THE HEROIC HEART
© 2015 by Tod Lindberg
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FIRST AMERICAN EDITION
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Lindberg, Tod.
The heroic heart: greatness ancient and modern/by Tod Lindberg.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-59403-824-2 (ebook)
1. Conduct of life. 2. Heroes. I. Title.
BJ1533.H47L56 2015
205—dc23
2015005296
For David Robins
CONTENTS
CHAPTER 2 The Danger of Heroes
CHAPTER 3 The Hero-King
CHAPTER 4 A Hero’s Bargain
CHAPTER 5 Heroism and Democracy
CHAPTER 6 The Backlash Against the Slaying Hero
CHAPTER 7 Vestigial and Virtual Heroes
CHAPTER 8 The Saving Hero
CHAPTER 9 Sacrifice and Generosity
CHAPTER 10 The Return of the Slaying Hero?
Acknowledgments
Sources and References
Index
. . . tho’
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
—Tennyson, “Ulysses”
I present to you a book I have been working on all my life, though not until recently with a view that the problems I was trying to figure out would turn into a book one day.
Do you have someone you consider to be your hero? Did you ever? Do you consider anyone, living or dead, to exemplify in one way or another the quality of greatness? I do, and did, and do.
And if you happen to be inclined to devote ten minutes to making a list of the people you have considered exceptionally admirable at one time or another in your life, I think your list no less than mine would form a proper beginning for an investigation of the qualities that make a hero—exemplary figures of human greatness, contemporary or historical, real or quasi-mythical or imaginary.
What a variety of characters populate my list of heroes. Who looms large? My parents, first of all: In the absence of tragic circumstances, early childhood seems inevitably to ascribe larger-than-life stature to Mom and Dad. Then comes an inevitable period of ups and downs, middle school emphatically included. Later, if all goes well, comes a grown-up appreciation of who they were and what they did for you. In my case, that turned out to have been a lot more than they were under any reasonable obligation to do.
My mother was badly afflicted at an early age with rheumatoid arthritis, and the joints of her fingers were frozen into awkwardly painful positions. She and my father long wanted children, but the years went by without success, to the point at which hope was fleeting. I was a late-arriving surprise.
Stomach cancer, first misdiagnosed as an ulcer, claimed my mother in her late forties when I was about 13; it’s unlikely given the state of treatment at the time that a proper diagnosis would have changed the outcome. Her battle did not last long.
I mention her lifelong adversity because my mother was undaunted by it until the end. She was a teacher, though not full-time once I came along; but as I got older she took longer-term assignments as a substitute. She was in high demand at an area school for special needs children, who were then called mentally retarded. I am not above a certain coarseness of expression. But from my earliest youth onward, the use of “retard” to refer to someone with disabilities has struck me much the way the N-word strikes decent people nowadays. It evokes visceral disgust. This is a legacy of my mother (who actually was a woman above coarseness of expression).
She was a natural leader and was good at most everything she did. I was bursting with pride when she became president of the Women’s Club of White Oak Heights only a couple years after we moved to that suburban Pittsburgh neighborhood. Once her term was over, I liked to look at her name in the club’s annual guidebook in the list of “Past Presidents.” Her cooking was delicious beyond all expectation in the late 1960s; I retain to this day a taste memory of the shrimp Newburg she often made for company. As for her excellence in local bridge tournaments, usually playing with my father, I once asked Mom how well Dad knew the game; she sweetly replied that it didn’t matter that much, because she knew Dad.
My father was an Eagle Scout, a rank I never attained, and he took over as scoutmaster of my troop as I was beginning to outgrow it, continuing for several years in the absence of any current scout father stepping up. He was a man without great ambition but reasonably successful in his career, working as a traffic agent moving coal for the railroad, eventually becoming Coal Sales Manager in Chicago, the final stop of four cities of increasing size in my youth.
That’s where calamity struck with the death of my mother. I can’t imagine what that
