View From The Middle
Dad Tried To Tell Me Heroes Are Real....Not Any More
By Charles Rogers

What the hell is going on? Our heroes are either deserting us or they've been found out to be frauds - non-heroes - phonies. They'll get around to letting us know how much of a phony as soon as they collect their money and pull off their masks.

When we were children, it was easy for Mom or Dad to point out those figures on the TV set and designate them as role models - people to be emulated as we grew up - from every profession, whether jet pilots or football "greats." Likewise with basketball hoop stars and even political, artistic and literary giants. It was a natural, really, because these were easy to define: heroes by every measure.

Easy. All you had to do was check their accomplishments. Dad would be glad to "tsk, tsk" and remark about how many yards a particular football player ran for a touchdown and then elaborate on the player's statistics, or what it took for an astronaut to wiggle into that soup-can-like container on top of the Apollo rocket and be hurled into outer space.

Heroes. Dad didn't have to tell me too much. I'd seen these people in the movies or in comic books. My friends and I knew, especially when we went to the Garden (yeah, THAT Garden) and saw the NBA hoopsters up close (Heck, even the referees were larger than life). We'd go home and check out the papers - most of the time the sports pages first - and find that home run records were, or were not, being broken that year. Although there were still a lot of heroes around. And if no records were broken, we always had the heroes of days gone by, Dad said (Where have you gone Joe DiMaggio?). They were all people we'd look up to. "They'll break that record next year," we'd say.

Think about it. True, things were different. I don't have to tell you what years I'm talking about. It doesn't matter what years. Things were a lot different before because we had what we considered bona fide heroes. Right here in the good ol' U.S. of A. Nobody could beat us because our heroes were home-grown. They stepped out of that movie screen or comic book and said, "Step aside. I'll take it from here!"

The "Right Stuff" astronauts. Men and women who were not only ready to take that leap into space because they were courageous, but because they were everything else, too. Smart. Ambitious. Patriotic. Ready in every way.

The better-than-best football star Michael Vick. A gridiron wonder who is (was) already a legend. Headed for the very top of his profession because of his talent and everything else that makes heroes. Can you imagine how youngsters, especially, looked up to him and marveled every time he literally flew across the goal line after catching a game-winning pass? Dad would have dropped his Budweiser if he'd seen that. Mom too.

In the summer, Dad would have marveled at Barry Bonds and Sammy Sosa and Mark McGwire the way they out-home-runned every baseball player who had gone before. These guys were real heroes, he'd say, while still alluding to how great Ruth and Gehrig and DiMaggio were.

The hero thing didn't only concern space men or sports stars, either. Dad had always also looked up to politicians - however naively - and industry leaders, telling his kids that these people were heroes in a different way. The praise extended to other cultures, of course, from music to dance to the other arts.

It was all well and good for the parent-child relationship, of course. A father should help pick out a role model for his son to emulate. The same for mother-daughter, etc., etc.

Dad should see what's happening now!

Mind you, these are just about all allegations, but have you seen the latest info on our astronauts; these people I wanted to go into space with for so many years? These people with whom I wanted to walk on the Moon? I can't say the astronauts might have needed, let's say, a liquid bracer for the trip, but it does sort of erase that image of hero from my mind. With all due respect to the years and years of work that went into their education and expertise in flying that Apollo module thing, I'd sooner jump into a Manhattan Yellow Cab than go to the Moon with them. A friend shouldn't let a friend drive drunk.

As for the football hero. I'm an animal lover, but this kind of barbaric animal is beyond and beneath contempt, if the allegations of his involvement in dog fighting are true. Dad would not even bring up the subject.

There's the NBA referee Tim Donaghy, supposedly caught gambling, even on some of the games at which he officiated. Hey, Dad. What about this larger than life idiot? I wonder if he would have fit into the hero genre?

Then there are the others. For the sake of brevity, I'll just throw a mention, like U.S. Attorney General Gonzales. Now there's a guy to look up to, Dad! There's a guy to whom your kids can aspire to be! Oh, and Governor Spitzer, too. He's a pip. Hasn't been in office for a year and he's already in trouble. Possibly criminal trouble.

Shall we talk about Paris and Nicole and Lindsay and Brittney, Dad? Tell Mom about their heroic examples of how one should conduct oneself, especially if she'"s in the public eye and an example to her peers.

Then there's FEMA. Oh, and Katrina and....

Poor Dad. He really tried to tell the story of how heroes are made and how they live and prosper and become successes and save the world.

Poor Dad.