Los Gatos Weekly-Times

Whatever happened to heroes?

By Mary Ann Cook

How come we don't have heroes anymore? I don't know where to place the heaviest blame--Bill Clinton or high tech. I used to accuse Arthur Miller and Richard Nixon and still do, but we'll get to them in a minute.

In the olden days we had plenty of heroes. When I was several feet shorter, there were Charles Lindbergh and Babe Ruth and President Roosevelt (at least in our house. In some quarters he was sneeringly dismissed as That Man in the White House, italics theirs).

But even these golden beings have lost their luster by now because high tech has ushered in the Information Age. These days we have too much information, as our current man in the White House can attest.

But in more low-tech days Lindbergh's star shown bright--probably none ever brighter--until he started hobnobbing with the Nazis and advocating appeasement. He turned so far right that he flew out of the hero picture entirely, losing credibility and our sympathy.

And Babe Ruth's hero status today is as lumpy as the candy bar named after him. What with revelations about his womanizing and boozing, his banner is shredded. Remembering all those trips to hospitals to visit with the nippers there who idolized him doesn't even restore him to former glory.

Roosevelt had a mistress and was rarely or never photographed as disabled, even though he really couldn't walk on his own post-polio. A more accommodating press than today's kept its mitts off both those issues during his lifetime.

After WWII, a certain disillusionment prevailed, and we stepped into the era of the anti-hero. He showed up in theaters, films and books, those mirrors of ourselves, our culture. Steve McQueen portrayed him; the Alfie role exemplified him. He was no hero, but he was no villain, either. And so emerged the anti-hero.

Arthur Miller may take most of the blame for this transition. His Death of a Salesman is arguably the most powerful American play of this century. And his hero isn't a hero at all: he's Everyman.

Willy Loman is a tribute to individualism and democracy, showing us that the protagonist of a play need no longer be a leader or someone high up on the social scale. He could be a simple man trying to scratch out a living like the rest of us, a very recognizable striving. Attention must be paid, this play says.

And I like to blame Richard Nixon, too, for the dearth of heroes. He was dead wrong when he said after his defeat for governor that we wouldn't have him to kick around anymore. He's practically the eternal flame of blame, the poster prez for duplicity.

Since his self-destructively taped presidency, it's hard to look at that office in the same way. If the person with the most power in the world can feel like he's an outsider, as though he hadn't been asked to the party, that sound we can hear in the background is a death knell for heroes.

Of course it isn't just recent leaders who are to blame, in spite of the current White House crisis. Jefferson had slaves; Lincoln left his wife at the altar: No wonder she went mad. The more we learn, the more we unearth something unadmirable, and the idol begins to crack.

Even those who do something as unbelievable as flying to the moon seem not so heroic once you read about the ground action. For many astronauts, divorce or breakdown followed fame. The Right Stuff made us feel like we got the real skinny, saw them full monty, so to speak.

In the Information Age, formerly reviled nerds become the heroes, but somehow a P.C. and Nikes are just not swashbuckly enough to replace a hero's boots and sword. All that information means high tech has killed the hero.

MaryAnn Cook is a Los Gatos Weekly-Times columnist. Illustration is by Jerry McLaughlin of Los Gatos.

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