The car radio played mushy beer-garden folk music, an accordion band doing one of the countless polkas or schottishes; she had never been able to tell them one from another.
“Kitsch,” Joe said, when the music ended. “Listen, I know a lot about music; I’ll tell you who a great conductor was. You probably don’t remember him. Arturo Toscanini.”
“No,” she said, still reading.
“He was Italian. But the Nazis wouldn’t let him conduct after the war, because of his politics. He’s dead, now. I don’t like that von Karajan, permanent conductor of the New York Philharmonic. We had to go to concerts by him, our work dorm. What I like, being a wop—you can guess.” He glanced at her. “You like that book?” he said.
“It’s engrossing.”
“I like Verdi and Puccini. All we get in New York is heavy German bombastic Wagner and Orff, and we have to go every week to one of those corny U.S. Nazi Party dramatic spectacles at Madison Square Garden, with the flags and drums and trumpets and the flickering flame. History of the Gothic tribes or other educational crap, chanted instead of spoken, so as to be called ‘art.’ Did you ever see New York before the war?”
“Yes,” she said, trying to read.
“Didn’t they have swell theater in those days? That’s what I heard. Now it’s the same as the movie industry; it’s all a cartel in Berlin. In the thirteen years I’ve been in New York not one good new musical or play ever opened, only those—”
“Let me read,” Juliana said.
“And the same with the book business,” Joe said, unperturbed. “It’s all a cartel operating out of Munich. All they do in New York is print; just big printing presses—but before the war, New York was the center of the world’s publishing industry, or so they say.”
Putting her fingers in her ears, she concentrated on the page open in her lap, shutting his voice out. She had arrived at a section in The Grasshopper which described the fabulous television, and it enthralled her; especially the part about the inexpensive little sets for backward people in Africa and Asia.
…Only Yankee know-how and the mass-production system—Detroit, Chicago, Cleveland, the magic names!—could have done the trick, sent that ceaseless and almost witlessly noble flood of cheap one-dollar (the China Dollar, the trade dollar) television kits to every village and backwater of the Orient. And when the kit had been assembled by some gaunt, feverish-minded youth in the village, starved for a chance, for that which the generous Americans held out to him, that tinny little instrument with its built-in power supply no larger than a marble began to receive. And what did it receive? Crouching before the screen, the youths of the village—and often the elders as well—saw words. Instructions. How to read, first. Then the rest. How to dig a deeper well. Plow a deeper furrow. How to purify their water, heal their sick. Overhead, the American artificial moon wheeled, distributing the signal, carrying it everywhere… to all the waiting, avid masses of the East.
“Are you reading straight through?” Joe asked. “Or skipping around in it?”
She said, “This is wonderful; he has us sending food and education to all the Asiatics, millions of them.”
“Welfare work on a worldwide scale,” Joe said.
“Yes. The New Deal under Tugwell; they raise the level of the masses—listen.” She read aloud to Joe:
…What had China been? Yearning, one needful commingled entity looking toward the West, its great democratic President, Chiang Kai-shek, who had led the Chinese people through the years of war, now into the years of peace, into the Decade of Rebuilding. But for China it was not a rebuilding, for that almost supernaturally vast flat land had never been built, lay still slumbering in the ancient dream. Arousing; yes, the entity, the giant, had to partake at last of full consciousness, had to waken into the modern world with its jet airplanes and atomic power, its autobahns and factories and medicines. And from whence would come the crack of thunder which would rouse the giant? Chiang had known that, even during the struggle to defeat Japan. It would come from the United States. And, by 1950, American technicians and engineers, teachers, doctors, agronomists, swarming like some new life form into each province, each—