Longtime editor of Harper's and a fixture of literary New York, whom Bob Dobbs enlists in Dialogue 54 as a witness against his own class. Bob recounts Lapham watching the 1994 O.J. Simpson freeway chase — the crowds cheering the white Bronco — and recognizing "a new pagan reality" that vindicated McLuhan, a conversion Lapham set down in his introduction to the 1994 MIT reissue of Understanding Media. For Bob the anecdote is a specimen: the O.J. spectacle as a holeopathic cliché probe that even a literate skeptic could not un-see. Start here for the O.J.-as-pagan-reality epiphany and the Understanding Media preface.
Across the dialogues
Enters as the literate New York editor whose O.J. Simpson "pagan reality" epiphany Bob offers as a holeopathic cliché probe in action — the skeptic converted, in print, in his own McLuhan preface
Bob relays Lapham's O.J.-chase epiphany — the literate New York skeptic seeing the cheering crowds as "millions of pagan idiots totally hypnotized," the moment he conceded McLuhan "was on to something."
"I saw this new pagan reality."
Bob locates the conversion in print — Lapham "does the preface to the MIT reissuing of Understanding Media in 1994-95," citing "the O.J. situation as his epiphany," where "us literate snobs in New York" are conceded to have underrated McLuhan.
"And what I'm saying is he does the preface."
Connections
Lapham wrote the introduction to the 1994 MIT reissue of Understanding Media, where Bob says he offers the O.J. Simpson chase as his McLuhan epiphany.