seems a bit dull. This headline from the NY Times: Revisiting Sgt. York and a Time When Heroes Stood Tall begs its own question. [registration required. I've found this site helpful in such circumstances.]
The author makes many points about a time when heroes could exist, then punctures the whole idea of it using things like the following paragraph:
It was easier to create heroic stories in 1918 when the press was more pliable and the public more gullible, and the popular media had a fondness for uplifting tales of uncomplicated bravery. Though newspaper articles at the time refer to members of Sergeant York's platoon who challenged the accounts of that day, the doubters were given only enough attention to dismiss them.
The rest of the article goes on to outline all the conflicting stories, reasons for disbelieving the York mythology, etc. Anotherwords, even our heroes are not heroes. There's no such thing as heroism. Every story of a hero is simply a thin shell over the conniving, scheming human beneath.
This is the sort of thing that to me delineates the line between your intellectual, liberal media type and the average person. To them, there is no myth that cannot be punctured, no reputation that cannot be tarnished. "We're only trying to give the readers the truth. Thay have to have the truth" they will say to us, smiling bemusedly down at us great unwashed. "Damn the consequences, we must dig under every rock and let the bright sunlight shine down on all."
See, the problem is, heroism is a complex thing. Take an ordinary guy, put him in impossible circumstances, and if he has the right combination of determination and courage, he will become more than himself. In short, he will be a hero. Underneath it all, he's still the ordinary guy he was before. When the fight is done, he will return to the same person, even if that person was a miserable SOB. That doesn't make him less of a hero, it simply puts his heroism into the context of a complex individual. Dig hard enough, Mr. Reporter, and you'll find the negative on anyone, no matter how much a hero he is.
Take George Patton as a good example of this. A miserable SOB by all accounts, and not the sort of person you might want to spend a weekend at the beach with. But at the head of the 3rd Army? Cutting through Europe at an incredible rate? Possibly saving thousands of lives by helping to shorten the war? One could make the argument that Patton, as the driving force behind his troops, was a hero.
The second problem is that people need heroes and the mythology associated with them. Heroes, with all their faults, are the people that show us the impossible is possible. They show us what dedication to one's nation, one's buddies, one's people, anything, can lead a man to accomplish. Heroes break through the limits of humanity. They can't do it always, and they don't do it in every circumstance, but they still do it. We need those myths to sustain us; we need them to provide us an example of how to perform when the chips are down.
The reporter would have us believe that there is no heroism. The question is begged, and the irony exists, because his colleagues in the media have worked very diligently to puncture every hero we have. There are no heroes because you won't allow them to exist. Did Alvin York really singlehandedly defeat all those Germans? Yes, I suppose as a historian I am interested in the truth of the matter, but does that make York any less heroic? Must we lose the mythology?
The heroes of today's America - the soldiers overseas fighting for freedom, the police protecting us, the firemen saving our lives - remain heroes, whatever their imperfections. I would argue that the imperfections are the very traits that make them so special to our nation. These are regular people who could sit home like the rest of us and get fat watching TV. They've chosen to risk themselves for us, and that makes them heroes. They'll remain that way to me, whatever the NY Times thinks.
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