy-league and suburban life and struggled desperately to provide the jaded public with fairy-tale amusement in stories of oddly desperate men in Hungary; of some exotic Arabian knights who strangely threatened to smash our idyl-and to provide American petroleum companies with new markets and excuses for price rises; and of the thrills of war correspondents' daring exploits in Suez, denied us since Korea. Behind all the tinsel fagade, created by window dressers and stage designers become architects and interior decorators, was the feeling that interplanetary travel was a reality, for America seemed another planet. But I also felt, uneasily, that America was like a glamorous silkworm, busily creating luxury while steadily walling itself off, in a cocoon of non-comprehension, from the affairs of the rest of the world. I soon found that one of the finest jobs of glamorization has apparently been done on the racial problem. Until Little Rock we had talked ourselves into believing that the problem had finally yielded to the invincible American engineering mind. Then the shattering news from Arkansas came as an unanticipated climax to the Kasper case, the furor created by the Supreme Court integration decisions, and the half-hearted but much ballyhooed desegregation actions of Congress. The newspapers, with amusing haste in their desperation for news to interest the luxuryand leisure-saturated readers, opined that the rebellion at Little Rock was confined to a tiny group of die-hards not at all representative of the church-going, tax-paying, respectable citizenry. Friends in Japan still remind me grimly that they are following the situation with at least as much avidity as the Girard case which also had a racial twist apparent

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