industry with the same contempt that a Brahmin like Henry James might have felt for a chamber-pot dynasty in 1890. It i true that s automation is about to produce the unique and custom-built at assembly-line speed and cheapness. Automation can manage the bespoke car or coat with less fuss than we ever produced the standardized ones. But the unique product cannot circulate in our market or distribution setups. As a result, we are moving into a most revolutionary period in marketing, as in everything else. When Europeans used to visit America before the Second War they would say, "But you have communism here!" What they meant was that we not only had standardized goods, but everybody had them. Our millionaires not only ate cornflakes and hot dogs, but really thought of themselves as middle-class people. What else? How could a millionaire be anything but "middleclass" in America unless he had the creative imagination of an artist to make a unique life for himself? Is it strange that Europeans should associate uniformity of environment and commodities with communism? And that Lloyd Warner and his associates, in their studies of American cities, should speak of the American class system in terms of income? The highest income cannot liberate a North American from his "middle-class" life. The lowest income gives everybody a considerable piece of the same middle-class existence. That is, we really have homogenized our schools and factories and cities and entertainment to a great extent, just because we are literate and do accept the logic of uniformity and homogeneity that is inherent in Gutenberg technology. This logic, which had never been accepted in Europe until very recently, has suddenly been questioned in America, since the tactile mesh of the TV mosaic has begun to permeate the American sensorium. When a popular writer can, with confidence, decry the use of the car for travel as making the driver "more and more common," the fabric of American life has been questioned.