A World Without Heroes - Cultural Mythmaking, Then and Now

[Devil Duq]

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But today we have the Gates' and Buffets' and Jeff Bezos' and Jerry Yang's and the Google Guys (whose names I can never remember).

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LOL, couldn't you have just googled their names? I did -- Larry Page and Sergey Brin.

It seems to me that the cruxes of this issue, as least as it pertains to pop culture icons (versus actual "heroes" - they are certainly not one and the same) are the 24-hour news cycle, the advent of entertainment values and profit motive shaping modern reportage, as well as a seemingly insatiable public appetite for celebrity gossip that unfortunately has eclipsed the real need to pay attention to more important world events.

Studios certainly kept a tighter rein on releasing information related to their stars back in the "Golden Age", as has been alluded to previously, but scandals could and did erupt in Hollywood on a fairly regular basis. The difference seems to be a question of scale -- the Ingrid Bergman/Roberto Rossellini affair, for example, was big news back in 1953 but didn't seem to dominate the airwaves the way that the Anna Nicole Smith imbroglio did recently. What used to be reserved for the society pages is now placed front and center, ad nauseum -- to our society's detriment, I might add.

There is also the factor of shamelessness and willing relinquishment of privacy that seems to pervade every facet of our society these days - from shower cams to newlywed reality shows to bloggers who insist on broadcasting every banal aspect of their daily lives. In a such a world, there are few illusions left, and without illusions the craft of cultural mythmaking ceases to be.