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When you ride ALONE you ride with bin Laden #4
What the government should be telling us to help fight the war on terrorism.
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by Bill Maher
The fourth installment of a sampling of essays from the marvelous book of the same name, written by the funniest social and political satirist since Mark Twain.
Installment index
A Hill of Beans
 O MUCH TALK, so little action. But, that's the way it has to be if we want to persist in stretching the meaning of "hero" the way we stretch the meaning of everything else in America. If a "suite" is any room in a hotel, and having sex with a girl when she's drunk counts as "rape," then "heroes" can be anyone caught in harm's way.
Except they're not. Victims find themselves in harm's way, heroes put themselves in harm's way. Trapped miners are not heroes; they're guys in a hard job who ran into some bad luck. It's also not heroic to "beat" cancer or prevail in any other endeavor where your motivation is totally saving or advancing your own ass. A hero sacrifices something on purpose, something big. When a culture purposefully blurs that distinction, they're already making excuses for losing.
Trapped miners are not heroes; they're guys in a hard job who ran into some bad luck. It's also not heroic to "beat" cancer or prevail in any other endeavor where your motivation is totally saving or advancing your own ass.
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The airmen who landed our crippled spy plane in China in April of 2000 were lauded as heroes; they may be, but not for that. It's certainly heroic just to choose military service in this prosperous, indulgent society, and for that alone all our servicemen are due our ultimate respect. But the heroic thing to do in the situation over Communist China would have been to not land the spy plane with the treasure trove of intelligence data.
"The problems of three little people don't amount to a hill of beans in this world," Humphrey Bogart said in Casablanca.
I had to laugh in 1997 when critics kept comparing Casablanca to that year's Oscar winner The English Patient, because both films involved a man caught between a woman he loved and the greater cause of winning World War II. Of course, in 1943 the hero -- Bogart -- chooses the war instead of the girl, and in 1996 the "hero" does the exact opposite -- a slight change in values.
In the forties, when Ted Williams first gave up his lucrative and magnificent baseball career to go fight the Germans, that was heroism, but it was also routine. Jimmy Stewart was a huge movie star, and he went, as did Gable and Henry Fonda and Tyrone Power and plenty of others. Rich kids, too, like Jack Kennedy and George Herbert Walker Bush, also signed up, because some things were more important than money. Nowadays, we talk a good game about how much we love and support our military personnel, but the truth is it's a mercenary army made up of the poorest members of society with the most limited career choices, who stand up and fight so we don't have to. The public is really no more in touch with the soldiers who protect them than millionaire athletes today are in touch with the fans.
Which is why a Pat Tillman is so impressive. Because Pat Tillman is doing the same thing Ted Williams did, but he's doing it today. Today, when a guy would have to be missing the padding in his helmet to even consider giving up the multi-million dollar contracts and the endorsement deals all so he can go eat sand in Crapistan for eighteen grand a year.
But that's exactly what Tillman is doing, having said goodbye to his $1.2-million-dollar-a-year job as the Arizona Cardinals leading tackler.
When it comes to understanding that "hero" is higher than "celebrity," and not the other way around, Pat Tillman gets it. Lots of Americans don't, including the media, who attempt to "celebrity" every legitimate hero of 9/11, and even did it to the first soldier killed in Afghanistan, CIA agent Johnny Spann. You couldn't watch a news broadcast the week he died without seeing some tear-jerk piece about his career and his wife and his three children and exactly where he lived -- you know, all the information a dead CIA operative would want out there. Forget that he was a member of a clandestine service or that publicizing his personal life might put his family at risk, the important thing was that we got an Access Hollywood segment out of it.
If you don't love Pat Tillman already for leaving football for life, and maybe death, how about this: he did the whole thing, made such a drastic change in his life, without sitting for one interview, or in any way involving the media. I don't know about you, but that's a hero to me.
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