The Hero Report

Heroism That is Taught & Retained?

mattlangdon:

Motorcyclist chases down a hit and run car. Not for the first time.

“My daddy didn’t bring up cowards,” he said. “A man has to step up when he needs to step up.”

Homeric Heroism and Tennis

kohenari:

Over at Grantland yesterday, Brian Phillips went all in on the sports figures as heroes trope, comparing the Big Three in contemporary men’s tennis to some of the warriors in Homer’s Iliad:

One of the great things about this era of the game, though — it goes along with the cruelty we were just talking about — is that it feels almost epic. That’s a word that gets thrown around a lot in sports, but I mean it literally here. Think about, say, The Iliad. It’s a book about combat, about wild golden armies tearing each other to shreds, but here and there in every battle there are heroes whom no one can touch. Hector and Achilles and Ajax and the other superheroes of the B.C.E. basically wade through the enemy, mowing down everything in their path. They’re not even in danger. There’s absolutely no chance that some minor Trojan is going to bring down Achilles; it’s not happening. And after hundreds of pages of this, when they finally start facing each other, you can’t freaking believe how intense the moment is, because you’ve been primed to think they’re invincible.

Isn’t that basically the state of tennis today? Federer, Nadal, and Djokovic have won every major tournament but one in the last seven years. The occasional Jo-Willie Tsonga crack-up aside, those three and Andy Murray are practically guaranteed to meet in every semifinal. They spend the early rounds of the tournament scything down ranks of lesser players, and when they finally play each other, you can’t freaking believe how intense it is. They’re all larger than life. They all seem essentially invincible.

It’s undoubtedly true that Federer, Nadal, and Djokovic are incredibly good at playing tennis. It is hard to imagine that anyone other than these guys will win a major championship. But that’s precisely where the comparison breaks down.

Achilles and Hector — and to a lesser extent Ajax and Diomedes — slash and cut their way through countless opponents without much trouble, but it all leads to the showdown between the two great champions that will have a decisive impact on the Trojan War. And when that showdown happens, it’s a let-down; it doesn’t resemble the epic struggle between Nadal and Djokovic at all.

Hector sees Achilles running toward him across the plain … and he takes off in the other direction. Hector has no chance in a fight against Achilles and he knows it. Indeed, the only reason he stops running is because Athena tricks him into thinking that one of his comrades-in-arms has come to help him; with the odds thus seemingly improved, he decides to stand and fight. But the odds haven’t actually changed at all, the battle ends very quickly, and Achilles in his savagery attempts to desecrate Hector’s corpse for weeks thereafter. There’s no six-hour match between two evenly-matched champions in the Iliad.

And this ties in directly with the part of the comparison that is the least apt:

Neither Achilles nor Hector seem at all invincible. They’re fragile human beings, just like us, and — as such — what is most interesting about them as heroes is that we know they both lose.

The larger-than-life struggle between Achilles and Hector cannot possibly end well for either; as any high school student well knows, both champions will meet their fates in this confrontation with one another. Hector cannot possibly survive his confrontation with the demigod Achilles, irrespective of the courage he displays prior to their meeting. Achilles, on the other hand, will emerge victorious from this battle but there is a prophecy that he cannot survive the war against Troy if he chooses to fight.

In this sense, the warriors of the Iliad are even more compelling than the Big Three because we already know a) how things will end and b) that things will end badly. Watching the drama unfold, watching the choices that each warrior makes in the waning hours of his life, serves as a powerful reminder for all of us that our own choices are desperately important because, like those great warriors, we too are finite beings with finite choices to make.

Israeli documentarian tackles the question of what makes a hero

After documenting West Bank checkpoints and anti-Semitism, filmmaker Yoav Shamir is now training his camera on the individuals who, despite all odds, help other people in distress. Last week, iconic filmmaker Michael Moore came on board.

He’s working with Phil Zimbardo and has interviewed the Subway Hero, Wesley Autrey.