All My Heroes are Dead, They Died in My Head

I was recently watching the 1981 Clash of the Titans, and at the end Zeus holds Perseus up to the honor of a hero. One of the goddesses asks, a I paraphrase, "What if all men acted as he did? What then?" To which Zeus smiles and replies, "Then we won't be needed anymore." Then I watched the new Clash of the Titans released in 2010, which is a very different story, because humans no longer need the gods. Perseus doesn't marry Andromeda, renounces being king, denies being a hero, and revels in being human. Two very different myths occur, in 1981 the hero was very much the hero, but in 2010 the hero is the anti-hero par excellence.

Can we safely say there are no heroes anymore? I think so. What a dramatic turn of events have occurred in the past three or four decades. Through a series of legislation, political policies, capitalistic/nihilistic/objectivist philosophy, and an encouraging shift in the ideology of the American Dream, Americans have gotten to the point where the anti-hero is held up on a pedestal.

Consider Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead, where the protagonist, Howard Roark, is the anti-hero, and he is the source of all that is great. This is the exact capitalistic society we endorse and encourage. And in light of recent protests over SOPA, if Roark is the fountainhead (i.e. source of originality, copyrights), the Roark dynamiting his own building for others making modifications to it is SOPA. We have to save our rights and intellectual property (buildings/internet) by blowing them to smithereens (SOPA).

When I say there are no more heroes, I should clarify here that I do not denounce men and women in the military risking their lives for our illusive freedom. We call them heroes, but I don't think that word means what we think it means anymore. And I think that is clearly demonstrated in our apathy towards our brothers and sisters in arms. WWI and WWII we celebrated the homecoming of our men from Europe, and they were glorified for their duties served. Vietnam, Korea, the Gulf War, Iraq, Afghanistan... yeah, not so much. Our government treats them like pawns, and a large chunk of the country could care less they died or were wounded for us. They are brave and courageous men and women, yes, and I will honor them for that. But the US has committed what can only be described as atrocities (and that's an understatement) through these valiant soldiers who are used as pawns in a game of devils. So, I solute them for their valor, and feel sorry for them at the same time, because we are all pawns.

And our apathy towards their service only augments my argument for our praise of the anti-hero. But what is more is our view of villains. Back to pop-culture, which best illustrates our contemporary views of the world, in the TV series Lost the villain, or bad guy, is always relative (as in the Einsteinian sense of relativity). All a villain is is our need to blame someone. In essence, the villain is a scapegoat. Is the villain him or her? Is it them? Or the other them? Or the other other them? There is no villain anymore, just like there is no hero, just whoever gets pointed the finger.

In the 1930s the villain was Germany and Japan. Once our villain was vanquished our enemy became Mother Russia, because we needed something to fear. The Red Scare illustrates how far our relative villain will go, when neighbors turned on neighbors (not to mention the Salem Witch Trails almost 300 years prior). Now that the Cold War has long been dead, our villain switched to the Middle East, but no one in particular. Hussein? Sure, he served as scapegoat for sometime, but 9-11 happened and we received a new enemy to blame for our troubles: terrorists, our most vague and elusive villain yet.

Are we getting the picture? We didn't need the gods because we had heroes, which could be viewed as the humanist movement in the Renaissance. Now we no longer need heroes. They served their purpose, just as the gods served their's, and secured for us a world we can take and handle from here. Right? The hero always faced an opposing force, but without heroes, where are our villains? They're all dead. We killed them. It's all turned into a high-stakes game of anti-heroes and terrorists (like cowboys and Indians), where it's all speculation (like capitalism itself) and we have no idea what's going on or what will happen next. It is all like the game show Who's Line is it Anyway? "where the rules are made up and the points don't matter." I think that is an accurate summary of contemporary American democracy (whatever that means", where the rules are made up and the votes don't matter.

"All my heroes are dead, they died in my head."
~Slipknot