We think of Lindbergh as the far-right most prominent speaker at rallies of the “America First” movement in the early 1940s, an isolationist precursor of the unilateralist Donald Trump and his horrible MAGA movement. I present here an alternative existentialist view of Lindbergh’s pioneering 1927 flight.
As I – Alan Neil Shapiro – grew into adolescence, advertising and shopping were more and more taking command of ordinary American life. One of the first malls on Long Island was a short drive from my family’s house. It was built at Roosevelt Field, the famous airstrip where Charles A. Lindbergh took off in the Spirit of St. Louis in 1927 on his pioneering transatlantic solo flight to Paris. After I got my driver’s license and car at age eighteen, I motored endlessly around the huge parking lots that encircle the multi-story department stores and long successions of smaller boutique shops of the Roosevelt Field Shopping Mall. After finding a parking space, I walked the promenades and inspected odd gadgets of every kind. I shopped at Macy’s for trousers and my Jockey underwear. I was like Raymond Babbitt, the “autistic savant” character played by Dustin Hoffman in the 1988 movie Rainman, who can only wear underpants purchased at Kmart. On the way home, I stopped to put a tiger in the tank of my gas-guzzler and to try to impossibly match the left and right halves of a “game coupon” to win a whole big fat bunch of Dead Presidents. You know: Bananas. Cold Cash. Megabucks. El Dinero. The Wherewithal. The Necessary. Moolah. Gelt. The Green Stuff. Lettuce. My Philadelphia Bankroll. Smakeroos. Gingerbread. Gravy. Paydirt. The Handsome Ransom. A Nice Piece of Change.
I – Charles Augustus Lindbergh – am in quest of the $25,000 Raymond Orteig prize being offered to the first woman or man to fly nonstop from New York to Paris. I’m on the airstrip at dawn on the North Shore of Nassau County, Long Island in my tiny cockpit. My whirlwind engine monoplane was built by a team of ingenious aeronautical engineers at startup Ryan Airlines Incorporated of San Diego, California. My enterprise has been financed by a group of intrepid risk-taking investors centered around the Robertson Aircraft Corporation of Lambert Field in St. Louis, Missouri. I haven’t slept a wink all night before undertaking a daring venture that will require digging deep within myself to muster every ounce of concentration that I possess within my mind and every scrap of courage that I own within my gut to avoid the sudden death which would follow in a matter of seconds after any momentary lapse in judgment or attention. Meteorological reports yesterday afternoon were so negative that I assumed that no takeoff this morning – or any morning in the near future – would be possible in the midst of the heavy fogs which had entrenched themselves throughout the Northeastern Corridor. I made plans to go out on the town with my friends Lane, Blythe, Stumpf, and Mahoney. We were going to catch a Broadway production called Rio Rita. Driving along 42nd Street, we stopped to phone the Weather Bureau and were surprised to hear of a sudden lifting of the storm over Newfoundland. We immediately called off going to the theater and settled instead for a quick dinner at Queensboro Plaza. While my friends readied themselves to work on final preparations all through the night in the hangar where the Spirit of St. Louis is sheltered, I returned to my hotel to try to get some shut-eye. I laid down at a quarter to midnight knowing that I only had two-and-a-half hours before I had to get up again. The comrade who was stationed outside my hotel room door to guard against intrusions by the media blundered by entering the room himself to tell me how much he is going to miss me. He interrupted my attempt to fall asleep. Now I’ve got to start a flight of approximately thirty-six hours having already missed a night’s sleep.
Daybreak. Sunrise in Garden City. “The engine’s vibrating roar throbs back through the fuselage and drums heavily on taut fabric skin. I close the throttle and look out at tense faces beside my plane. Life and death lies mirrored in them — rigid, silent, waiting for my word. I glance down at the wheels. (…) I’m conscious of the great weight pressing tires into ground, of the fragility of wings, of the fullness of oversize tanks of fuel. Plane ready; engine ready; earth-inductor compass set on course. The long, narrow runway stretches out ahead. Over the telephone wires at its end lies the Atlantic Ocean; and beyond that, mythical as the rainbow’s pot of gold, Europe and Paris. (…) Wind, weather, power, load — how many times have I balanced these elements in my mind, barnstorming from some farmer’s cow pasture in the Middle West! But here, it’s different. There are no well-established standards from which to judge. Of course our test flights in San Diego indicate that it will take off — theoretically at least. Those carefully laid performance curves of ours have no place for mist, or a tail wind, or a soft runway. I can turn to no formula, the limits of logic are passed. Now, the intangible elements of flight – experience, instinct, intuition – must make the final judgment, place their weight upon the scales. In the last analysis, when the margin is close, when all the known factors have been considered, after equations have produced their final lifeless numbers, one measures a field with an eye, and checks the answer beyond the conscious mind. (…) Sitting in the cockpit, the conviction surges through me that the wheels will leave the ground, that the wings will rise above the wires, that it is time to start the flight.”
What I truly believe in is the Spirit of Conquest, as I phrase it in my own summary self-interpretation presented in the Preface to my memoirs which were fourteen years in the writing. Or do ‘I’ really mean – a possible secondary deconstructive reading – the Spirit of the Quest? When I was an air-mail pilot flying the St. Louis-to-Chicago route with stops in between, it was my sworn duty to deliver paper business transaction messages – come hell or high water – to connecting flights in the Windy City that carried the letters on to their designated addressees in New York. Many of my colleagues sacrificed their own lives to help the United States Government accomplish its noble mission of establishing an efficient postal system, crashing onto some ordinary wheat field or into some unseen vertical obstacle when blinded by fog or storm. Mail truck drivers voluntarily assisted us during unpaid off-duty hours in refueling and restarting our converted Army-military war machines at the intermediate stops in Illinois on the way to the realization of our dreams of serving our country and a just cause.
Flying alone at night by the light of the silvery moon, I stake my claim as a human being to equality with that elegantly refined immortal natural satellite, my entitlement to fairly fight tooth and nail for my share of happiness in this lifetime, and my chance to leave a mark after my death commemorating my short stay in this world. To sing a song of myself, to rise to become a beacon of pale light for other lonely travelers struggling to find their way and themselves in the prevailing nocturnal darkness. Someday my body will be no more, but the spirit of my works will eternally return as per a logic of non-linear temporality like the inexact coincidence between the calendrical cycle of the moon’s phases and the duration of the solar year. It is the perspective of the moon that interests me. “It makes the earth seem more like a planet; and me a part of the heavens above it, as though I too had a right to an orbit in the sky.” I am a flying ace, an aviation pioneer, a Captain of Ingenuity, and I live by a credo. I practice my devil-dog daredevil occupation so that one day humankind will dominate the sky. But as a theorist of power, ‘I’ (Alan Shapiro-Charles Lindbergh) know that “domination” must be understood and performed without any corresponding submission by the other — without victims. And as an antiwar theorist of technology and media, ‘I’ diverge from the negative assessment made by Paul Virilio in War and Cinema that vision from an airplane must be the basis of a “logistics of military perception” for the purpose of surveillance and control over territories on the Earth below.34 As an important aspect of an alternative post-military and post-cinematic ethic-aesthetic, ‘I’ fly in order to have a view over, under, around and through the world more generally and supportively, like Heidegger’s shepherd of being in hyper-modern hyper-textual mode, or the cross-pollination carried out by bees. ‘I’ can soar without sacrificing others or the planet. I – Charles A. Lindbergh – dream of being able to fly anywhere or achieving independence from the Earth. Such an altered gravity situation might be like the experience of walking on the moon — the reaching of a truly antipodal or reverse-mirror perspective on the West.