Joe Polowsky's funeral

Somebody, and it may have been me, once said that a fire is easier to film than an idea and this truth is unfortunately the first article of faith in the credo of all television news cameramen who are not afraid to move in for the first spurt of blood from a dying man, to remind us old film buffs of that ghastly shot of a body, slumping out of a car in 'Bonnie and Clyde', which, alas, set the mode for a thousand subsequent bloodbaths.

From time to time I'm overcome, like many other people, I imagine, by the incessant and successful search for whatever image is most gruesome in war and most pitiable in peace – the matchstick legs of starving children, for instance. One, perhaps the only, happy effect of this nausea is to make you recall with special vividness, even tenderness, the items, innocent or comic or otherwise pleasant, with which all news programmes it seems, everywhere in the world, end their evening sessions.

There was one came up one day last week and I'm not likely to forget it for a long time because, I suppose, it struck a touching and a dignified note on a theme which is absolutely devoid of dignity or sentiment. Namely, the ill-will with which the two superpowers glare at each other across the map of the world.

It was the story of an old American soldier who requested in his will that he be buried in East Germany. He died the other week and his wish was respected. His name – it sounds unreal, like one of those manufactured, all-American heroes celebrated in radio documentaries any day after the end of the Second World War – his name was Joe Polowsky. Since then, or until he retired, he drove a taxi in Chicago, but in April 1945 he was one of the small band of soldiers, American and British, who made first contact with Russian soldiers on the banks of the Elbe. His dearest wish, written down in his will, was to have two of his buddies go to the place where the Allies joined up and bury his body there.

This, of course, took money but his friends collected it and sent off his two oldest, living wartime buddies. The United States provided two marine guards. The Russians, for their part, sent two generals. The six of them formed an honour guard and they lowered his body into a grave down by the riverside. In the evening, there was a wake of sorts. The last shot we saw was of the Russians and the marines and the two old veterans raising glasses and embracing.

When the word of Joe Polowsky's will got out, there were plenty of neighbours on hand to mutter that he must have been a Communist. Luckily, there was also on hand another cab driver, a close friend, to scorn this mischief. 'Joe was never a Communist,' he said, 'he was an Eisenhower Republican and a Reagan Republican till the day he died. He was just a man of goodwill with an open heart.'

That sentence, alone, is one that we should all be worthy of. It reminds me of some of the crudely chiselled epitaphs on the plain stones that mark the graves of '49ers or other pioneers who died along the hard way to the foothills of the High Sierra. Lines, in which, every so often, simple people struggle through to a line of stark poetry. One I remember says, 'Tom Brent, died here, October 1850. He done his best'.

Well, the other evening I lazed around in the bathtub and got in late for the evening news. Maybe my watch was slow. More likely I was reacting against the prospect of more bloody battles and terrorist kidnappings and the like. Anyway, I got in late but I was not too late to see extraordinary scenes of little mobs of women in several department stores, one in Minneapolis, one in Chicago, one in New York, literally punching the shop assistants and scratching each other.

Food riots? I wondered. Not possible. Suddenly, there was a man behind a counter, a big man with a big stick or a rubber truncheon in his hand, bawling, 'So help me, I'll bash the next one who grabs at these dolls!' Dolls? That's what it was about. We were seeing desperate mothers fighting each other to adopt a doll. Not any doll, but a particular, very homely, squat doll with an oversized head, fat face, a stubby nose, puckered lips – a pathetic monster of a baby doll. It's the product of one company. Each doll, the company promises, has a distinct personality, all of them homely to the point of repulsiveness, but in their own special way.

The company calls this monstrous regiment of baby dolls the Cabbage Patch Kids. They were introduced at a toy fair for retailers in New York last February, not that anyone noticed and the original gimmick – which the company correctly figured would set ablaze a Christmastime shopping mania – was to have the salesmen or the demonstrators dress up as doctors, offering these toy babies for adoption. Each baby comes with a birth certificate, with a double name and with adoption papers. The company thought that this would encourage what they called 'increased bonding' between the child and the baby it had adopted.

The company didn't collectively dream up this idea on a dull day, they employed a clinical psychologist from New York University and she says, 'The idea was to produce a doll with a quality that captures people. These Cabbage Patch Kids are very vulnerable looking. They bring out the nurturing instinct, to protect, to hold and cuddle.

'Research has shown,' she says, 'that if you put together certain characteristics that are common to the young of most mammals – large forehead, big eyes, tiny nose, lack of a chin, oversized head – and put them in cartoons or even in abstract forms, people have warm, kindly responses. They are essentially very vulnerable.'

Well, you must have noticed that 'vulnerable' is a vogue word, especially among theatre and film critics whose vogue has become sickening. In one biographical dictionary of the movies that I happen to own, I found the word applied no less than 40 times to vulnerables as far apart as Marilyn Monroe and Buster Keaton. It is, today, always used as a compliment. It's the modish substitute for what an earlier generation of critics called 'sensitive'.

Maybe it assumes that, today, nothing is more repulsive than a hero or heroine who is confident, brave, self-reliant. Gary Cooper wasn't vulnerable. He was the self-sufficient male, never more dangerous to the villain than when he just looked and said nothing. Mary Pickford wasn't vulnerable. She was the cheeky, adorable tomboy.

But, today, to get an Oscar nomination from the critics, you've got to be vulnerable. That is to say, sad, listless, helpless, pathetic. So it was only a step for that clinical psychologist, Ms (I'm sure) Ms Esther Buchholz, to predict that the most desirable new heroine for children was a doll so pathetic as to be ugly, malformed and very much in need of adoption. Anyway, it worked and, after these early stampedes in department stores all around the country, the manufacturing company is left groaning that it didn't make ten million of these little horrors – their stock of two million is almost sold out.

This mania, understand, didn't just happen. It was planned. The early publicity was mysterious and then, before the dolls were available, the advertising hailed the early arrival of a miracle doll that you'd surely want to own. The pathos of the thing was the big selling point and two million Moms have fallen for it.

It's only the latest example of a sales triumph in the age of hype. Ten, twenty years ago, it was called 'promotion'. A century ago, P. T. Barnum called it 'puffery' which took the form of huge posters advertising a circus, the like of which had never been seen, even by the Ancient Romans. The modern forms of 'puffery', or hype, make the advertising campaigns of even twenty years ago seem almost charmingly naive. Those were the days when a man wrote a book, the publisher bought it, they waited for the reviews. If they were ecstatic, they then waited for Hollywood to bite. Hollywood bit, maybe, and hired writers to do a screenplay. A movie was made. Perhaps it would be a hit, perhaps not.

Today, a movie company owns a publisher, as well as a soft drink firm and an orange grove, and decides to manufacture a hit. Somebody gets out a plot line. A named writer is hired. He writes the book. Forget the reviews which, as one distinguished publisher said to me, 'Today, count for no more than a flattering letter written to a friend'. The writer flogs his book in a dozen cities, appearing on the telly and signing copies. Meanwhile, the movie company has commissioned a theme song, maybe the movie's title, from a rock group. With this, and with apocalyptic advertising for many months, the movie company boosts the coming movies, works the title into a slogan for, say, its TV orange juice ads, so the actual, multi-million dollar success of the movie is almost an anticlimax.

Or take the case of one girl who first appeared in a bathing suit on a sports magazine cover, was snapped up for other covers, then had a book ghosted for her on how to stay fit. She was grabbed to do TV endorsements for beer and for lipstick. Now a clothing firm markets her signed swimsuits and it will spend hundreds of thousands of dollars in pre-publicity, puffery, hype, telling every girl in America she's a nerd or a wimp if she doesn't own that swimsuit. Needless to say, the original innocent girl is about to become a multi-millionaire.

Hype, you may have heard, is an abbreviation of hyperbole or conscious exaggeration. Not so. That's what the linguistic scholars used to call an ID, an intellectual derivation, and now call 'folk etymology'. Hype was put into print over 30 years ago by a Broadway songwriter, saying that a particular movie had no hyped-up glamour. He picked it up from drug users whose aim was to be hyped-up. It was shortened to the noun, hype.

So, think, next time you fall for a bestseller or a pretty face or an ugly doll. It's not your judgement that's at work. The publishers, the movie company, the manufacturer or, more likely, their advertising agency, have given you the needle.

This transcript was typed from a recording of the original BBC broadcast (© BBC) and not copied from an original script. Because of the risk of mishearing, the BBC cannot vouch for its complete accuracy.

Letter from America audio recordings of broadcasts ©BBC

Letter from America scripts © Cooke Americas, RLLP. All rights reserved.