Americans and their Love of Heroes

I can't speak for other countries, but Americans have a love affair with
"redemption". We lionize sports heroes who regularly ingest or inject banned substances, watch while they lie to Congress, watch while they get inducted into the sports hall of fame, pay outrageous amounts to go watch their team mates also play while under the influence, watch them brawl, act like children and get in trouble with the law, many of which are doing the same thing, and then in turn sluff it off as though its to be expected.

We elect and reelect corrupt politicians and shady office holders whom we know to be ethically challenged, deeply flawed and often rotten at the core, and then we wonder why the system seems broken. The question is, Do we care? I don't think so. Here's why.

We are willing to build up our promising heroes, and likewise willing to tear them down, but we won't let them stay down, just long enough to vet our collective anger. Then we reinstate them into our good graces, give them another chance, often before they've learned a lesson from their previous choices. In short, we condone bad behavior as though it were an expected ritual, a type of rite of passage. Then the same behavior often occurs again. This time we take it with indignation, perhaps an affront to our choice, which was of course, to forgive and forget.

The problem with this approach is that very few lessons are learned by these people because they know, what we don't realize. We have lionized them and given them value far beyond their bad behavior. So they go on with that behavior, hide it, don't talk about it, and don't learn from it. They do this because we're more than willing to let them. They realize their entertainment value to us and for that we are willing to pay a hefty price for their redemption. They know this, we don't.

The bad behavior that so often characterizes our heroes is related to our willingness to accept it. That we do, to the point where the behavior is no longer an isolated event, but becomes a game plan. In the overall scheme of the individual's play book, they will play, deceitfully adhering to bad behavior while their adoring fans, the public, only find out when its too late. They know this. We obviously don't or we simply don't care. Which is it?

What we fail to recognize is the underlying culture that breeds deceitful behavior and the shallow circumstances under which it can be excused away. We use any justification possible to feel good about our choices, even in the face of overwhleming evidence to the contrary. And once again, we let them go on with their wrong.

We just touch the surface of these people, just enough to stroke their egos, but never challenge them to expose the real side. Too often, our heroes are fragile. Too much introspection and they come undone, often at tremendous costs. Although we idolize people in all walks of life, entertainers, celebrities, and politicians seem to be the focal point of aberrant behavior; They are definitely in the spotlight more, but fallen heroes are replete in every industry and in every lifestyle, witness Enron.
George Bush is a another examaple.

We knew this man was in his own special way, corrupt from the start. We knew his oil background and a laundry list of items that were questionable from the start. We ignored it because we needed a "hero" in the deepest American sense and we got what we asked for and then we went back and did it again. Once more, we didn't care to investigate or delve too closely into the undelying culture which breeds this type of deceit. Or maybe we just didn't care?

We take at face value, the traffic of deceit and watch it unfold in varying degrees until the evil implicit in its advance becomes whole, and the pie is ruined. We are never willing to admit that these acts are of themselves the product of a culture that tolerates them.

We continually elect and reelect corrupt politicians, promote incompetent people to positions of high authority. name crooks to head sensitive departments, and the list goes on. Who indeed represents the fool? They or us? I would gander that these so-called heroes have the last laugh, and rightfully so.

Americans need to engage in more critical thinking. That thinking requires that we stop taking every thing at face value and start delving deeper into the psyche of those, we desire to lionize. It could save us lot of time in the future, not to mention the loss of face to a global world that until recently, admired us.