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Understanding McLuhan
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Understanding McLuhan (1996)(Voyager)[Mac-PC].iso
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06811_Field_TCUM T376.txt
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1996-04-10
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944b
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16 lines
The biggest casualty of the TV impact was Al Capp’s “Li’l
Abner.” For eighteen years Al Capp had kept Li’l Abner on the
verge of matrimony. The sophisticated formula used with his
characters was the reverse of that employed by the French
novelist Stendhal, who said, “I simply involve my people in the
consequences of their own stupidity and then give them brains
so they can suffer.” Al Capp, in effect, said, “I simply involve my
people in the consequences of their own stupidity and then
take away their brains so that they can do nothing about it.”
Their inability to help themselves created a sort of parody of all
the other suspense comics. Al Capp pushed suspense into
absurdity. But readers have long enjoyed the fact that the
Dogpatch predicament of helpless ineptitude was a paradigm
of the human situation, in general.
With the arrival of TV and its iconic mosaic image, the