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Popular Culture Review
or Fox News. No American Idol, no Monday Night Football, no Today (or
Tonight or Tomorrow), no View, no Sesame Street, no Home Shopping, no You
Tube, no Tube, no nothing. Imagine a world without TV. There’s one “nada”
that isn’t clean, much less well-lit. Rare is the person who can come back from
the dead to witness what he (like God) hath wrought, and live to regret it.
Einstein wouldn’t need Morse code to telegraph his dismay; he wouldn’t have to
put in a long-distance call from Maine to Texas, or listen to Mr. Murrow (speech
at RTNDA Convention, October 15, 1958, recently recreated by David
Strathaim, Good Night and Good Luck [dir. George Clooney, 2005]) lament the
fact that TV had become nothing but “wires and lights in a box.” What’s more,
Einstein saw or witnessed this during his own life-time, which is one measure of
the dizzying rate of social change his theories reflect. What momentum! Einstein
only had to wait 30 years for the tube (counting 1939 as the year TV was first
exhibited, at the New York World’s Fair), and just 40 for the Bomb. There must
be a law of acceleration (or degeneration) there. You do the math. In any case,
the two most diabolical inventions of the 20th century are alike the outcome or
tangible result of some highly abstract thinking, the kind that bakes no bread,
but makes bread-baking seem both tame and innocent. Only the most
impractical ideas are practical—a bittersweet irony that (like Faraday, in the 19th
century) Einstein both rued and appreciated. Don’t forget the laser, which owes
its origin to a 1917 paper (“On the Quantum Theory of Radiation”) that gave the
probability coefficients for “light amplification by stimulated emission
radiation,” making oral surgery nearly as painless, if not as enticing, as Darth
Vader, whose phallic swordplay transformed extra-terrestrial combat to
chauvinistic swagger.
We love lasers, but the idea is even more charming, though (like love) we
don’t understand it at all. Alas, Einstein cannot be stripped, simplified, or
reduced to essentials. Like the Mona Lisa, whose enigmatic smile he virtually
mimics, he is far too subtle and nuanced for that. Nor is he merely a string of
appearances, like a series of flash-bulbs placed at uniform intervals—the kind
once used to settle a bet about horse’s hooves, which led to the invention of
motion pictures, and thus to an Albertian light show. It just won’t work—
indeed, it’ll backfire. It follows that the more we know (about) Einstein, the less
we know, and vice versa. He is his staged presence: God (or light, to alter the
Thomistic formula) as pure act, whose art lies in its performance: “nay madam, I
know not seems.” And yet, it is a lie—like Picasso’s definition of art as the lie
that tells the truth. For even the light that created the universe is merely another
form of death or devastation. The big bomb (brighter than a thousand suns, over
Alamogordo), is an echo as well as an imitation of the big bang. [So is every test
done since then, whether above ground or below, or at sea.] And that has local
as well as global repercussions: awe-inspiring if not awful. Right here in Glitter
Gulch, no one knows who Miss Atomic Bombshell was: her name or even
whether she’s alive. [Lee Merlin was the nuke Venus, but her whereabouts are
secret, or classified.] Like a deflowered Dynamo, Vegas is all lit up with no