Lucky

A highlight of our visit to St. Louis and Forest Park was the Missouri History Museum and its continuing exhibit on Charles Lindbergh, the humble young Minnesotan who piloted his tiny craft "Spirit of St. Louis" across the Atlantic in 1927 and hit the ground in Paris already a hero. (Jimmy Stewart immortalized him thirty years later for Hollywood.) The exhibit was thoroughly engaging, even though it made only minor mention of Lindbergh's anti-Semitism and isolationism during the second world war, the inspiration for Philip Roth's chilling Plot Against America. But what I was surprised to learn there is that Lucky Lindy became an anti-technologist and said, late in life, that if he had to choose between birds and airplanes he'd pick birds. Lucky for us, we don't have to make that choice yet. And lucky for us, that we didn't follow Philip Roth's fictional script and elect Lindy to the presidency.