Read Online Writings from the New Yorker 1925-1976 by E. B. White - Free Book Online Page B

the truth from the papers. You can, however, buy at any newsstand a ten-cent assortment of biassed and unbiassed facts and fancies and reports and opinions, and from them you are allowed to try to assemble something that is a reasonable facsimile of the truth. And that’s the way we like it, too. If a “voice” should ever be heard in the land, and stay heard, an awful lot of editorial pages and news pages would take the count. We think it entirely fair to remind the Businessmen of the most recent case where a voice was heard in a land. The voice was heard, the light came straight down from above, you could learn the Truth from the papers—and the land * is now under a four-power military government.
    POLLING
    11/13/48
    THE TOTAL COLLAPSE of the public opinion polls * shows that this country is in good health. A country that developed an airtight system of finding out in advance what was in people’s minds would be uninhabitable. Luckily, we do not face any such emergency. The so-called science of poll-taking is not a science at all but mere necromancy. People are unpredictable by nature, and although you can take a nation’s pulse, you can’t be sure that the nation hasn’t just run up a flight of stairs, and although you can take a nation’s blood pressure, you can’t be sure that if you came back in twenty minutes you’d get the same reading. This is a damn fine thing.
    Hollywood, which long ago elevated the pollster above the writer, and which invariably takes a blood count before beginning a picture, must be examining the results of the 1948 Presidential election with particular interest. Book clubs, which listen to the pitter-patter of millions of hearts before deciding whether a book is any good, must be studying the results, too. We are proud of America for clouding up the crystal ball, for telling one thing to a poll-taker, another thing to a voting machine. This is an excellent land. And we see even more clearly why the movies have advanced so slowly in the direction of art: Not only have the producers been deliberately writing down to the public but they’ve been getting bad information into the bargain. Who knows? Maybe the people aren’t so far below them as they think.
    SOCIAL SECURITY
    11/20/48
    PRESIDENT TRUMAN SAYS he is going to increase social security. By this he means that a somewhat larger amount will be withheld from a worker’s pay check each week and that the employer will be asked to match the amount. Mark Sullivan, in the Tribune, points out that with the value of money dropping the way it is, an increase in social security is only an apparent increase, not a real increase. Mr. Sullivan argues that the fifty cents that was withheld from your pay check in, say, 1937 would have bought you a square meal at that time, but that when you are sixty-five years old and get the fifty cents back, it may buy you only a small box of dried raisins. He says the way to increase social security is to see that the dollar doesn’t shrink. The argument is sound enough. Perhaps the way to manage social security is to forget about dollars and withhold meat instead. Every employer could be required to maintain a deep-freeze unit and withhold one square meal each week for each employee. Then when an employee reaches sixty-five and starts digging around like a squirrel on a winter morning, he will dig up some frozen meat instead of a shrivelled dollar. Of course, withholding meat for security reasons would cause food prices to skyrocket and this, too, might be a social advantage, since many of us could normally be counted on to die of malnutrition before we ever reached sixty-five.
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    The problem of security is full of bewildering implications, pitfalls, and myths. It is paradoxical that the more secure a person gets in a material way, the less secure he may become in other ways. The least secure fellows you see around, in any age or period, are the big fellows,