How Do You Chose Your Heroes?

A hero of today.

Even as a little kid in the fifties, I was hyper-aware of how much grown-ups disapproved of Elvis Presley and of how much teenagers seemed to adore him. Some young women almost seemed to worship him.



One of the chief complaints that grown-ups always seemed to have against Elvis the Pelvis (as I often heard him called) was the bumping and grinding motions of his hips and pubic bone during his singing. They seemed more than suggestive to the generation that had survived the Great Depression and World War II. (Well, some of them survived it.) This parental objection only led the kids to love him all the more.



Parents in the south had one more gripe against him. He had accepted and even begun to specialize in a form of music which was strongly influenced if not outright created by America's black citizens. Many southern parents called it "jungle music" and believed that it would result in a general degradation in the morals of American society.



Sure enough, within a decade we had such phrases as "free love" and "the new morality" being bandied about. None of this was caused by any one race. It was caused by a national acceptance of a lower standard of behavior. It all referred to the new "sexual freedom" which many young people felt they should and could enjoy because of two or three changes which had occured in the world in recent decades. One was "The Pill." A girl could have as many partners as her appetites demanded and still not get pregnant, at least usually not. Then there was the fact that virtually all venereal diseases had been conquered, we thought, by the wonder-drugs called antibiotics, a new class of drug which had been pioneered by the almost accidental discovery in England of Penicillin.



Sex with impunity! No wonder it was our generation, the generation of the sixties, that coined the phrase "free love."



This new "life-style" as some liked to call it, quickly took over, and even television and movies began to depict protagonists ("good guys") as having casual sexual liaisons with just about anybody when they both felt like it. This grew and grew in the seventies. It became common for people to live together as though they were married but not be married and have no plans to be married.



Communes - groups of people living in a form of voluntary socialism - sprang up all over the country. Those who wore the clothes and accepted the philosophies of this movement (sometimes called "the counterculture") were known generally to the older generation as "hippies." Often, it was pronounced as "longhairedhippiefreaks." Genuine antagonism was felt against them, so it was probably a good thing that most (if not all) so-called hippies practiced the peaceful principles they preached or there could have been a blood-bath in the late sixties and long into the seventies.



There was a lot to be angry about back then, it seemed. Some people hated the very idea of communism and looked down on someone who would burn a draft card or flee to Canada to avoid service in Vietnam, the latest of a series of "brush wars" in which the U.S. tried to stop the row of "dominoes" that General Eisenhower had talked about from toppling into the control of the USSR and the Red Chinese. It was a really confusing time, in some ways, because, the kids who fought the war and those who demonstrated, sometimes violently, against it, were all of about the same age and had been raised in very similar ways.



But now they were at each others' throats. Perhaps the most glaring example of this came at Kent State University in 1970. Young demonstrators and young National Guardsmen clashed in an uncontrolled manner which quickly became a shocking news story. A boy, his blood already a pool around him on the sidewalk, was face down as a high school girl who had sluffed class to be there for the demonstration, opened her arms in a cry for help which became one of the most famous photos of the twentieth century.



By the time Elvis died in the late seventies, the World War II generation was older and more tired than they'd ever been. And suddenly millions of people seemed to be grieving about an entertainer as though he were a hero.



This was confusing to the older folks. To them, entertainers were to be loved and followed, but real heroes were either political or military in nature. I saw an interview in the late eighties with the great historiographer Barbara Tuchman. It turned out that she only had 3 months to live when she gave the interview. When asked what she worried most about in America's future, she unhesitatingly said that young Americans no longer had real heroes. They didn't know what heroes were. They mistook football stars and movies stars and recording stars for heroes. She pointed out that, in her generation, any American child asked who his/her heroes were, would begin by listing people like George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Abraham Lincoln. They might also throw in Thomas J. Jackson, Robert E. Lee, and other Confederates. But they were heroes because they had given their lives trying to improve society, regardless of the actual outcome.



I was moved by the interview with her. I wrote her a letter, telling her how much I agreed at heart with what she'd said and how grateful I was for her accomplishment of rendering into a few sentences a great and dangerous truth that threatened us all in the late eighties. She was kind enough to write back a brief post card which is among my prized possessions today.



My memory of Elvis's death is quite clear. The Word War II generation was almost disgusted by the upset that it caused. "What," they seemed to be asking everywhere,"had this boy ever done to make the world a better place? Why is he being treated like a hero?" In that same decade two women had tried to shoot President Gerald Ford. Poor marksmanship and lack of familiarity with their weapons seem to have saved him, but these two poor ladies will never see the light of day again in this life. These two attempted assassinations were both covered a lot, but they didn't seem to excite as much public outcry as Elvis's death. We were changing. If President Jimmy Carter had died at about the same time as Elvis, surely both would have received much press coverage. But we see what has happened to the Elvis legend since his death. He has become bigger and more admired and imitated than ever. Jimmy Carter, on the other hand, has been largely forgotten by anyone who wasn't an adult during his one four-year term.



Then, the other day, a man very much like Elvis in his nerve and his willingness to take the next stride forward in changing our culture's morals, died unexpectedly at age fifty. As we discussed all the uproar over his death, my father (a personal hero of mine who sprinted down to the Navy Recruiter's office on the day he turned 17 in 1945) pointed out how much we had changed. He opined that, if someone had shot the current president, these people wouldn't have been any more upset than they were about the death of the entertainer. If he wasn't right in this opinion, he was very close to right. He was merely commenting on how much we've changed since he was young, when his generation would weep for the loss of Major Glenn Miller but feel a much more fundamental loss when FDR died.



I was shocked and hurt to hear two people who are very important to me say that my father's motive in the comparison was a racial one! I knew that nothing could be further from the truth. If he had said that the people wouldn't have been as upset over a Carter assassination as they were over Elvis's death, people would never have assumed that the comment was about race. And his comment about Michael Jackson and Mr. Obama was not a racial one, either.



African-Americans have struggled for many decades to achieve political equality in this country. Now that it has been done, we must not insult them by treating them with kid gloves. They can take the lumps that other politicians can take. They can represent the changing morals of the country as well as earlier leaders have done. Let them do it.