Achilles, Armstrong and Oprah
Strong-armed Lance Taking a page from Oprah's hit-the-beach-spitting-machine-gun-style-questions interview strategy manual, the thoughtful Tom Walters starts a new blog by asking: Are we looking looking for heroes in the wrong places ? To which, mimicking the style of fallen hero Lance Armstrong, we can reply, yes or no: Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. It can't be a revelation that since about the time of Achilles we just don't get right the gift of our public admiration. The question isn't do we look for heroes in the wrong places. The question, simply, is why? And it's not an easy question. Part of the answer has to do with the feeling that we don't really, with passion, go looking for heroes, at all. Rather, their images, like predators, come looking for us. And they find us as we see them on billboards, in commercials, on television. If you have read or seen Shakespeare's The Tempest ( and following an old professor here) you ...