Like it or not, I couldn’t care less for your feelings, Evel Knievel is our Lindbergh. The Lone Eagle played by a door-to-door salesman: it’s the best we can manage c. 1974. They look somewhat alike, blonds, much hair, handsome. But Knievel is huskier, husked, scar tissue laid down on scar tissue. And where Lindbergh stenciled Post No Bills on his private life, Knievel probably wears a sandwich sign to bed. You can understand that: it’s tough to manufacture an Event these days, men have danced on the moon in our time. The Spirit of St. Louis opened an ocean to aviation; the Sky cycle opened a lot of motel rooms in Twin Falls, Idaho. But what’s left todoinan age that loathes heroism—burn your Master Charge card outside the Chilean Embassy? In another age they canonized Simeon Stylites for a refined sort of flagpole sitting. Today our heroisms, like our Neilsen ratings, are consensus affairs. Individualism is démodé. You noticed nobody volunteered to be the Catonsville One.
They’ve called it “the marketing of a suicide.” Would you believe, the Ideal Toy Company and six others have their billboards right on Evel’s launching ramp, equal time with Old Glory above. Next hearses will carry transit advertising on the tailgate. Every other personality, from Bobby Riggs on down, is wearing the Chuckles Candy bar insignia—red, yellow, black, orange, green—campaign ribbons from some eater’s war. At the Garden, where my ticket cost $12.50, they’ve got Knievel sweatshirts and handkerchiefs. In the local toy department, my son says, every other gimmick is an Evel Knievel spinoff. If the cataclysm hits in a month or so, archaeologists will presume that the great God of our tribe did wheelies.
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