Word: heroicize
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Last week some media watchers speculated that Fuller's installation was provoked in part by Conde Nast CEO Steve Florio's machismo. Poaching the enemy can appear heroic. As an editor of a major women's magazine put it, "There's been so much bad press about him he had to change the dial." (Florio took a beating in a recent FORTUNE piece that accused him of atrocious management and of lying about the profitability of Conde Nast publications...
...distant place, of daring and going. Never mind that the carpers call this mission useless. The public does not require a usefulness beyond its own admiring pleasure. As for the practicalities of the space program, it was never so useful as when it reminded the country of heroic capabilities...
...German firm of Hildebrand & Wolfmuller; its enormous engine--1,489 cc, the biggest that would be fitted to a production machine until the 1980s--chugged it along at 30 m.p.h. Motorcycle technology advanced so quickly under the spell of the fin-de-siecle obsession with heroic speed that only 13 years later, in 1907, the future aviation pioneer Glenn Curtiss was able to put an eight-cylinder engine in a truss frame of metal tubes and go rocketing through a measured mile in Florida at 136 m.p.h...
With Shepard's death, time seemed less elastic than we thought it was. The old outleaping moment of the race to the moon, science and technology's heroic counterpoint to the '60s' rage and mess, was now, as embodied in the first young all-American leaper, dead of leukemia at the age of 74. You may rescind the laws of gravity but not of mortality...
...standard of the original seven flies yet -- John Glenn, squeaky-clean and super-heroic to this day (and years older than Shepard) will go up again in this age, when space flights leave like crosstown buses, and that will be fun. But you always remember your first time, right? That was Shepard's, and always will...