Frank Sinatra has always been a contradictory figure. Biographers have often commented on the paradoxical nature of Sinatra's personality, attempting in vain to reconcile the sensitivity, subtlety, and stark emotionality demonstrated by one of the 20th century's foremost interpreters of popular song with the image of the violent, boorish, and insensitive thug that denned his offstage persona. The more politically minded of his biographers have also commented on his radical political swing from fellow traveler of the Communist Party to right-wing ideologue over the course of his 50-plus-year career (though whether one wants to count the last twenty years or so of it as a defensible “career” rather than an extended exercise in ill-advised self-indulgence is another matter). They have attributed this shift either to Sinatra's fury at being first courted and then slighted by the Kennedy administration, which after the 1960 presidential election smartly distanced itself from Sinatra's mob ties, or to his visceral hatred of rock 'n' roll and, by extension, the counterculture for which it provided the sound track and of which it was a partial expression. While these explanations are convincing on the level of psychobiography, they miss the larger cultural scope of the political contradictions that shaped Sinatra's career — contradictions that lend his career an allegorical significance in charting the expressions and transformations of political community formation in the mid-20th-century United States. That this allegorical significance extends beyond the caprice of the cultural studies analysis that follows is suggested by Sinatra's enduring popularity as a national icon.

William Jefferson Clinton evoked considerable admiration and hostility as a public figure. More so, perhaps, than other recent presidents, Clinton has sparked an intense debate as to what his legacy will be. The Clinton biography found on the White House web page hints at the difficulties facing those who wish to interpret his life. After summarizing the nation's economic success during Clinton's two terms and mentioning major biographical events, the author writes:

In 1998, as a result of issues surrounding personal indiscretions with a young woman White House intern, Clinton was the second U.S. president to be impeached by the House of Representatives. He was tried in the Senate and found not guilty of the charges brought against him. He apologized to the nation for his actions and continued to have unprecedented popular approval ratings for his job as president.

When Walter Benjamin wrote this sentence in the 1930s, he had in mind both the new directions of the press, which was opening more and more spaces in which its readers could write, and the new films and newsreels, where “any man today can lay claim to being filmed” (“Work of Art,” 233) and where, rather than actors, “people … portray themselves” (234; emphasis Benjamin's). Benjamin's attitude toward this collapse of the distinction between author and public was ambivalent. Phrases such as “the phony spell of a commodity” (233), to describe the cult of the movie star, suggest his nostalgia for a time when the aura of the “original” work of art had not yet begun to decay. On the other hand, his idea that “mechanical reproduction emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual” (226) pointed enthusiastically to the new technologies as part of a liberationist meta-narrative.