Guardian Columnist: Why Does America Celebrate Heroes?

(Crossposted at Lifelike)

We don't have any newspapers quite like the Guardian in the US. It's kind of an amalgam of the Nation and the New York Times; mostly far left but with an occasional dollop of sense. This column, by Timothy Garton Ash, unfortunately lacks that latter quality.

This was the enactment of a dream, of course. The statistical reality of social mobility in today's United States is rather different. But a dream in which enough people believe is itself a kind of reality, and that has long been the case of the American dream. It's a remarkable fact that, in surveys, many poorer Americans oppose high taxes on the rich - presumably because they believe they might one day be rich themselves. There are just enough success stories of outstanding individuals from poor and immigrant backgrounds to keep the dream alive.

That is not entirely the reason why sensible people oppose high taxes on the rich. In fact, we had those high taxes right up until Ronald Reagan. The reason why we oppose high taxes on the rich is that the rich have the capital stock of the country. If they are taxed highly on their investments, they will tend not to invest. And then the rest of us suffer the ill-effects. Perhaps the classic case of this was when the Clinton Administration decided to raise taxes on the purchase of luxury goods, like yachts. Inevitably what happened was that rich people decided not to buy yachts. Who suffered? The folks who made their living building them.

Two months later we saw America at its worst, as members of the black underclass in the ninth ward of New Orleans drowned, grew sick and were preyed upon by violent gangs, while government failed to help or protect them. There are even reports (unconfirmed, and perhaps apocryphal) of American women changing their name from Katrina, since Hurricane Katrina has become a synonym not just for natural disaster but for human and political failure. How could the richest and most powerful country in the world, capable of hitting a flea in Afghanistan with a precision laser-guided missile, fail its own poor so miserably?

Sigh. Perhaps Mr Garton Ash is unaware that the number of dead in Katrina was vastly overstated, that the reports of violent gangs appear to have been completely made up. I don't know anybody named Katrina myself, but I doubt if many women so named would change it just because of the hurricane.

Then he diverges onto another path which I found interesting:

It would be interesting to do a word count for mentions of the word "hero" in American public life, as compared with Britain, France or Germany. A hundred years ago, conservative nationalist Germans used to characterise the "true" Germans as heroes and the Jews as wheeler-dealers: Helden against Händler. Today, we have a different stereotype: true Americans as Helden and limp-wristed Europeans as Händler. Yet in practice, of course, you had the same mix of true bravery and, as one journalist on the spot noted, "real raw panic" in the response to Rita and Katrina as you would in most societies.

I have no doubt that the word "hero" is used more commonly in the United States than in Europe and for a simple reason: Leftists hate heroes. Indeed, I suspect Mr Garton Ash is not a big fan himself. Note his immediate (and inane) evocation of the Germans and the Jews; the implication is clearly that if you like heroes you must have loved the Holocaust.

Why does the Left denigrate heroes? Because when we celebrate heroes, we are elevating an individual over the common man. We are saying that this person is better than average, that he or she is deserving of admiration and emulation. The Left realizes that heroic individuals undercut their argument that people on their own cannot succeed, that a collective, community effort is needed. It takes a village, remember?

Think about the reaction of "cartoonist" Ted Rall to the death of Pat Tillman. Tillman, a multimillionnaire athlete, had quit professional football after 9-11 to enlist in the army, where he became a Ranger. He was tragically killed in Afghanistan in a friendly fire incident. Rall created a cartoon depicting Tillman as bloodthirsty to kill Arabs. In the final panel, two newspaper reporters are talking with their editor about what they think of Tillman. "Uh--Idiot?" says the first reporter. "Sap?" suggests the second. "Hero!" says the editor.

That's why the continuing theme of Brainster's is the hero, the individual who rises above the moment to achieve greatness. It is to celebrate people like Marine Captain Brian Chontosh, or Phillip Bullard, or Sgt Paul Smith.

Yes, I blog on a lot of topics. But the word "hero" definitely pops up more often in my blog than most. It appears in 17 different posts in September alone, according to a quick search.

Ayn Rand recognized the hero-destroying tendency of the Left. In her book, The Fountainhead,

Ellsworth Toohey, an architectural critic and socialist, slowly prepares to rise to power. He seeks to prevent men from excelling by teaching that talent and ability are of no great consequence, and that the greatest virtue is humility.

Steve Ditko, creator of Spider-man and Dr Strange, was a Rand disciple and created one of the most unusual superhero comic books of all time, Blue Beetle #5, from Charlton Comics Group, in November 1968. The comic is an unabashed tribute to heroes and clearly inspired by The Fountainhead. While strolling through a museum, Ted and Tracy come across an art critic explaining to a bunch of hippies a particularly crappy piece of modern art as representing man as he really is. Disgusted, they quickly turn into another wing of the museum.

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Of course, Ditko was swimming against the tide with this effort in 1968.