Newspapers in other states were invited to copy.

They did, slowly at first, then with an accelerating, contagious enthusiasm. Indeed, as the intense public interest in this symbol of stability, this refugee from the extremes, became manifest, newspaper columns gushed fountains of purple prose about the “Normal Man of Fillmore.”

At Nebraska State University, Professor Roderick Klingmeister noticed that many members of his biology class were wearing extra-large buttons decorated with pictures of George Abnego. “Before beginning my lecture,” he chuckled, “I would like to tell you that this ‘normal man’ of yours is no Messiah. All he is, I am afraid, is a bell-shaped curve with ambitions, the median made flesh—”

He got no further. He was brained with his own demonstration microscope.

Even that early, a few watchful politicians noticed that no one was punished for this hasty act.

The incident could be related to many others which followed: the unfortunate and unknown citizen of Duluth, for example, who—at the high point of that city’s Welcome Average Old Abnego parade—was heard to remark in good-natured amazement, “Why, he’s just an ordinary jerk like you and me,” and was immediately torn into celebratory confetti by horrified neighbors in the crowd.

Developments such as these received careful consideration from men whose power was derived from the just, if well-directed, consent of the governed.

George Abnego, these gentry concluded, represented the maturation of a great national myth which, implicit in the culture for over a century, had been brought to garish fulfillment by the mass communication and entertainment media.

This was the myth that began with the juvenile appeal to be “A Normal Red-Blooded American Boy” and ended, on the highest political levels, with a shirt-sleeved, suspendered seeker after political office boasting. “Shucks, everybody knows who I am. I’m folks—just plain folks.”