Man, This Country’s Too Much!

Somebody once asked Gertrude Stein why she hardly ever listened to the radio and she said, Because there is too much music in the world.” That not only made a lot more sense than Pigeons on the grass, alas!” or “It was black, black took,” but it also stated an ineluctable fact; there was too much music then, and there is even more of it now. An article in The New Yorker recently listed all the American pop singers the author could think of, and the list took up half the page. There are too many of these singers, and there is also too much wheat germ and vitamin E and television, and too many cars and airplanes and controls and soap ads and people who squeeze the Charmin. This is no more the Century of the Common Man than it is the American Century. This, in case you didn’t know, is the Century of Too Much. Now, I don’t mean this the same way the ecologists do. The fact is, we have too many ecologists too. Nor do I picture everybody leaping about the Grand Tetons in goatskins, getting back to nature. We just must have things like cars and poppin’ fresh dough; what we do not need is too much of them, and in today’s world if you don’t watch out you’ll have too much of anything you happen to like.

When I start thinking about the old days of not quite enough, my mind always seems to focus on Hervey Allen’s hero, Salathiel Albine, in Juniata, Pennsylvania in the mid-1700s. Salathiel was born in a bark lean-to, as I remember, and he was brave, honest, frugal, and resourceful throughout his life, which was long (there was too much Hervey Allen in those days too, you will remember), and he never had too much of anything.

JC

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John R. Cassidy

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Somebody once asked Gertrude Stein why she hardly ever listened to the radio and she said, Because there is too much music in the world.” That not only made a lot more sense than Pigeons on the grass, alas!” or “It was black, black took,” but it also stated an ineluctable fact; there was too much music then, and there is even more of it now. An article in The New Yorker recently listed all the American pop singers the author could think of, and the list took up half the page. There are too many of these singers, and there is also too much wheat germ and vitamin E and television, and too many cars and airplanes and controls and soap ads and people who squeeze the Charmin. This is no more the Century of the Common Man than it is the American Century. This, in case you didn’t know, is the Century of Too Much. Now, I don’t mean this the same way the ecologists do. The fact is, we have too many ecologists too. Nor do I picture everybody leaping about the Grand Tetons in goatskins, getting back to nature. We just must have things like cars and poppin’ fresh dough; what we do not need is too much of them, and in today’s world if you don’t watch out you’ll have too much of anything you happen to like.

When I start thinking about the old days of not quite enough, my mind always seems to focus on Hervey Allen’s hero, Salathiel Albine, in Juniata, Pennsylvania in the mid-1700s. Salathiel was born in a bark lean-to, as I remember, and he was brave, honest, frugal, and resourceful throughout his life, which was long (there was too much Hervey Allen in those days too, you will remember), and he never had too much of anything.