A decline of exuberance is just barely noticeable in America, making itself felt particularly among the most highly educated and the well-to-do in a loss of appetite for work and perhaps even for leisure.

Why, I ask, isn't it possible that advertising as a whole is a fantastic fraud, presenting an image of America taken seriously by no one, least of all by the advertising men who create it?

Men are created different; they lose their social freedom and their individual autonomy in seeking to become like each other.

Though top executives may work as hard as ever-in part perhaps because, being trained in an earlier day, they can hardly help doing so-their subordinates are somewhat less work-minded.

Drivers in a traffic jam, frustrated by each others presence, are not the most amiable of men.

Our society offers little in the way of reeducation for those who have been torn away from their traditional culture and suddenly exposed to all the blandishments of mass culture-even the churches which follow the hillbillies to the city often make use of the same "hard sell" that the advertisers and politicians do.

America is not only big and rich, it is mysterious; and its capacity for the humorous or ironical concealment of its interests matches that of the legendary inscrutable Chinese.