Word: heroisms
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...more regrettable than lost heroism, even more lamentable than the missed opportunities for maternal affection, is the effect of e-mail on our minds and mores. The authority on the latter, Miss Manners, writes that e-mail is simply inappropriate for condolences, apologies, thank-you's and other occasions when only a letter will do: "Even without tearstains, there is just something earnest-looking about those wandering lines and shadings of ink." Some of this apparent earnestness is surely due to the strict laws that still govern letter writing. For all the talk of "netiquette" (which delights Miss Manners...
...wants to be a millionaire? In the song the answer was, "I don't." But that was in another country. Gone these days is the character who practically defined American heroism, epic and tragic--Huck and Holden; Charlie Chaplin, Charlie Brown. Nearly all of Hemingway's heroes are defeated in Winner Take Nothing and in the novels. In To Have and Have Not, Harry Morgan had not. The dark, antiheroes of a time as recent as the 1970s have disappeared too--De Niro in Taxi Driver, Pacino in Dog Day Afternoon. Bruce Springsteen sang about his "town full of losers...
McCain often speaks of prudence (for instance, when he talks about social security and taxes), but the hallmark of his "New Patriotic Challenge" is not so much prudence as heroism--the willingness to sacrifice, to suffer pain, even to die, for a worthy cause. Heroism is most closely associated with war, and references to war run throughout McCain's rhetoric--not only with regard to himself and "The Greatest Generation," but to faith, party politics and most everything else...
Some individual acts of heroism are so influential, so profound, that they serve to restore faith in human nature when all else seems lost. In a time that America's leaders lost touch with the people, where the government appeared corrupt and irresponsible, one particular example of courage served to remind people across the nation that hope still remained. The decision of Attorney General Elliot L. Richardson '41 to resign rather than fire Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox '34 during the Watergate investigation showed Americans that there were still some idealists, still some honest men in public service...
...great story to tell; other war heroes, from Bob Kerrey to Bob Dole, have failed to transfer the luster of their medals to the grimy battle for the presidency. Is McCain, who insists that he is no hero, just cannier and more ruthless about marketing his heroism? Or was he born with instincts, which prison sharpened, for seizing advantage and riding it as far as it might take him? "No one will work harder," says McCain, as if that will be enough...