Oklahoma City, USA, has the unpleasant distinction of being the site of an experiment in discomfort. Some Oklahomans are protesting at this and there can be little wonder that they are. But experiments on human beings in the mass are not a novelty; they are, in fact, going on all the time.
Each morning for the past five months, jet aircraft have flown backwards and forwards over Oklahoma City, deliberately breaking through the sound barrier about half a dozen times between seven o’clock and about half past one. This will go on, day after day, until the beginning of next month.
The object of these experiments is to find out the effect which sonic booms have upon the people on the ground. Now that the American aircraft industry has entered the international race to build a supersonic airliner, the Federal Aviation Authority (FAA) is trying to discover what would constitute an aircraft “acceptable” to the people it will fly over. There is no doubt that the projected airliner will be an excessive nuisance; the FAA are experimenting to find out the limits to which the nuisance can go. How much noise and other discomfort will people stand ?
There has inevitably been some protest from Oklahoma City, a small part of whose 500,000 people not see why their homes should be damaged (windows have broken, walls have sagged and bulged, plaster has split under the boom), their nerves shattered and their lives endangered (one ceiling which came down in the Negro section of the City narrowly missed a six year old child), in the cause of building a bigger, faster, noisier, more objectionable aircraft than those which already cause considerable disturbance.
The FAA has offered a conciliatory front to the protestors—they even promised to call off the experiments if the City authorities asked them to. But not all of Oklahoma’s citizens dislike the booms (we shall come to the reason for this in a moment), so no such request has been made. In any event, there is little doubt that, whatever Oklahoma or any other community may say, the world is going to be pestered by the supersonic airliners.
The protests of the people who live around London Airport have not been able to reduce the noise nuisance there; in fact, jet flights, which are the main culprits, steadily increase. Occasionally the government pulls off a dishonest trick. As the pace of competition among the jet operators gets hotter, the airlines make frequent application to be allowed to step up their allocation of flights—sometimes night flights. It is not unknown for the Ministry of Aviation to grant only part of such application, and to follow this with such a hullabaloo about their professed concern for the eardrums of the people around the airport that the fact that they have actually granted an increase in flights goes almost unnoticed.
The reason for the popularity of the big jets is that they are one of the cheapest methods of moving people over long distances by air that has ever been discovered. This means that their operator can hope to make big profits from them. If this should apply also to the supersonic liner, then that monster will before long be crashing about over our heads.
The thing which will stop the supersonic project will not be the demonstrations of the people who will be driven to distraction by it. It will not be because the thing is officially considered to be too great an assault upon human living conditions. The airliner will be abandoned if it is proved to be so crushingly unprofitable that the nations who are now racing to build it are persuaded that their economic interests are better served by dropping the project.
This has happened before. The post war years are littered with aircraft—the Brabazon, the Princess flying boat—which did not make the commercial grade. Others—the Vanguard, for example—only scraped in and were immediately an economic embarrassment. The development of the helicopter as an inter city link has been held in check not because it is a deafeningly clacking contraption (which it is) but because its operators have not been able to make it pay.
We may reflect, with a wry smile, upon the fact that up to now the most profitable aircraft have also been among the most objectionable. So we have got the jets, whose throaty scream drowns all conversation as they pass overhead at a height at which the traditional piston engine would hardly be noticed. And we have not got the flying boats, which might have been that much less of a nuisance because their airports would have probably been built on the coast. If this unfortunate circumstance is anything like a constant rule, the supersonic jets will be profitable. And we shall look back wistfully to the comparatively peaceful days when simple 707’s thundered over the roof-tops.
The Oklahoma experiments will then be consigned to embarrassed history. But other experiments, in different fields, will go on. Day after day, for example, we are subjected to investigation by what are officially known as market research organisations. Smooth, earnestly bespectacled young men call at our front doors, flick over plastic pictures of electric shavers, challenging us to identify their makers. (The writer, who has a weakness for electric shavers and who therefore devours all the ads for them, came out with full marks for this, but was disappointed not to receive a prize.)
The same young men may come back again some time later, with other questions about other products. They do not call at every house. They “sample” us, which perhaps makes some people feel like rare sherry, except that rare sherry is more respected by its drinkers than we are by our masters.
The smart young men have even divided us into groups, according to the jobs we do and how much we get for it. A company director is probably in group A or B. A tool maker may be somewhere in Group C. And so on down the alphabet, until somewhere among the E’s are the people, who scrape along on National Assistance.
None of the smart young men seem to see anything wrong in this. Most of them are anxious to identify themselves with the market research herd, dressing, talking and even combing their hair to the same pattern. They could have stepped straight out of those exceedingly irritating advertisements which, by a novel stroke, tell us when not to chew gum. They look out at the world with confident eyes, convinced of their ability to sell it absolutely anything.
The reason for this sort of activity—to use a rather delicate word for it—is that capitalist industry must always be obsessed by its markets. Profit is at the moment the primary objective of production- but although it is made when the goods are produced, profit can only be realised when they are sold. It did not take capitalism long to realise that it had better try to get to know its markets. So they are constantly sampling us, experimenting on us, sending out their smart young men to put us under their microscopes.
They may even try to alter a market, to persuade us to stop buying one type of product and to start buying another. Or they may try to open up new markets, with goods which have not been widely sold before. (Any day now, for example, we shall be swamped with advertisements for central heating systems.)
In Oklahoma, as a matter of fact, some of the business interests descry a market in the sonic booms, The local Chamber of Commerce hope that, if the experiments help to turn out an “acceptable” aircraft, Oklahoma’s airfield will be developed as one of the world's first supersonic airports. Speculating on this prospect, they have already bought up a lot of land around the airfield. Hungrily they look to the business which a supersonic airport would bring them—the contracts to build and to supply, and the extra population which would come to the area. Dazzled by visions of the golden economic boom, the business men of Oklahoma City have no eyes for the distress which the sonic booms will cause to the people of the area.
Experiments are not confined to the commercial field. Everyone knows that the great publicity drive which the Conservative Party launched before their victory in 1959 was managed by one of this country’s leading advertising agencies. This agency did not rush out haphazardly, slapping up hastily designed posters in any old place. They first of all took their sample of what they call public opinion, they made their experiments and they thought around it all. Only then did they decide on the line which their publicity should take.
The lessons of that defeat were not wasted upon the Labour Party. They assembled their own force of high powered admen, who gravely discussed which line they should adopt. Should they plug Nationalisation? Pensions? Roads? Out of all this came the Let's Go slogan, and the thumbs up sign— and is it only coincidence that Mr. Wilson is now inseparable from his pipe?
All of this effort has gone into finding out what the people will bear in the way of election propaganda, in the same way as the Oklahoma experiments are supposed to find out what they will bear in the way of thunder over their heads. It has gone into finding out what political image will appeal most to the voters’ ignorance and apathy. That is why the Tories no longer present themselves as the party born with a divine right to rule and why Labour has stuffed away its cloth cap, which is now worn only at events like Miners' Galas.
Nobody is exempt from such investigations—even the investigators themselves. That paunchy, florid sales executive, poring over the latest market research returns, enunciating in careful accents through his teeth, does not escape. He, too, is part of a market, to be assessed and experimented upon. Even the chewing gum makers are after him, along with the car firms and the people who try to persuade him that theirs is the best way of suppressing his ulcers.
Capitalism exploits and restricts its entire working class. But more than that, it degrades us in a multitude of ways. It has us wriggling on a pin on its observation board, and is carefully noting our every twitch and spasm. Does that spasm indicate that we would prefer another sort of pin? Does that twitch mean that we want one with a different shape head? If there’s money in it, capitalism is interested.
Maybe the working class do not object to this. In moments of despair, it even seems that they actually like it. In which case they do not object to, they like, blatant humiliation.
But, as Vera Lynn never tired of pointing out, somewhere there is a silver lining. Whatever the result of the experiments, and whether any notice is taken of them or not, they do prove one thing. We count. Mass opinion is important At the moment, it is all mass ignorance; but if it were mass knowledge. . . If the people refused to chew gum, or take plastic spoons with their detergent powder, if they said a unanimous No to supersonic aircraft, all these things would have to stop.
There is one obvious qualification to this. If ever people got around to thinking like that, they would almost certainly be on the verge of saying the biggest-ever No. They would be about to say No to capitalism itself, to its grisly experiments, its cynical posturings and its ruthless degradations. There is a moral in this for us all, for the deafened folk of Oklahoma, for the canvassed, sampled, classified, humiliated people of the world.
Stop wriggling and get off that pin.
Ivan.
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