Baseball
Interestingly, McLuhan singles out not jazz but baseball as the singularly defining symbol of the Jazz Age. The Roaring Twenties were a time of inner-directed individualism marked by setting records and breaking records. Baseball, though a team sport, is also inner-directed and relies upon individual records for statistics to create its mythology.
Prussian Soldiers
By the late 1800’s the efficiency of the Prussian military was personified by the now-familiar heel-clicking of thousands all in precise unity producing a single sound. The mechanistic quality of the Prussian army became the symbol across Europe for tribal unity and the subsequently realized threat of the power represented by such unity.
Brick Walls
McLuhan singles out brick walls as the symbolic incarnation of bureaucratic specializing. The hierarchical organization of a bureaucracy is notable not for the manner in which is facilitates movement upward and along the various specialized sections, but for that walls that separate them from one another.
Humpty-Dumpty
Humpty-Dumpty, by contrast, symbolizes the nemesis of the bureaucratic division of power and responsibility. The eggman represents the idea of an integrated whole that does not require division and bureaucratic separation. That Humpty-Dumpty is the ideological opposite of bureaucratic organization is demonstrated by the very fact that he becomes a broken figure after falling off the wall.
The American Automobile
McLuhan points out a significant variant between American cars and their European counterparts which shifts its position from mere status symbol or democratizing ideal into an ironic opposite. European cars are notoriously so small that they essentially democratize society to the point where drivers are little different from pedestrians. By contrast, the enormous gas-guzzling boats of mid-century America can hardly be viewed as symbols of democratic equality. They make drivers the undisputed kings of the road in which pedestrian are mere vassals and oafs and public transportation the domain of powerless peasants. The American car paradoxically exists as the symbol of aristocratic supremacy; to drive a car is not merely to say one is more successful, but to go the whole distance and say to non-drivers “get out of the way because I am better than you.”
