or Joe Namath. Man becomes mythic man, the American Adam. This archetypal hero-personified in the movies by Shane, by Billy Jack, by McMurphy in Cuckoo's Nest, by Kowalski in Vanishing Point, by Nobody (Terrence Hill) in the movie series bearing that name, and by the Man with No Name (Clint Eastwood) in Fistful of Dollars and other spaghetti westerns--is called the American Adam because of his absolute rootlessness and his essential innocence, his lack of moral dilemma. In many men's advertisements there is pictured but one man alone in the wilder- ness, rugged, unrefined, unbothered by women and the claims of civiliza- tion. The Marlboro ad campaign, based on just such a theme, has been the most successful in advertising history. Bel Air has run an extremely similar campaign in men's magazines, but in women's magazines Bel Air peoples its wilderness with a woman and a man as coequals. Clearly, advertisers believe more in money than in myth.

For companionship the Adamic man will turn to another man or blood brother before he turns to a woman. Schlitz reminds the American male that since he can "only go 'round once in life" he had better go in the company of his fellow man, at least if he wants to do it with "gusto." Often the Adamic hero will have a sidekick who is somehow marked as an inferior either through race, age, or intelligence. The Lone Ranger has his Tonto, Superman has Jimmy Olsen, the Cisco Kid his Pancho. What- ever the nature of the relationship, this man-man alliance continues to crowd women out of the picture in recent movies. Scarecrow, Midnight Cowboy, Butch Cassidy, Papillon, The Sting, Brian's Song, Cuckoo's Nest, laws, The Man Who Would Be King, and even Blazing Saddles all center on the near love between men. The woman movie star, in fact, has become an endangered species in America.

The frontier is not the only alternative to urban mass society. The media offer the public another escape, albeit a more low-keyed and homely one, the middle landscape. From Tom Jefferson to Andy Taylor, Americans have often expressed a distaste for the city as well as a certain dread of the frontier and its concomitant barbarity. The answer is the middle landscape, the mythic place where sanity and compromise prevail, the it country," a down-home Shangri La which remains unaffected by progress and the passage of time: Mayberry RFD, if you will.

Mayberry represents the quintessential middle ground. A dry town, Mayberry annually receives the award for being the most crime-free community in the USA. If any crime does occur, its perpetrator is almost always an alien: the big city criminal or the backwoods rowdy. Once exposed, however, to Andy's natural wisdom and Aunt Bea's cooking, these criminals usually forswear the life of crime. Everything still makes sense in the mythic heart of the country. "The Real McCoys," "The Beverly Hillbillies," "Gomer Pyle," "Green Acres," "Petticoat Junction," "The Farmer's Daughter, " "Apple's Way,". . . [more]

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