20
Popular Culture Review
Lindbergh in poll popularity, ahead of athletes, movie stars, politicians, religious
leaders, and anyone else with a name). He defined celebrity, even as it defined
and deified him. Another dubious first: an archetype to be reckoned with, as we
approach a centennial since apotheosis. What machine guns, chemical warfare,
and aerial bombardment didn’t achieve, epidemics, floods, Prohibition,
gangsterism, race riots, Dada, Surrealism, the twelve-tone row, the Beer Hall
putsch, the age of Weimaresque decadence and despair, and the Thermidorean
rhythms of the jazz age managed to accomplish. As electronic media developed,
or as weapons of mass destruction gave way to those of mass distraction,
Einstein himself became a commodity, or as he put it, a “prize ox” or “hen”
displayed for PR purposes, enlisted in various causes, while suffering through
endless rounds of ticker-tape parades, marching bands, concerts, cruises,
ceremonies, commencements, newspaper interviews, and