Arts and Manners

Around the World in Eighty Smears

What saved Professor Pavlov’s dogs from ultimate degradation amidst all those conditioned reflexes was that they could not read, lucky creatures. Illiteracy, as everybody should know by now, is greatly preferable to a literacy that feeds on currently prevailing reading matter—and not only because of its offensiveness. Even more fatefully, that reading matter conditions the literate to suicidal reflexes. Pavlov’s dogs, though they were made to produce futile saliva at the sound of bells, at least kept craving food. But the faithful reader of, say, The Present in Perspective, by Prof. Hans W. Gatzke (Chicago: Rand McNally & Co. $2.50), will be all conditioned to lie down and die. Such is the power of the printed word.

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William S. Schlamm

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Franklin Delano Roosevelt

Around the World in Eighty Smears

What saved Professor Pavlov’s dogs from ultimate degradation amidst all those conditioned reflexes was that they could not read, lucky creatures. Illiteracy, as everybody should know by now, is greatly preferable to a literacy that feeds on currently prevailing reading matter—and not only because of its offensiveness. Even more fatefully, that reading matter conditions the literate to suicidal reflexes. Pavlov’s dogs, though they were made to produce futile saliva at the sound of bells, at least kept craving food. But the faithful reader of, say, The Present in Perspective, by Prof. Hans W. Gatzke (Chicago: Rand McNally & Co. $2.50), will be all conditioned to lie down and die. Such is the power of the printed word.