A World Without Heroes - Cultural Mythmaking, Then and Now

[Anacardo]

I doubt this is an original observation, but I have yet to see it discussed, so I'll toss this one out there.

It seems to me that an earlier age of the American media-entertainment empire produced a pantheon of cultural icons that has yet to be duplicated. Figures from the 40s, 50s and 60s are enshrined in our collective consciousness, without any seeming equivalents from later eras. Perhaps this is merely the effects of backward-looking relative youth, and one day Tom Cruise, Madonna and Dr. Dre will take their respective places on nostalgic swaths of Americana beside James Dean, Marilyn Monroe and Elvis Presley, but I instinctively doubt it. (Only in sport, perhaps, can we find exception; Michael Jordan is every bit as iconic as, say, Joe DiMaggio, but the self-inflating hype machine of modern American professional sport likely has no equal past or present.) Am I wrong? Too myopic as a child of the '80s and '90s? Or was there something special about that era that produced these monolithic entertainment figures? Somebody older who's done some thinking about Hollywood, Motown, etc., pls chime in. (Dominic, please report to the white courtesy phone. Dom to the white courtesy phone.)