 | | | |
What makes a hero today? Why should it be considered any more heroic to die in a terrorist attack than to be knocked down and killed by a drunk driver? The struggle to redefine heroism after 11 September starkly reveals the uncertainty at the heart of American and Western society.
| Since the suicide hijack attacks on New York and Washington, a traumatised USA has been searching for heroes around whom it can unite. As a result, it seems that everybody who suffered or died on that day has been eulogised as a hero. A star-studded 'tribute to heroes' concert raised $150million for victims of the attacks. Congress has passed the True American Heroes Act awarding Congressional Gold Medals - the highest honour it can hand out - to every government employee who died in the attacks, be they firefighters or Port Authority clerks.
| 'The fatalities of that day are all heroes and deserve to be honoured as such', declared one Republican congressman, successfully lobbying for the former National Guardsman who piloted the plane that flew into the Pentagon to be buried with full military honours in the Arlington National Cemetery.
| In a country that has always cherished its heroes as brave souls who fight for Truth, Justice And The American Way, the notion that somebody can be granted heroic status simply because they have suffered is causing some discomfort. A few voices have begun publicly to voice concern about what is being called 'hero inflation'. As Nicholas Thompson asked in an interesting article in the Boston Globe on 13 January: 'When we put every victim of tragedy on a pedestal, what are we looking up to?' He concludes that 'by lowering the bar for heroism, we cheapen the word and, in some ways, the exploits of people who have earned the right to be called that in the past' (1).
| The problem is that the USA (like other Western societies) has few traditional heroes left. Just weeks before the terrorist attacks, a major opinion poll revealed that over half of all Americans could not name one public figure whom they thought of as heroic. Since 11 September, those at the top of US society have hardly covered themselves in glory. From his bolt for a security bunker immediately after the attacks, to his recent struggle with a pretzel (which apparently ended in a tie), President George W Bush does not cut a particularly heroic figure.
| Meanwhile the public image of Congress is that Washington's finest are still cowering in fear of a few envelopes containing white powder. Little wonder that outgoing New York mayor Rudy Giuliani, the only public figure who appeared to rise to the occasion, beat Bush and the rest to win Time magazine's coveted Man of the Year front cover.
| | | America now celebrates the heroism of 'ordinary people' |
| With heroes in short supply among its upper ranks, America has fallen back on celebrating the heroism of 'ordinary people'. The New York firefighters and (to a lesser extent) policemen who attended the Twin Towers on 11 September have become the nation's favourites, cheered as heroes all (although some, like Nicholas Thompson, have observed that even these individuals were mostly doing their jobs rather than performing extraordinary acts of bravery).
| However, the attempt to elevate these rank-and-file victims into national heroes for modern America has not been problem-free. First there was the fight between firefighters and police at Ground Zero, over attempts to scale down the search for bodies (343 firefighters died when the towers collapsed). Now a row has erupted over a statue of the three New York firefighters who famously raised the Stars and Stripes at Ground Zero, Iwo Jima-style. All three of them were white (like the overwhelming majority of the New York Fire Department) but, in an effort to create a more 'inclusive' symbol of national heroism, the statue depicts one as black and another as Hispanic. The father of one firefighter who died has complained that 'They're rewriting history in order to achieve political correctness' (2).
| The confusion over what makes an American hero today reflects a deeper loss of conviction at the heart of the West. There is great uncertainty about what our societies stand for and are prepared to fight for now. The self-confident all-American hero symbolised by John Wayne has been all-but extinct since the Vietnam War. The tendency to place people on pedestals because of what they have endured, rather than anything they have achieved, has become a feature of our victim-centred culture in recent years.
| The loss of conviction has exerted a powerful influence over American and Western foreign policy. Back in 1996, a leading US foreign policy analyst argued for what he called a 'post-heroic military policy', built around long-distance missiles, bombs and small specialist forces, on the basis that America was no longer prepared to tolerate its troops fighting and being killed in foreign wars, Band of Brothers-style.
| As we have noted on spiked throughout the conflict, the conduct of the war in Afghanistan has been shaped by just such a post-heroic ethos. Washington has bombed Afghanistan from afar, with tragic results, and fought shy of sending in large numbers of special forces even after the rag-tag Taliban had been predictably routed. One consequence of the reluctance to take risks has been the dire lack of intelligence on the ground. At the time of writing, it appears that America knows even less about Osama bin Laden's whereabouts than at the beginning of the war. At least then we were all fairly certain that he was in Afghanistan. Now Washington evidently hasn't a clue where he is, or whether he is even alive.
| Meanwhile, the Bush administration has rushed to create some heroes of the Afghan war by staging high-profile medal ceremonies for a few Green Berets who fought with the Northern Alliance, and for the handful of US soldiers and airmen who have been injured during the campaign (most US casualties have been the result of 'friendly fire' from their own forces). Captain Luke Amerdine, awarded the Bronze Star and Purple Heart, captured the spirit of the new American hero when he told how he 'had a good long cry' over the deaths of three comrades killed by a US bomb.
| | | Victims have become role models for societies that stand for little |
| The blurring of the lines between victims and heroes is evident in Hollywood, too, where in different ways both the blockbuster Pearl Harbor, and the new film Black Hawk Down (about the firefight involving American Rangers in Somalia in 1993), use humiliating defeats as a backdrop for American heroism.
| The promiscuous use of the word 'hero', and the elevation of victimhood into a role model to be admired, marks a significant departure from the traditions of Western society. Of course victims deserve compassion. But one need not be a fan of old-fashioned hero worship to see this as a problematic development, which points at a lowering of human horizons. Where once heroes achieved, and inspired in others the aspiration to be like them, today's high-profile victim-heroes suffer, while the rest of us are invited to feel their pain.
| Victims have been turned into the role models for societies which stand for little and can be united only in a community of suffering. When everybody can be a hero without trying, we risk losing sight of how society has been driven forward through truly heroic human achievements.
| A final note on heroes and the rewriting of history. The video for R Kelly's new song, The World's Greatest, released to coincide with the Muhammad Ali movie, sums up the new mood. It features the singer dressed as a boxer, surrounded by crowds of kids waving 'My hero' banners and wearing 'Heroes' t-shirts. The Stars and Stripes is everywhere, including on Kelly's boxing gloves (just like in Rocky), and clips of Ali in the ring are interspersed with images of New York firefighters and police officers.
| Ali, the shuffling victim of Parkinson's disease, is now universally eulogised. Yet 30 years ago, when Ali the magnificent boxer took his genuinely heroic stand against the Vietnam War, he was stripped of his world heavyweight title and sentenced to jail. Far from waving the American flag, Ali refused to fight for Uncle Sam because, he famously said, 'No Vietcong ever called me nigger'. Even today, the real Ali hardly fits the Hollywood stereotype of the American hero. How did it feel, somebody recently asked him, to know that the 11 September hijackers shared his religion? He replied, 'How does it feel to know that Hitler shared yours?'.
Mick Hume is editor of spiked, and is speaking at the spiked conference After 11 September: Fear and Loathing in the West, on Sunday 26 May at the Bishopsgate Institute in London. See here for full details.
Read on:
Bin Laden: they seek him - where?, by Brendan O'Neill
(1) Hero inflation, Nicholas Thompson, Boston Globe, 13 January 2002
(2) 'Firemen seethe over memorial', London Evening Standard, 16 January 2002
|
|
|
| | |
