Leave it to Charles Kuralt, anchorman for the CBS News program ”Sunday Morning,” to strike a note of humanism and optimism on a topic as big as
”World Culture: Agenda for the 1990s.”
The moderator of a high-powered international panel, which opened NEOCON 21 (National Exposition of Contract Furnishings), the commercial furniture and interiors market hosted by the Merchandise Mart and which ended last Friday, Kuralt`s pithy observations on American culture eased the way for big-picture presentations by panelists Emile Biasini, deputy minister in charge of Public Works for France; Viacheslaw Glazychev, vice president of the Union of Architects in the Soviet Union; and Adele Chatfield-Taylor, president of American Academy.
”On the surface, the U.S. seems to me to be all about communication,”
Kuralt told a rapt early morning audience of interior designers, architects and commercial-equipment purchasing managers at the Chicago Theater. Noting the American affinity for computers, fax machines and other high-speed business gadgetry-”I counted five telephones in my small hotel suite this morning”-one might get the impression American culture is ”busy, sybaritic and self-centered,” Kuralt said.
Yet ”I think the most important thing that has happened is the last 20 years” is a growing ”impulse for humaneness, fairness and decency” in the U.S., Kuralt said, even a ”national conscience, sometimes in spite of government.”
Reminding his audience about the contemporary concern for ecology and about opportunities for women and minorities, he added, ”I`m thinking of what a difference a handful of people make-the difference one or two people can make.”