NO ADONISES
“AVERAGE AMERICAN.” The Greeks would have the laugh on us. Praxiteles would leave his “Hermes” unfinished if he looked for models in the United States. In the American Museum of Natural History, New' York, stands a figure of the “Average American,” flat of chest, round of shoulder, and protuberant of paunch; and he is the sublimation of 100,000 Americans who returned from the World War. This is the story as given in the New York “Evening Post” in an imaginary monologue with the hero of the old Rollo books resurrected as a listener: — “This flat-chested young gentleman with round shoulders and incipient paunch, Rollo, is your papa at the time cf his return from, the war. “The war was a great thing, Rollo, because it gave scientific gentlemen a chance, to measure 100,000 —no, you can’t count them—soldiers. “No, it isn’t a statue of papa, really, Rollo. It is a statue of the average of the 100,000 —a sort of composite of all the young men who became papas of all the Rollos.
“What did you say, Rollo? What good is it? Oh, Rollo! Haven’t you heard of science?' “Well, anyway, Rollo, that’s the way your papa looked', under that great uniform which made brothers' of the cab driver and the banker’s son. His shoulders were rounded from sitting at a desk. His tummy was beginning to expand from eating rather more food than a man of sedentary occupation requires.
“A sedentary occupation, Rollo, is the pursuit of a living with pen and telephone. “Science, Rollo, has perceived that shoulderblades which slope like these go with intellectuality. Intellectuality, Rollo, is what you have too much of, and if you have any more questions, go up to the Museum of Natural History, where the statue has just been placed, and ask somebody else. “Will you get to bed?”
“What has happened to the lusty Americano of whom Whitman sang?”i asks the Baltimore “Evening Sun.” “Civilisation, so the eugenists say, has caught him and gobbled him up. No Adonis was ever raised on office work.” I
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https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/newspapers/GEST19321029.2.17
Bibliographic details
Greymouth Evening Star, 29 October 1932, Page 4
Word Count
346NO ADONISES Greymouth Evening Star, 29 October 1932, Page 4
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