Devaluing the Hero

George Lucas, who created numerous heroes in the Star Wars trilogy, has an odd choice of hero. Story from AFP.

George Lucas has created legendary film heroes like Luke Skywalker and Indiana Jones, but the US director says that in real life, his hero is Barack Obama.

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"We have a hero in the making back in the United States today because we have a new candidate for president of the United States, Barack Obama," Lucas said when asked who his childhood heroes were.

Obama, "for all of us that have dreams and hope, is a hero," Lucas said.

My criticism of the statements by Lucas has nothing to do with the specific politics of Barack Obama. What I want to focus on is the idea or concept of the hero and the tendency to devalue that idea.

When you think of a hero you think of someone who does extraordinary things to save others and quite often does so at the cost of self-sacrifice. Where does that apply to Barack Obama? It doesn't. He is a politician who has considerable rhetorical skill and has won the Democratic nomination for president. He has not even been elected president.

What has he done to be considered a hero. Get elected to the Illinois State Senate? Please. Get elected to the U.S. Senate? Try again. Have large crowds at campaign rallies? Not really. Being a good politician does not make a hero. Obama is just a politician who has moved up the ranks quite rapidly. If that makes a hero, we might as well take hero out of the English language. And as I said before, it has nothing to do with his political ideology.

I bring this up because I feel that the word "hero" is slowly losing its meaning. I remember from my English class in high school a discussion of what makes a hero. Some argued that a hero could be expanded to people who stayed in school instead of dropping out. Others contend that a hero could be someone who decided to say no to drugs. Many in the class seemed to be arguing that need not be an ideal, that it could be any ordinary person doing a good deed.

I could not have disagreed more. My opinion then and now is that the idea of a hero should be of a figure that does extraordinary things. If you expand the concept to any person that makes a somewhat difficult decision you clearly devalue that concept. The hero should be more towards the extraordinary end of the spectrum rather than creeping towards the ordinary. Maybe I'm harping on a trivial topic, but I think this is an important idea to stress.