Heroes, past and present

Interesting article, with which I mostly agree. (Thanks to JM for alerting me to it.)

clipped from www.american.com Hollywood’s Hero Deficit By James Bowman From the July/August 2008 Issue A spate of movies about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the war on terror came out last year, all of them hostile to U.S. involvement and all of them box-office flops. At the time there was a certain amount of soul-searching in the media as to why, when most Americans told pollsters they thought the Iraq war, at least, had been a mistake, they didn’t seem to want to go and see movies that sought to show them just how great a mistake it had been. During and after World War II, real-life heroes often looked to the likes of John Wayne to see what a hero was supposed to look and act like. Such men hardly exist now. The point of the heroes Hollywood has specialized in over the last 35 years has been to make sure that heroism can exist only on a plane far from the daily lives of the audience. Where there is no hope of a better world, there can be little to distinguish heroes from villains.