JENNY LYN BADER
LARGER THAN LIFE
We require a new pantheon: a set of heroes upon whom we can rely. who
will not desert us when the winds change, and whom we will not desert. It's
unsettling, if not downright depressing. to go through life embarrassed about
the identity of one's childhood idols.
.
Maybe we should stick to role models Instead. Heroes have become ~~
quaint, as old-fashioned as gas-guzzlers - and as unwieldy, requiring too
much investment and energy. Role models are more like compact cars, less
glam and roomy but easier to handle. They take up less parking space in the
imagination . Role models have a certain degree of cOnsciousness about their
job. The cast members of Beverly Hills 90210, for example: have acknowl­
edged that they serve as role models for adolescents, and their characters be­
have accordingly: they refrain from committing major crimes; they overcome
inclinations toward substance abuse; they see through adult hypocrisy; and
any misdemeanors they do perpetrate are punished. For moral mediators we
could do better, but at least the prime-time writing staff is aware of the bur­
den of having teen groupies.
Heroes don't have the luxury of staff writers or the opportunity to en­
dorse designer jeans. Hercules can't go on Nightline and pledge to stop taking
steroids. Prometheus can't get a presidential pardon . Columbus won't have a
chance to weep to Barbara Walters that he didn't mean to endanger
leatherback turtles or monk seals or the tribes of the Lucayas. Elizabeth I
never wrote a best-seller about how she did it her way.
Role models can go on talk shows, or even host them . Role models may
live next door. While a hero might be a courageous head of state, a saint, a
leader of armies. a role model might be someone who put in a three-day pres­
idential bid, your local minister, your boss. They don't need their planes to gQ
down in flames to earn respect. Role models have a job, accomplishment, or
hairstyle worth emulating.
Rather than encompassing that vast kit and caboodle of ideals, role mod­
els can perform a little neat division of labor. One could wish to give orders
like Norman Schwarzkopf but perform psychoanalysis like Lucy Van Pelt, to
chair a round-table meeting as well as King Arthur but negotiate as well as
Queen Esther,1 to eat like Orson Welles but look like Helen of Troy. and so
forth . It was General Schwarzkopf, the most tangible military hero for anyone
my age, who vied instead for role-model status by claiming on the cover of his
book: It Doesn't Take a Hero. With this title he modestly implies that anyone
with some smarts and elan could strateglze and storm as well as he has.
Role models are admirable Individuals who haven't given up their lives or
livelihoods and may even have a few hangups. They don't have to be prone to
excessive self-sacrifice. They don't go on hunger strikes; they diet. They are
therefore more likely than heroes to be free for lunch, and they are oftener
still alive.
Heroism is a living thing for many of my contemporaries. In my informal
poll, I not only heard sob stories about the 'decline of heroes, I also discovered
something surprising: the ascent of parents. While the founding fathers may
be passe, actual mothers, fathers, grands, and great-grands are undeniably
"in." An overwhelming number of those I polled named their household fore­
bears as those they most admired. By choosing their own relatives as ideals,
people In their twenties have replaced Impersonal heroes with the most per­
sonal role models Qf all. Members of my purportedly lost generation have not
only realized that it's time to stop believing In Santa Claus, they have chosen
to believe instead in their families - the actual tooth fairy, the real Mr. and
Mrs. Claus. They have stopped needing the folks from the North Pole, the guys
with the wigs, the studs and studettes in tights and capes,
In a way It bodes well that Superman and the rest could be killed or re­
ported missing, They were needed to quash the most villainous folks of all: ·in­
sane communists bearing nuclear weapons, heinous war criminals, monsters
named Doomsday. The good news about Superman bleeding to death was
that Doomsday died In the struggle.
If the good guys are gone, so Is the world that divides down the middle
into good guys and bad guys. A world without heroes is a rigorous, demand­
ing place, where things don't boll down to black and white but are rich with
shades of gray; where faith in lofty. dead personages can be replaced by faith
in ourselves and one another; where we must summon the strength to imag­
ine a five-dimensional future In colors not yet invented. My generation grew
up to see our world shift, so It's up to us to steer a course between naivete
and nihilism, to reshape Vintage stories, to create stories of spirit without
apologies.
I've heard a few. There was one about the woman who taught Shake­
speare to inner-city fourth graders in Chicago who were previously thought to
be retarded or hopeless. There was a college groundskeeper and night watch­
man, a black man with a seventh-grade education, who became a contracts
expert, wrote poetry and memoirs, and invested his salary so wisely that he
bequeathed 450 acres of mountainous parkland to the university when he
'Queen Esther
Jewish heroine of the biblical Book of Esther. - Eos .
50
died. There was the motorcyclist who slid under an eighteen-wheeler at full speed, survived his physical therapy only to wind up in a plane crash, recov­
ered, and as a disfigured quadriplegic started a bUSiness. got happily married, and ran for public office; his campaign button bore a caption that said "Send me to Congress and I won't be just another pretty face. .. ." When asked for her heroes, a colleague of mine spoke of her great­
grandmother, a woman whose husband left her with three kids in GaliCia, near Poland, and went to the United States. He meant to send for her, but the First World War broke out. When she made it to America, her husband soon died, and she supported her family: at one point she even ran a nightclub. Ac­
cording to the great-granddaughter, "When she was ninety she would tell me she was going to volunteer at [he hospital. I would ask how and she'd say, 'Oh, I just go over there to read to the old folks: The 'old folks' were probably seventy. She was a great lady." My grandmother saved her family, too, in the next great war. She did not 5;
··live to see the age of the fax, but she did see something remarkable in her
time, more remarkable even than the emperor riding down the street: she
saw him walking down the street.. I used to ask her, "Did you really see the
emperor Franz Josef walking down the street?"
She would say, "Ya. Walking down the street." I would laugh, and though
she'd repeat it to amuse me, she did not see what was so funny. To me, the
emperor was someone you met in history books, not on the streets of Vienna.
He was larger than life, a surprising pedestrian. He was probably just getting
some air, but he was also laying the groundwork for my nostalgia of that time
when it would be natural for him to take an evening stroll, when those who
were larger than life roamed cobblestones.
Today, life is larger.
.