We're a nation of celebrity and hero worshipers, so much so that we make heroes out of those who aren't, such as John Wayne: a patriotic, red-blooded, two-fisted American who spent the Second World War in the trenches on the movie lots of Hollywood.
The chief business of the nation, as a nation, is the setting up of heroes, mainly bogus.
In the fun house of today's metastisizing sports-entertainment megaplex, when every day brings another story revealing how these 'heroes' we create are fashioned from base clay, a pause might be in order to reflect on athletes who actually embodied the qualities we think we admire in the too-easily deified.
Athletes as role models and heroes is a hoax, a sick hoax. The men and women who are fighting in Iraq, they are the true heroes.
I was a big fan of Indiana Jones; then I realized he was kind of a fake hero. The real heroes are the people who work hard and do their stuff right, like firefighters and policemen.
In all ages the people have honored those who dishonored them. They have worshiped their destroyers; they have canonized the most gigantic liars, and buried the great thieves in marble and gold. Under the loftiest monuments sleeps the dust of murder.
Mankind adores its betrayers, and murders its saviors.
Our discontent begins by finding false villains whom we can accuse of deceiving us. Next we find false heroes whom we expect to liberate us. The hardest, most discomfiting discovery is that each of us must emancipate himself.
We never see ourselves as heroes and sometimes when we do it is a hero that has made a fortune as a clown or a boxer. And there is no lasting value in either one of those.
While we glorify football players for their accomplishments on the field, they are not heroes.
The left puts a lot of faith in a lot of people in the past that were dismal failures that they think are the greatest people who ever lived.
