Essential McLuhan 50 At the beginning of his very flattering essay on myself in The Pump House Gang (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), Tom Wolfe has a drawing of me which at once suggests another title for his essay (“What if he’s right?”), namely, “I’d Rather Be Wrong.” At the end of his essay he confronts me with a waitress in a topless restaurant to whom I uttered the assurance: “The topless waitress is the thin edge of a trial balloonl” (I.e., the silicone bust.) Anthropologist Leach is quite right in pointing out that the TV generation is “growing more conformist, not less.” But it is not a visual or pictorial conformity that is developing. The hairless ape has begun to attach a great significance to his hair. “Fair tresses man’s imperial rod and snare, And beauty draws us with a single hair.” He points out that: “quite a lot of alarm is generated by sheep in wolves’ clothing.” The young are really the hairs to a generation of incompetence. The young are really the hairs to a generation of incompetence.