PARTING SHOT

If you grow up as a bookworm, certain habits stay with you for a lifetime. For one thing, the holiday season remains forever associated with long, enchanted hours of reading, probably a hangover from those endless Christmas vacations given to schoolkids. It’s yet another proof that youth is wasted on the young, and one of the best reasons to fear a purely secular society.

For some reason, I’m drawn to nonfiction just now. Perhaps the election season gave me my fill of fiction for a while; having just dug out from under an avalanche of lies, I want to hear from those who have been mining the priceless ore of the truth. Two new books, considered together, show us different approaches to a thorny question: when we speak of “the people” and “the mood of America,” just what do we mean? Who are our neighbors, and how can we best understand them?

First off, there’s Studs Terkel’s latest oral history, The Great Divide: Second Thoughts on the American Dream. If you’re not familiar with Terkel’s method, made famous in books like Working and Hard Times, it’s very simple: he asks people about themselves and they tell him, often with astonishing candor. If you want to know what America is thinking and feeling, it is in books like this, not in the yes-no blips and opaque numbers of the opinion polls.

In The Great Divide, Terkel sets out to find what has happened to America in the Eighties. He brings us the voices of almost one hundred men and women speaking of their hopes and fears about jobs, country, and family. You probably don’t know Sean Kelly and Mary Gonzales, Isabelle Kuprin and Fred Winston-but you know someone like them: unemployed steelworkers, college teachers, fundamentalist housewives, ex-peace activists, stockbrokers, salespeople, pastors, firefighters, Klansmen, actors. Beyond a short introduction to each subject, Terkel seldom interjects his own voice. The talks begin in medias res, so we usually don’t even know which questions set off these torrents of self-revelation.

Still, we know we are listening to America: the twenty-seven-year-old college professor who can’t believe his students don’t know the Rolling Stones. . .the ex-Jesuit seminarian, now a Chicago realtor, who tells us that only the invisible hand of the marketplace can save the poor.. .the radio engineer, born-again and waiting for Armageddon … the laborer who thinks the Con-tras are “a bunch of murderers”.. .the young ad copywriter who “wanted to be Jacques Cousteau. but I had to have a Ph.D. and I didn’t like school that much.” The voices are not always happy, but they contain enough grit and anger and wisdom to confound Gallup and Roper.

A starkly different method of understanding America-and making a buck from it-is found in The Clustering of America, written, at least in part, by one Michael J. Weiss. His thesis, expanding on the target marketing system developed by a company that will not get a plug here, is that we are where we live-in America’s 250,000 neighborhoods. That sounds like numbers beyond all ken, but wait. Using census data and myriad consumer surveys and polls, these wizards have reduced all those neighborhoods to just forty “clusters,” each with its own name and demographic fingerprints.

“Tell me someone’s zip code, and I can predict what they eat, drink, drive-even think,” boasts the creator of the cluster system, who also must go plugless here. If you’re sensing some ambivalence on the part of yr. humble reviewer, let me unburden: this book fills me with a mixture of admiration and fear in about equal parts. Granted, some keen thinking went into breaking the country into clusters called Blue Blood Estates, Money and Brains, Black Enterprise, Tobacco Roads, Norma Rae-Ville, Bohemian Mix, and so on. But keen thinking goes into many activities we must deplore, like the mafioso’s hit and the politician’s smear campaign.

Before donning the curmudgeon’s hair shirt, let me confess that The Clustering of America has its enjoyable, even enlightening moments. If you’ve ever wondered just who in the Dallas area really watches “Dallas,” well, tell me your zip code. Actually, Weiss’s map is not quite that clear, but it’s obvious that most Ewing fans live in outlying areas and in the inner city: “downscale minorities and fanners drawn to the high melodrama of the oily rich,” in Weiss’s terms. In clusterese, the lovers of J.R. and Bobby live in Tobacco Roads, Emergent Minorities, Golden Ponds, etc. By contrast, those least likely to spend a Friday at Southfork reside in Dallas’s version of Bohemian Mix. “America’s counterculture.” Well educated and leftleaning, such folks are unlikely to enjoy the cavorting of decadent capitalists. That should mean low viewership in, say, Oak Lawn and parts of East Dallas.

So who’s against new, streamlined methods for selling Goozy bars where Goozy bars are likely to be welcomed? Nobody. But as the impresario said, give him a zip code and he can also tell you what people think. To his credit, Weiss at least raises the ethical and political problems of cluster-bombing America-before blithely dismissing them.

When Louisiana’s scandal-plagued Edwin Edwards was trying to regain the governorship in 1983, he started out trailing his opponent. After using cluster analysis, his consultants found three blue-collar clusters where voters were largely undecided: Blue-Chip Blues (highly paid skilled workers); Norma Rae-Ville (less educated factory workers in mill towns); and Coalburg & Corntown (light industry and fanning communities). Deciding against a state-wide media blitz, which would have wasted money in solidly anti-Edwards neighborhoods, the Edwards camp put together three sales pitches for their man, each crafted to please one of the three clusters. Voters in Coalburg & Corntown, for instance, are notably nostalgic about small-town America and the bedrock values they believe are slipping away. To woo that cluster, Edwards painted himself as the man who could bring back the good old days. He won, and while nobody claims that cluster analysis was the only reason, the campaign is considered a feather in the cap for target marketers.

“The clusters let us know.. .what people care about,” explains one campaign operative. Fair enough. But it’s also fair to ask about the possible dangers of cluster consciousness. Won’t it help politicians do even better what they already do too much-pander to select groups by using often contradictory messages? They will find that this or that value plays well in Urban Gold Coast clusters, or Furs & Station Wagons. Then, like Woody Allen in Zelig, they will become just like those they hope to persuade-at least until the election.

This is a fascinating system, but like all knowledge it’s a neutral tool, a hammer for building houses or cracking skulls. Let’s hope that such cluster kings don’t take us further toward a society in which the men who sell the mayo also pick the president.