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It may be true, it may be myth. But in 1967, when Che Guevara faced the Bolivian army sergeant who was about to execute him, history records the legendary revolutionary's final words like this: "Shoot, coward, you are only going to kill a man."
In dark suit and bowtie, he is a computing-era carnival barker — eyebrows bouncing, hands gesturing, smile seductive and coy and a bit annoying. It's as if he's on his first date with an entire generation of consumers. And, in a way, he is.
Before the towers crumbled, before the doomed people jumped and the smoke billowed and the planes hit, the collective American memory summoned one fleeting fragment of beauty: a clear blue sky.
It's convenient to assign J.J. Abrams' "Super 8," one of this summer's biggest movies, an easy, modular genre: Intrepid small-town kids encounter the unknown, engage it, handle it far better than the adults and find that their emotionally sensitive behavior brings their community salvation. Call it the E.T. Effect.
Where were you on the day the world didn't end?
To surf American airwaves, to read American comments on the Internet by the thousands, to walk American streets on the day after Osama bin Laden's astonishing demise meant you'd almost certainly hear some variation of a single telling word: "closure."
You see it all around town these days. The "Big Ben" signs gradually returning to the windows in working-class hillside neighborhoods. The No. 7 jerseys on the backs of suburban convenience-store clerks, grade-school teachers — even, strikingly, children.
There it was, gazed upon by millions in horror, anger and pure fascination: a grainy, sputtering image of the deep blue sea and its interloper — the bubbling brown goo that was spewing into the water from the depths of the planet.
His overalls are weathered. His white beard is grown out to aging-hippie perfection. The tattoos on his arms tell the story of a moment from the summer of 1969 that has passed into legend — three days of peace and music that became a doorway to defining an era.
They sit grounded, scattered haphazardly across Europe and the United States — a baggage-toting diaspora of humanity's jet age, reduced to temporary refugee status by a volcanic cloud whose ash has upended the sense that for want of a boarding pass, the world is our oyster.
More than a week after an earthquake leveled swaths of the Haitian capital, the recriminations are circulating faster than clean water. From CNN's Anderson Cooper to blogs and social networks, questions echo: Why is help taking so long? Why can't the relief process be streamlined? Can't this thing go any faster?
The leader of the Maldives, an Indian Ocean island nation whose very existence is threatened by global warming, was emphatic. "In all political agreements, you have to be prepared to negotiate," he said in Copenhagen this week. "But physics isn't politics."
The president of the National Pork Producers Council — the person who represents the people who represent the nation's pigs — appeared recently before Congress to talk about sales in the swine flu era.
"Those who will come after us will be as wise as we are, and as able to take care of themselves as we have been," Thomas Jefferson said in 1811.
The guy who runs the planet's latest G-20 summit city made an illuminating remark as he welcomed the world to his front door.
For the world, apparently, eight is no longer enough.
The Falk Laboratory School, a little gray brick building atop a hill in Pittsburgh's Oakland section, overlooks a heart-stopping vista of the city that unfurls straight down to the Monongahela River. This was my elementary school, and the song we sang about it in music class featured this line: "Above a city of bridges and steel, of rivers and mill fires burning."
After the last G-20, President Barack Obama pronounced it "a very productive summit." You can also call these blink-and-they're-gone meetings lots of other things: A really expensive image boost. The high-level economic equivalent of a season of "24." A fraternity rush mixer for the people who run the planet.
The images seem contradictory, somehow: A town with a vibrant, textured story to tell welcomes the world — and the once-in-a-generation opportunity to raise its profile — by turning itself into a phantom-zone fortress of boarded-up storefronts, roadblocks and big men with big guns.
"Wish upon a star," Jiminy Cricket, Disney's arthropod muse, likes to say.
"And that's the way it is," he'd say. It wasn't, but we wanted that reassurance. The idea that someone could wrangle the world each night and boil it down to a sensible, digestible half hour was so comforting.
On July 22, 1969, barely 48 hours after a human being first stepped onto the moon's surface, a community in Pittsburgh's western suburbs called Moon Township had a parade, as suburban communities do.
"I just don't believe that Michael would want me to share my grief with millions of others," one of Michael Jackson's closest friends said on Twitter this week. "I cannot be part of the public whoopla."
A record-shattering vinyl album and its moonwalking maestro. A paper poster of a golden-haired beauty in a one-piece swimsuit that was gossamer and clingy in all the right places.
Look at me. Look at my life, my body, my antics, my kids, my home. It's OK — come on in. It's a fair deal: I'm getting famous, you're getting entertained. Everybody's happy. What's the problem?
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