Culture: Americans’ fixation with sex and sleaze puts flaws on a

pedestal above achievement.

Shortly after her husband’s assassination, Jacqueline Kennedy wrote:

“For Jack history was full of heroes…. Jack had this hero idea of

history.” How quaint she seems, how naive and sentimental. Now Jack

frolics in the White House pool with call girls and plots how best to

kill Fidel Castro. We listen on the White House phone as Lyndon Johnson

bullies, to tapes of Richard Nixon as he swears and vows revenge. We

read descriptions of our president’s penis. For us, there are no heroes.

That is the deeper meaning of Seymour Hersh’s “The Dark Side of

Camelot.” Thomas Jefferson is the president with a slave mistress,

Albert Einstein the scientist who mistreated his wife, Mozart the care

less genius who liked to talk dirty. Historians remind us that Robert E.

Lee was cold Abraham Lincoln passive, Franklin Roosevelt devious. A

recent biography of Mother Teresa asserts that she took money from

dictators and mistreated subordinates. Its title: “The Missionary

Position.”

There is in some ages a predilection to deny greatness and drag down

heroes. We live in such an age. In America at the end of he century, no

one is admirable, no one unblemished, no one on a pedestal. Mistrustful

of myths, we prefer full disclosure.

Skeptical of virtue, we easily find flaws. Instead of educating our

children by exem- plary lives, we offer them cautionary tales. It was

not always so. “Lives of great men all remind us/We can make our lives

sublime,” wrote Henry Wadsworth Longfellow in a poem once familiar to

generations of Americans. Until World War I, the ideology of heroism was

intact and influential in Anglo-American culture. It permeated parlors,

schools farms and factories. It could be found in novels and newspapers

and eulogies; in McGuffey’s “Readers” and in the sermons of Phillips

Brooks; on statues everywhere, in inscriptions on public buildings and

engraved on tombstones. It could be seen in the names parents chose for

their children.

The ideology of heroism molded Harriet Beecher Stowe, Stonewall Jackson

and Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. It shaped Andrew Carnegie, Jane Addams,

Theodore Roosevelt and Harry Truman, who was raised on the book “Great

Men and Famous Women.” Of course Longfellow and his readers knew their

heroes were not perfect. Even so, they believed that heroes instruct us

in greatness, that heroes remind us of our better and braver selves,

that without heroes the American past loses meaning and the idea of

historical progress is ques tioned. They also believed that heroes

strengthen the ordinary citizen trying to live decently. Maybe our

Victorian forbears were too stuffy and too sentimental, too credulous

and too preachy, but today it is the scornful who prevail.

It is easy to blame others: politicians who lie to us and let us down,

journalists who obliterate privacy and offer only bad news, an

intelligentsia that likes to mock, an entertainment industry that

thrives on shock. But we all are complicitous. We have created a culture

that is cynical sneering, leering; a culture in which our children are

denied permission to admire. We have given free rein to envy, to our

desire to tarnish and tear down; and short changed our instinct to

emulate, to look up, to admire. Not finding heroes, we have succumbed to

scorn.

Perhaps it is inevitable that an information revolution will create the

impression that sleaze is omnipresent and nothing is sacred. When all

archives are open, all conversations recorded, all secrets told, can

anyone be exemplary? Maybe our preoccupation with sex and the intimate

life makes nobility impossible. Maybe in a democracy there can be no

veneration, nil admirari.

Will our children become such devotees of the dark side that they forget

that Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence, that Mozart

composed the C Minor Mass or that John F. Kennedy wrote “Profiles in

Courage” and resolved the Cuban missile crisis? In the early part of our

century, gossip columnist Walter Winchell quipped: “Democracy is where

everybody can kick everybody else’s ass.” Could he be right?

Peter H. Gibbon is a research associate in education at the Harvard

Graduate School of Education.

– Peter H. Gibbon