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A few years ago, high-domed U.S. thinkers liked to blame the nation's cultural deficiencies on conformity. Last week Adman Charles H. Brower, president of Manhattan's giant Batten, Barton, Durstine & Osborn, trotted out another villain: "mediocrity." Speaking at a big advertising powwow in Florida, Brower declared that a lack of "greatness" is holding up national progress. He told his competitors: "Advertising in a climate of greatness will work harder. Fewer people will be annoyed by advertising . . . It will cease to be the whipping boy for every uninformed meathead and misinformed egghead and unsuccessful sorehead."
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Into print last weekend burst a pair of nonprofessional writers: Army 2nd Lieut. Peter Dawlcins, West Point's All-America halfback in 1958, now a Rhodes scholar at Oxford, and German-born Scientist Wernher von Braun, one of the top U.S. missile scientists. In The New York Times Magazine, Dawkins compared U.S. and British attitudes toward collegiate sports ("We Play to Win, They Play for Fun"). In This Week Magazine, Rocketeer von Braun presented Part One of a serialized novel titled Life on Mars. But professional writers needed to read only the leads and relax. Dawkins starts: "It is interesting indeed to investigate the different positions sport occupies in the lives of people of varying backgrounds and standards of living." Von Braun's beginning: "McKay sat easily in his seat on the flight deck, watching Bill Squire beside him at the controls of Goddard, the big rocket-nosed glider which had launched them from the expedition's cargo ship orbiting 620 miles out from the surface of Mars."
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Sick Comic Mort Sahl, 32, was beginning to sound as healthy as his earnings, now running to more than $300,000 a year. Sahl, who delights in proving that almost all popular heroes have clay heads to match their feet, owned up to some personal idols. On his list: Mark Twain ("a prism through which the young country expressed itself"), Herman Melville ("he had scope and virility, didn't internalize"), Tom Paine, Albert Einstein, Edmund Wilson, Theseus, George Bernard Shaw. Allowing that Franklin Delano Roosevelt was "a father figure" to him, Sahl said that he regards Dwight Eisenhower as "a stepfather figure."