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myth : hero
A hero is defined as one who exhibits
extraordinary courage,
fortitude
or greatness of soul.
"I have long felt that the term "hero" has become
victim of the tendency by
politicians to create jingoistic phrases that play well with
the public. I was a reserve police officer for 20 years and never felt that
just showing up for a work shift was a heroic act." - Cliff Weiss
"The misuse, overuse and cynical
manipulation of the word "hero" exemplifies
the erosion of language that dumbs a media-saturated, news-as-entertainment-fed public even
further down the road of "everyone's a winner." It is sad to consider how the
acceptance of an inappropriate term can be so readily embraced by a populace
that is spoon-fed a feel-good-at-any-price dose of daily cant." - Lawrence J.
Pippick
The hero is the one who comes to participate
in life courageously and decently in a
natural and honorable
way.
Heros, in the myths of old,
were greater than mere mortal men or women.
The hero typically was considered to be the
offspring of the mating of a god or goddess with a mortal woman or man. The
hero, being a son or daughter of the gods,
wears a mantle greater than that of any mere mortal. The hero,
a carrier of godly power beyond the reach of
mortal men, symbolizes the marriage of
Heaven with the Earth.
The hero's sphere of action is in the field of
time,
here and now in a sharply defined
dual reality - a duality - broken into pairs of
opposites - good and evil.
Celtic heros were recognized when they fell into a berserker frenzy
(ferg) in which they operated in the red haze of angerly boiling blood.
Upon Cuchulainn's return from his first expedition fifty naked maidens were
sent to meet him, they seized him and submerged in in tubs of water the first
of which shattered the second of which boiled over and the third of which was
left heated. (There is a link between the
word for the heat generated by a warrior under the spell of ferg and its
homophone which is applied to sexual excitement.)
The idea of good
and evil in mythology,
of life as a conflict between the
forces of
darkness and the
forces of light,
is a
Zoroastrian idea, which has come over into
Judaism and Christianity.
In Eastern
traditions, good and
evil are relative to the position in which you are
standing.
Whenever one moves out of the
transcendent,
one comes into a field of
opposites.
One has
eaten of the tree of
knowledge, not only of
good and evil,
but of male and
female, of right
and wrong, and of
light and
dark.
No longer is one
innocent.
Everything in the field of time is dual: past and
future, dead and alive, being and
nonbeing.
The ultimate pair in the
imagination are
male and
female, the
male being
aggressive,
and the
female being receptive, the
male being the
warrior, the
female the dreamer.
We have the realm of
love and the realm of
war, Eros and
Thanatos.
-adapted
from the Power of
Myth, interview of Joseph Campbell,
mythologist, by Bill Moyers, journalist.
"I believe that for a lot of these folks, the urge
to help is solely an ego driven need to be
hero worshiped. The true hero works
without fanfare. The true hero does not
parade 364 days of the year in T-shirts
indicating their exalted status as firefighters or members of a search and
rescue team. Hero worship runs rampant in this country. These folks deserve our
thanks for doing what they do, but let's stop fooling ourselves about the
reasons why many of them do it." - Billy Mange
American heroes
Jessica Dawn Lynch was a
hero but not in the way she was portrayed in the
media.
"To the thousands who wrote letters, sent teddy bears and
flowers and handmade quilts, to the millions who prayed for her safety, Lynch
is an archetypal American soldier, a symbol of courage under fire. "She was
fighting to the death," an anonymous source told the Washington Post, in an
account of her capture and dramatic rescue that seemed more like a movie pitch
than a news story. "She did not want to be taken alive." It was all so well
timed, such an emotional turning point, that questions began to rise: How had
her unit got lost in the first place? Had she actually fired her weapon or been
shot herself? Was it was really such a daring rescue if there was no one
guarding her anymore by the time the commandos whisked her out? Before long,
she had become a symbol for war critics of many of their complaints: bad
information and worse planning; soldiers insufficiently trained or ill equipped
for the mission they confronted; a Pentagon willing to stretch the truth
to boost morale. One BBC report dismissed the rescue operation as "one of the
most stunning pieces of news management ever conceived." And so the uncertainty
fluttered around her: Was she a hero, or a pawn?" - Nancy Gibbs I
Palestine
Jessica Dawn Lynch was a hero but not in the way she was
portrayed in the media. Jessica Dawn Lynch never
fired a shot because her rifle jammed with sand and having a broken back makes
it a little hard to fight. She was not shot or stabbed as the
Pentagon
spinmeisters claimed. The "daring"
rescue was a carefully planned and executed script made for Hollywood, "reality
television," which came just at the right time to deflect criticism of the
mistakes made in the "awe and shock" campaign of aggression against the
Iraqis.
Jessica Dawn Lynch is a hero because she "spoke the truth to
power."
"The Pat Tillman incident, where the
Pentagon deliberately misled
reporters about the circumstances of his death, was certainly a foreboding
example of the Pentagon's
disrespect for journalism. This is to say nothing of the outright lies
regarding Jessica Lynch." - Eric Alterman and George Zornick
"Jessica
Lynch became an icon of the war. An all-American heroine, the story of her
capture by the Iraqis and her rescue by United States special forces became one
of the great patriotic moments of the conflict. Her rescue will go down as one
of the most stunning pieces of news creation yet conceived. It provides a
remarkable insight into the real influence of Hollywood producers on the
Pentagon's media managers, and has
produced a template from which America hopes to present its future wars." -
John Kampfner
The last soldier to see Army Ranger Patrick Daniel
Tillman alive, Spc. Bryan O'Neal, told lawmakers that he was warned by
superiors not to divulge - especially to the Tillman family - that a fellow
soldier killed Patrick Daniel Tillman who was shot three times in the head by a
member of his platoon - fratricide. Patrick Daniel Tillman was shot by a United
States Navy Mark 12 Mod X Special Purpose Rifle from approximately 10 yards
away. A Ranger sniper fired the three single shots that formed the shot group
on Patrick Daniel Tillman’s forehead. No enemy forces were engaged. The
Pentagon deliberately lied as it
looked bad that the professional football player died needlessly - especially
after the Pentagon made such a big
deal about a professional football player giving up his career to serve in the
military in a war of aggression.
"The American people are capable of
determining their own ideals for heroes, and they don't need to be told
elaborate lies. I had the good fortune to come home and to tell the
truth." - Jessica Lynch
Also see Joseph Campbell on:
in the beginning
image
myth
life
consciousness
archetype
metaphor
mystery
the
serpent
religion
dreamtime
God
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