Essential McLuhan 72 every pattern of the contemporary world and of history, he resolutely averted his gaze from the past and present alike. It was in a spirit of somnambulistic compensation that he built Greenfield Village in the eye of the industrial maelstrom. Henry Ford, one of the most antiquated and tribalistic of all industrial managers, was “The President.” There were no other members of the hierarchy. In dispensing with the conventional organizational hierarchy, Ford naturally resorted to the tribal form of government by Mafia methods. He was ahead of his time. He could afford to junk history, since he was history. At the other extreme in the motor industry was Alfred P.Sloan, Jr., of General Motors, whose very conventional hierarchical organization is portrayed in detail by Peter Drucker in Concept of the Corporation. With his archaic dream of decentralization for General Motors, Sloan involuntarily restored the baronial pattern of managerial bosses and autonomous groupings in his empire. This pattern readily enabled his representatives to see themselves as “knights in shining armor.” This “Court of King Arthur” sort of world was seen by Henry Ford, through the spectacles of Mark Twain, as pure bunkum. The Rear-View Mirror Henry Ford teamed up with Thomas Edison to build Greenfield Village, a nostalgic RVM evocation of the agrarian world that they had junked by their innovations. Daniel J.Boorstin, in The Image: Or, What Happened to the American Dream, need have gone no further than Greenfield Village to reconstruct the stages of slaughter, interment, and monumentality, by which Bonanzaland became a universal parking lot. The extreme forms of urban decentralism created by the car led swiftly to extreme forms of managerial centralism. Ford and Sloan split apart over this. Ford saw it as a means of strengthening centralist control, while Sloan chose the strategy of decentralism as in accord with the mobility of the car. Having already stated the contrast between oral and written patterns of social and legal procedures of the past, it is possible to see these traditionally opposed forms of order once more in the center of the management dramas of our present world. Mini-Mafia Oozing charm from every pore He oiled his way across the floor (My Fair Lady)