Beware the Hero

Tod Lancaster
Aug 23, 2017 · 7 min read

The first time I saw a hero in the flesh, I was six years old. His name was Jack, and he worked at the local fire station. My family’s tiny detached garage had caught fire, and a crew had been dispatched to extinguish it. Jack was the the guy holding the nozzle, walloping the big, scary flames into nonexistence. He was also the one who, after he and his fellow heroes had packed up their gear, took a moment to stoop and tousle my hair before hopping into his glorious red fire truck and clattering off into the sunset.

The next few months of my life were spent obsessing over firemen. When Santa asked me what I wanted for Christmas, I pointed without hesitation to the bright red hook-and-ladder sitting under the shopping mall Christmas tree. I wore my plastic yellow firefighter’s helmet to school, removing it only grudgingly, and only after being sentenced to the corner.

I adored Jack, although I never saw him again, and in spite of the fact that I didn’t know the first thing about the man himself. But that’s how our minds work; humans love heroes. We cherish them. We build statues to honor them, and we place their likenesses, literally and figuratively, on lofty pedestals to ensure that they tower over future generations as they have so beneficently towered over us. We build monuments to heroes, and carve their faces into mountains, and place them in hallowed niches in our eternal, ever-expanding pantheon, all the while ignoring the rather obvious truth that heroes do not — and cannot — exist.

Heroism exists. Heroic acts exist, and the people who perform them certainly deserve our esteem. The problem arises when we permanently and irrevocably conflate the act of heroism with the agent of that act: when we assign the value of one praiseworthy deed to all the past and future moments of the person who carried it out. When we do this, our connection to the person in question shifts from admiration or gratitude to something else: something akin to worship.

Hero worship can be healthy. My boyish deification of Fireman Jack surely had some positive effects. I didn’t grow up to fight fires, but I did grow up to value the image of an honest, hard-working man who isn’t afraid to get dirty and who puts the welfare of others before his own. Whether this accurately reflected Jack as a man is irrelevant; Jack as a symbol was of indubitable value to me.

But hero worship can be unhealthy too. There is the misplaced veneration that enriches actors, athletes and musicians, of course, but I’m concerned here with the canonization of political figures: the impulse that compels people to channel their hopes for the future of humanity into a single person who has, wittingly or otherwise, exploited our subconscious desire for a hero. This sort of willful myopia can lead to disaster.

To those who oppose him, the most familiar example of the toxicity of political hero worship will be Donald Trump. When Trump, flushed with exhilaration at having secured the Republican nomination, spread his arms in a shoddy imitation of Jesus on the cross and uttered the now-famous “I alone can fix it,” he may have actually believed what he was saying. He is, after all, a textbook narcissist. But whether he believed his own words is of little importance. His followers devoured them, ignoring or excusing Trump’s glaring character flaws. They whooped and cheered, convinced that the man before them could “fix” the entire system and deliver them from all their woes and worries. They stood in the presence of an emerging American hero, basking in the warm refulgence of his bullshit.

Of course, Donald Trump is far from a hero. To the rest of us, that fact is patently clear. From the outside, Trump’s ham-fisted manipulation of rural America’s desperation to feel “heard” is egregiously transparent, further confirmation of his casual facility with falsehood. It’s more than that, however. It is also an invaluable example of the danger posed by imaginary or fraudulent heroes.

The left is guilty of hero worship as well. Some would argue that they are culpable to a lesser degree, but I think they’ve been lucky. The heroes they have most recently been presented with have, by and large, been decent people. Most unbiased observers would concur that yesterday’s hero, Barack Obama, was a remarkably decent man, and even Bernie Sanders’ detractors have difficulty qualifying any charges beyond naïve idealism.

In 2016, the most conspicuous figure on the left to fall short of hero status — for most of us, anyway — was also, arguably, one of those most capable of competent governance. Hillary Clinton — shrewd and nakedly ambitious as she is purported to be — is, by all reasonable accounts, a decent person too, and has by all appearances acquitted herself with dignity and competence in both public and private life. Her problem, as has now been repeated ad infinitum, was that she failed to inspire. But what does that really mean? It means that, while she certainly did inspire some, Clinton was unable to convince enough voters of the absurd, impossible assertion that “she alone could fix” whatever it was they happened to think was most broken. Yes, she secured more overall votes than Trump; but the margin was slim enough — thanks, in part, to the disengagement of sullen hero worshippers still smarting from Sanders’ loss in the primary — that Trump was able to squeak into the presidency.

If the left has been lucky in the quality of the heroes on its menu, the right has been extremely unlucky. The hero they latched onto — a fraud, as all self-proclaimed heroes are — happens to be a scoundrel of the worst sort. His multifarious transgressions against basic decency aren’t worth reiterating here, since new ones seem to claw their way into the public consciousness on a daily basis. Suffice it to say that — in addition to Trump’s manifold personal shortcomings — most of his pandering is doomed to remain unconsummated, and most of his supporters’ grandiose expectations will remain unfulfilled.

But what if things had been different? What if Trump hadn’t turned out to be the paragon of political ineptitude we now see before us? Donald J. Trump in the Oval Office is as incongruous an image as a blobfish in a teapot; but what if this incurious, scatterbrained frat boy had instead been blessed with the oratorical aptitude of Winston Churchill, or the low cunning of J. Edgar Hoover? Trump is capable of rallying throngs of the disaffected and the under-educated — not that all of his followers fit this description — but what if he also had the ability to dominate Washington’s “inside game”? America is fortunate, in some ways, that Trump is as clumsy and ignoble as he is.

But one thing Trump does understand — perhaps intuitively, given his vortical need for attention — is the human proclivity for hero worship. He rode this understanding all the way to the Oval Office, despite a clear and astonishing lack of appreciation for what would be expected of him once he got there. Peppered with hollow blandishments congratulating his audiences for their farsightedness in supporting him, Trump’s campaign rhetoric consisted largely of empty swagger and outlandish promises, all to be delivered on the back of his illusory merits as a leader, businessman and deal-maker.

Trump is not the first pretender to concoct a personal mythology with himself as the central hero. To one degree or another, most politicians play the hero (or try to). Rudy Giuliani comported himself admirably in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, and he has been waving to that parade ever since. John Kerry’s valid and laudable military service is an oft-insufferable cornerstone of his political persona. Then there’s John McCain, whose past valor is beyond question, but who still reaps undeniable political benefits from being seen as a hero. In this competitive environment, the incentive to mythologize can lead to outright falsehood, as with Hillary Clinton’s wild yarn about taking sniper fire in Bosnia.

While some of this heroism is real, and some is exaggerated, and some is spun out of whole cloth, none should entitle a politician to blind adulation. No human is worthy of unquestioning reverence.

What is worthy of reverence — and what I believe will save us from Trump, and all such future “heroes” — is the United States Constitution, and the institutions to which it gave birth. If we’re going to deify anything, it should be the unprejudiced rule of law that is articulated in that document. Unlike mere human beings, our founding principles are highly resistant to adulteration. It is upon them that we should place our hopes for the future.

So rather than demanding to be “inspired” by political heroes, we should demand capable governance by fallible humans who embrace, in actions as well as in words, a deep and abiding reverence for the Constitution.

We’re not six-year-olds gawping up at firemen, and politicians are rarely the heroes we want them to be. At their best, they are faithful executors of our laws, and tireless wardens of our most sacred institutions. At their worst, they are an existential threat to those selfsame things. Good people exist, and brave people do too, even in politics, but heroes are the stuff of myth.

Even Fireman Jack wasn’t a hero; he was just a guy doing his job. Now, as an adult who has put away childish things like heroes, I understand that. He was probably a good guy, but he was well compensated for dragging out that fire hose, and for aiming it at that fire. Most of our politicians aren’t heroes either: they are well compensated for what they do, both financially and socially. Admire them if you want, but please don’t let your regard atrophy into hero worship.

As for Trump, he’s something else entirely. I’m not sure what, but I am sure that he’s no hero. He will never even be a Fireman Jack, or anything of the sort: not because he doesn’t know how to work a fire hose — metaphorically speaking — but because he is the sort of man who was attracted to the presidency less by the prospect of putting out fires than by a desire to watch things burn.

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