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I just now heard documentary film-maker, Ken Burns, speaking with Keith Olbermann about the perhaps over-the-top adulation being afforded President Obama on the occasion of his inauguration, say something that I consider to be as profound as it is true. Burns reflected that our heroes are always somewhat less than we come to imagine them to be. But, he said, (and I must paraphrase now) the difference between Abraham Lincoln as he actually was, and Abraham Lincoln as we have exalted him, is that which we want of, and for, ourselves.
In the case of our exaltation of President Obama, therefore, if we do that which we would do, rather than that which we would not, then our success will maintain Obama up there in that high place to which our enthusiasm has lifted him today.
As Obama has said: It's not about him; it's about us.
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Showing posts with label Heroes. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Heroes. Show all posts
Tuesday, January 20, 2009
Monday, August 6, 2007
Heroes - #3 (cont.)
Bob Dylan – Part Two
[NB: Anyone arriving at this blog for the first time at this point, who would like to read this essay from the beginning, should scroll down to the August 2, 2007 entry “Reflections: Heroes.”]
In 1964, I had an opportunity to see Bob Dylan live in concert, in the auditorium of my high school. Fortunately, I don’t need to reconstruct my reflections on that event from the shards of memory, as I can provide, unedited, with period adolescent, mid-Western, naïveté fully intact, my contemporaneous journal entry from the day after the concert.
But I have already hyped this Dylan thing well beyond my ability to propound it convincingly. It is necessary here to cop out, to state that to understand what Dylan was by 1965, you had to have been there: I can’t translate it into words. For a year, or two, or four…Dylan was the embodiment of the Zeitgeist for a particular subspecies of American youth, of which I was one dazed and confused specimen. We wanted a hero. We needed a leader. We tried to seize Bob Dylan by main force to anoint him our philosopher-king, our warrior-prophet, our King David. And Bob Dylan, as if by magic, slipped unnoticed out of the mob, and, from a safe distance, flipped us the bird. “Don’t follow leaders*,” he snarled. And I haven’t had a hero since.
In his refusal to be idolized, Dylan instructed me in two things: Don’t examine the random contingencies of my life, he said, examine my work. And in examining my work, he added, don’t ask me what it means—ask your self.
Yeah…well…if you think about it, that’s about the same attitude that, say, Shakespeare took.
______________________
* Look out kid
You're gonna get hit
By losers, cheaters
Six-time users
Hangin' 'round the theaters
Girl by the whirlpool
Lookin' for a new fool
Don't follow leaders
Watch the parkin' meters
[NB: Anyone arriving at this blog for the first time at this point, who would like to read this essay from the beginning, should scroll down to the August 2, 2007 entry “Reflections: Heroes.”]
In 1964, I had an opportunity to see Bob Dylan live in concert, in the auditorium of my high school. Fortunately, I don’t need to reconstruct my reflections on that event from the shards of memory, as I can provide, unedited, with period adolescent, mid-Western, naïveté fully intact, my contemporaneous journal entry from the day after the concert.
But I have already hyped this Dylan thing well beyond my ability to propound it convincingly. It is necessary here to cop out, to state that to understand what Dylan was by 1965, you had to have been there: I can’t translate it into words. For a year, or two, or four…Dylan was the embodiment of the Zeitgeist for a particular subspecies of American youth, of which I was one dazed and confused specimen. We wanted a hero. We needed a leader. We tried to seize Bob Dylan by main force to anoint him our philosopher-king, our warrior-prophet, our King David. And Bob Dylan, as if by magic, slipped unnoticed out of the mob, and, from a safe distance, flipped us the bird. “Don’t follow leaders*,” he snarled. And I haven’t had a hero since.
In his refusal to be idolized, Dylan instructed me in two things: Don’t examine the random contingencies of my life, he said, examine my work. And in examining my work, he added, don’t ask me what it means—ask your self.
Yeah…well…if you think about it, that’s about the same attitude that, say, Shakespeare took.
______________________
* Look out kid
You're gonna get hit
By losers, cheaters
Six-time users
Hangin' 'round the theaters
Girl by the whirlpool
Lookin' for a new fool
Don't follow leaders
Watch the parkin' meters
Friday, August 3, 2007
Heroes - #1
Al Kaline
The first of my heroes is an athlete--for more than two decades the star of my "hometown" team, the Detroit Tigers: Al Kaline. This was a man who combined skill and class. Kaline was a gifted player, a triple threat: he could run, throw, and hit. He was a reliable clutch hitter, an extraordinary right-fielder, and a smart, if not super-fast base runner. With Kaline patrolling right-field, players on opposing teams did not take the extra base. Kaline’s arm was extraordinary. He once threw a man out at home from the seat of his pants.
Al Kaline was the star of the Detroit Tigers—the only team he ever played for—from the time I first began to follow baseball as a ten-year-old boy, playing pick-up games on the sandlots of Ann Arbor, until I was a graduate of the University of Michigan; a jaded and cynical survivor of the ‘sixties; married, employed, and living in New York City. Al Kaline was a stabilizing constant throughout the manifold crises of that turbulent era.
Kaline never embarrassed himself or his team, either on or off the field. Although he was elected to the Hall of Fame as soon as he was eligible, I’ve heard it argued that Kaline wasn’t really a great ballplayer. His life-time batting average was just under .300 and, although he collected over 3000 hits, he finished his career one short of 400 home runs. But if Kaline was only a “good” ballplayer, he elevated good to the level of greatness by being consistently very good over a span of two decades.
Near the end of his playing days, his gifts finally beginning to fade, the Tiger management offered to reward Kaline’s long and stellar career with a $100K contract—superstar pay for that era. Kaline turned it down. He didn’t feel that his productivity in the previous season had earned him a raise. They don’t make them like that any longer.
The first of my heroes is an athlete--for more than two decades the star of my "hometown" team, the Detroit Tigers: Al Kaline. This was a man who combined skill and class. Kaline was a gifted player, a triple threat: he could run, throw, and hit. He was a reliable clutch hitter, an extraordinary right-fielder, and a smart, if not super-fast base runner. With Kaline patrolling right-field, players on opposing teams did not take the extra base. Kaline’s arm was extraordinary. He once threw a man out at home from the seat of his pants.
Al Kaline was the star of the Detroit Tigers—the only team he ever played for—from the time I first began to follow baseball as a ten-year-old boy, playing pick-up games on the sandlots of Ann Arbor, until I was a graduate of the University of Michigan; a jaded and cynical survivor of the ‘sixties; married, employed, and living in New York City. Al Kaline was a stabilizing constant throughout the manifold crises of that turbulent era.
Kaline never embarrassed himself or his team, either on or off the field. Although he was elected to the Hall of Fame as soon as he was eligible, I’ve heard it argued that Kaline wasn’t really a great ballplayer. His life-time batting average was just under .300 and, although he collected over 3000 hits, he finished his career one short of 400 home runs. But if Kaline was only a “good” ballplayer, he elevated good to the level of greatness by being consistently very good over a span of two decades.
Near the end of his playing days, his gifts finally beginning to fade, the Tiger management offered to reward Kaline’s long and stellar career with a $100K contract—superstar pay for that era. Kaline turned it down. He didn’t feel that his productivity in the previous season had earned him a raise. They don’t make them like that any longer.
Thursday, August 2, 2007
Reflections: Heroes
Heroes
The contemporary cinematic and video game fixation on comic book Super Heroes seems to me to be symptomatic of a subconscious, global hunger for the real thing. In the frailty of our fleeting, often isolated, existences, we desperately wish for a Superman – a force for Good--out there somewhere--ready to swoop down and apply his perfect and inevitable justice against any and all evils which threaten to render our anxiety-prone lives as terrible as we fear they may one day become. It is these Super Heroes—these dumbed-down, mass-produced avatars of Nietzsche’s Übermensch —which prove how far out of touch with the Transcendent our culture has become. Our hiding of our herky-jerky eyes behind the fantastic reality of a comic book, or in the pixilated virtual depths of a video screen, is symptomatic of our inability to place our faith in either real human heroes, with their Achilles’ heels, feet of clay, and fatal tragic flaws--or in Eternity. We are able to love neither Fate, nor Father.
You may have guessed that I am not a fan of comic books. And I haven’t seen even one of the Batman flicks. Not even the nearly nude body of Angelina Jolie can lure me into a theater where my head will be overwhelmed by a soul-numbing mixture of too loud sound, too fast quick-cut editing, and too little real meaning. I can’t humble myself before an ersatz god. Have a blast, but deal me out.
So I have no heroes today, whether tragically flawed, but human--or super. I am as afflicted as the next guy by existential nausea. But as a younger person, and not yet so thoroughly acquainted with the frailties that the flesh is heir to, there were three men who, I must admit, each served a stint as hero in my life. In the next few days, I will briefly expound on each of them.
The contemporary cinematic and video game fixation on comic book Super Heroes seems to me to be symptomatic of a subconscious, global hunger for the real thing. In the frailty of our fleeting, often isolated, existences, we desperately wish for a Superman – a force for Good--out there somewhere--ready to swoop down and apply his perfect and inevitable justice against any and all evils which threaten to render our anxiety-prone lives as terrible as we fear they may one day become. It is these Super Heroes—these dumbed-down, mass-produced avatars of Nietzsche’s Übermensch —which prove how far out of touch with the Transcendent our culture has become. Our hiding of our herky-jerky eyes behind the fantastic reality of a comic book, or in the pixilated virtual depths of a video screen, is symptomatic of our inability to place our faith in either real human heroes, with their Achilles’ heels, feet of clay, and fatal tragic flaws--or in Eternity. We are able to love neither Fate, nor Father.
You may have guessed that I am not a fan of comic books. And I haven’t seen even one of the Batman flicks. Not even the nearly nude body of Angelina Jolie can lure me into a theater where my head will be overwhelmed by a soul-numbing mixture of too loud sound, too fast quick-cut editing, and too little real meaning. I can’t humble myself before an ersatz god. Have a blast, but deal me out.
So I have no heroes today, whether tragically flawed, but human--or super. I am as afflicted as the next guy by existential nausea. But as a younger person, and not yet so thoroughly acquainted with the frailties that the flesh is heir to, there were three men who, I must admit, each served a stint as hero in my life. In the next few days, I will briefly expound on each of them.
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