Who Are Your Heroes?

he·ro

 noun \ˈhir-(ˌ)ō\

: a person who is admired for great or brave acts or fine qualities

: a person who is greatly admired

: the chief male character in a story, play, movie, etc.

I believe everyone has heroes.  I am not sure why.  Perhaps we possess and innate sense for superior human behavior and are attracted to persons who display those characteristics most likely to result in our own survival.  Or maybe we are so steeped in cultural history that as a society we have all learned to admire the same traits.  Either way, we pick out persons whose lives we believe are worthy of our admiration and emulation.  This is true whether we choose real-life figures of fictional characters.

Interestingly, all civilizations, thriving or extinct, seem to develop a mythology populated with heroes who display the same worship-worthy qualities; e.g. courage, honesty, loyalty, righteousness.  Think of the movies you have seen in your lifetime.  Then dust off that corner of your mind reserved for those things you were supposed to have learned in school.  Recall high-school freshman English and your cursory exposure to Greek and Roman (and maybe Norse, if you were lucky) mythology.  Compare Heracles (Hercules) with James Bond; both stalwart defenders of the flame (virtue), undeterred by any foe and compelled by duty to vanquish evil.

If your childhood was like mine, play included emulation of movie, television and (when absolutely necessary) literary heroes to whom you had been exposed.  A list of heroes would differ from generation to generation.  Historical and pop-culture influences change over time.  While I might envision myself astride a white stallion exclaiming, “High-oh Silver, away!”  (The Lone Ranger, for you younger readers) Your offspring probably immerse themselves in video games assuming an alter ego we’ve never heard of.  But it is the same story, even if today’s presentation is a bit more graphic.

As we age, our heroes may tend away from the fictional to the historical.  World War II had a significant influence on my generation as our fathers’ characters had been tempered there.  Movies and TV continuously reinforced our perception of that conflagration even if our fathers were reluctant to do so.  Graduating from movies to history books, we replaced the fictional portrayals with biographies of men who had actually shaped the history of the time.

Achieving intellectual maturity, our definition of heroism may have expanded to include not only the warriors but the society creators as well.  We can only appreciate the value of our own country if we know the stories of the founding fathers and their struggle to establish true freedom as a standard for society.  And we learn to appreciate the bravery of those individuals who rose up against the anachronistic social institutions that denied equal access to the American Ideal.

As I enter that stage of my life where introspection and observation join together to create a model of the world that pleases me, I find that those heroes I truly learned from, like most every other lesson my life has taught me, tend towards the unconventional.

Bret Maverick – from the 1950’s television show Maverick. The decade was rife with Westerns.  You couldn’t hardly change the channel and some cowboy was shooting at some other cowboy accompanied by the musical score of the Warner Bros. studio orchestra.  There were Marshals (Gunsmoke) and bounty hunters (Wanted Dead or Alive); hired guns (Have Gun, Will Travel) and cattle drovers (Rawhide); settlers (Wagon Train) and more Marshals (The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp); all epic tales of the post Civil War wild west; tense stories of survival in a savage land.  Then there was Maverick.  Neither talented gunmen nor stalwart peace officers, they (that’s right, there were two of them… then three… well it gets complicated and has much to do with contract difficulties, but I digress) were brother gamblers.  Their mission was to roam from town to town, looking for a poker game and trying to live up to their Pappy’s philosophy.  The key that set them apart was their aversion to personal danger; they were the archetypal reluctant hero pressed into actions by uncontrollable circumstances.  Add James Garners’ penchant for satirical humor and you begin to see the irony.  The two brothers, Bret (James Garner) and Bart (Jack Kelly) appeared in alternate weekly stories occasionally both appearing in the same episode.  While they had equal billing, Bret was clearly the bigger audience draw.

Sylvester – the Warner Bros., Merry Melodies cat.  Anyone who knows me well is aware of my passion for Warner Bros. cartoons.  In my professional life, I was exposed to a constant string of leadership seminars.  A frequently repeated feature of these programs was to ask the participants to complete a survey card requesting personal information about the attendee.  The cards were read to the class and based on the anonymous responses to the questions they were to attempt to identify which of their coworkers was describing themselves.  One of the most common questions was, “Who is your hero?” or “Who would you most like to emulate in your life?”  You can imagine the answers: Mother Teresa, Abraham Lincoln, my dad.  My answer always drew the strongest reaction; it was, “Bugs Bunny.”  But in reality, he was the ideal.  My real-life role model was Sylvester.  I still root for him as he launches his overly complicated plans to eat that obnoxious little bird.  Truly, can you think of a soul more committed to a single mission?  Sylvester was created in 1945 by director Friz Freleng.  His first pairing with Tweety was 1947’s Tweetie Pie which became the first Warner Bros. cartoon to be awarded an Oscar.  While Sylvester began his career solo (Life with Feathers – 1945) and appeared with almost all of the Warner Bros. characters during his career, my favorites were always those cartoons involving his quest for that damned, squeaky, mite-infested miniature squawk-box of a bird.  And I wouldn’t have been upset if Sylvester would have taken that umbrella away from Gwanny and shoved it up, well you know where. You have to love a cat whose first line ever was, “Sufferin’ Succotash!”

Plato – yes, that Plato, the Greek Philosopher.  I know, this seems quite the diversion from a roaming gambler and a persistent pussycat but bear with me for a moment and you’ll see where I am going.  I had never given much thought to the Greeks.  Yeah, I know, cradle of democracy and all that baloney.  But if you dig down just below the surface you begin to see a flaw or two.  For crying out loud, they couldn’t even build a complete shoe!  My true enlightenment was born while reading Plato’s seminal work, The Republic (it’s amazing what you can find to waste your time on when you are retired).  The Republic is presented as discussion among Socrates (Plato’s teacher) and his students.  The topic is the creation of an ideal community.  The subject matter included touches on all aspects of life and society.

The conclusion is that society should be stratified; the value of an individual’s trade should dictate where in the hierarchy they belong.  Their lifestyle, e.g. wealth, should be a function of relative worth.  Now this is not unlike our capitalistic society of today.  The more valued your contribution is deemed, the higher your income level.  Up to this point, I have no problem with Plato’s position.  It concerns me somewhat that they believed station could be assigned based on genetic interpretation: A shop keeper is a shopkeeper because his breeding pre-determined it.  But then they change directions and focus their attention to leadership and authority.  It seems the top tier, the decision makers, the ruling class as it were, should be supported by the society at large.  Their lives should be trouble free as to allow their full attention to be applied to the rigors of ruling.  To assure all that the best talent is drawn to this lofty responsibility, the rulers should be provided with only the best.  Even as to the assignment of mates, it would be considered necessary to provide the rulers with women of superior quality so as to assure superior offspring.  And who, you ask, would make up that ruling class?  Why the philosophers, of course.

Is it just me or does anyone else here see the similarity to the finale of Dr. Strangelove (1964-Colombia Pictures)?

Ah, you are now thinking, “Dale, how could you select such an elitist for hero status?”  Because, this is the ultimate in gall!  I admire any person who can tell you how to live your life and that includes a proviso for his own livelihood.  And here I thought majoring in business administration would assure an affluent life.  Little did I know, instead of studying accounting rules, I could have spent my college years sitting around the student center pondering the big question, “Why is there air?”

Well there you go; those are mine.  Who are your heroes?