Heroism: McCain, Trump — Thanes, Jesus, Football

If Donald Trump weren't Donald Trump and American politics so over-heated, Trump might have started a useful discussion about Heroism in his attack on John McCain. There's a lot of continuity and a lot of change in how the ideal of "hero" gets applied in the stories of Gilgamesh and Achilles, Christ and the Sarah Connor and Ellen Ripley of the James Cameron and Gale Anne Hurd TERMINATOR and ALIENS movies.

My students would quote at me, "You're a hero or a zero" and by "hero" they meant a winner ("Winning isn't everything; it's the only thing"; defeating enemies as "the greatest gift of the gods," «Sieg heil!» = "Hail, Victory!"). 

Can there be tragic heroes? Heroes who die in a good losing cause: Beowulf dying for a doomed people, some unremembered grunt who threw himself on a grenade to save his friends? Is there heroic death in a bad cause? 

Can one be a suffering hero, like Jesus on the cross — he was repackaged as a warrior in the great Old English poem "The Dream of the Cross" — a hero of endurance and loyalty like, well, John McCain?

We didn't have that discussion, and I don't expect one like it in my lifetime; and I think American culture poorer for that.

Rest in peace, John McCain. You screwed up a lot, and you've been a hero. May the memory of that heroism be a blessing.

"Punk!" OR, An Observation On the Donald J. Trump's Pushing Aside Dusko Markovic, Prime Minister of Montenegro 24/25 May 2017

Washington (CNN) While walking with the NATO leaders 

during his visit to the alliance's headquarters Thursday, 

President Donald Trump pushed aside Dusko Markovic, 

the prime minister of Montenegro, 

as he moved to the front of a group of the leaders.

Ignoring the sort of behavioral problems that can go with mental problems that go with his increasing language problems over time — What we've got with President Trump's bulvon behavior is also an idea of manliness that would work for a big-city street punk ... but only when dealing with other punks. That military school his family sent him off to should have taught him better, or watching a few minutes of President Obama's Chicago style for a man of power (beautifully parodied by Joe Mantegna's over-controlled, over-correct Fat Tony D'Amico on THE SIMPSONS).

Mr. Trump's popularity with significant demographics in pop culture and politics points at widespread juvenilization of ideas of masculinity shoved to my attention when I had to explain to my overly-polite, mostly-good-Catholic Miami University (Oxford, OH) students that Michael Biehn's quiet but strong Kyle Reese and Cpl. Dwayne Hicks were the male role models in TERMINATOR and ALIENS and not Bill Paxton's motor-mouth punks, nor Jenette Goldstein's macha (sic) Pvt. Vasquez, nor the Terminator: the ultimate macho-man as no man at all but an unfeeling killer robot.

A friend of mine and I used to jokingly throw out the line, "Ah, I fear for the Republic!" I'm feeling that line as increasingly less of a joke. "Swaggering Strong Man" is more than just a style, and its dangers have been obvious and harped upon since (at least) old King Hrothgar sermonized on the subject at length to the young Beowulf. The swaggerer commanding the most lethal military on the planet in 2017 has character flaws that would disqualify him for leadership of a proto-Viking war band in the European Dark Ages.