“Kurt Cobain?? Hero??? River Phoenix?? Hero?? Chris Cornell?? Hero??”
I agree with your sentiments. I believe, too often, in this day and age, words like talent and hero get confused. There are plenty of people who have great talents but certainly don’t merit being idolized.
The false “hero” status we put on celebrities also encourages them to believe we care what they think.
“Entertainers, whose only talent is playing ‘pretend’, try to convince us, that they know what’s best for us.”
Years ago, Robert A. Heinlein tried to warn us about entertainers and professional athletes and what they said!
“The United States had become a place where entertainers and professional athletes are mistaken for people of importance.
To Sail Beyond the Sunset Quotes Showing 1-1
“But there seems to have been an actual decline in rational thinking. The United States had become a place where entertainers and professional athletes were mistaken for people of importance. They were idolized and treated as leaders; their opinions were sought on everything and they took themselves just as seriously — after all, if an athlete or an entertainer is paid a million or more a year.
He knows he is important … so his opinions of foreign affairs and domestic policies must be important, too, even though he proves himself to be both ignorant and sub literate every time he opens his mouth. (Most of his fans were just as ignorant and unlettered; the disease was/is spreading.)”
Robert A. Heinlein, To Sail Beyond the Sunset
https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/347280-to-sail-beyond-the-sunset
Entertainers, whose only talent is playing ‘pretend’, try to convince us, that they know what’s best for us.
#NotAFan
#NotACent4U
#BoycottU
“...encourages them to believe we care what they think....”
The sad thing is, some morons do.
But here’s an education for those morons:
Every 19 or 20 year old kid who ever stood a watch in a combat zone in -30 degree Korean winds...
...Who went to the deserts or Iraq and Afghanistan to fight religious psychopaths...
...Who crouched in holes while mortars or artillery rained down on them...
...Who stayed back and fought rear-guard to hold ground so his buddies could retreat...
...Marines who scaled Mount Suribachi on Iwo to plant the flag...
...The pilot of an SBD Dauntless dive bomber who just dropped his 500 pounder on carrier Akagi at Midway, and yelled into the microphone “Arizona, I remember you!”...
...The men at Khe Sahn, holding off the NVA, subjected to long range artillery for weeks...
...Green infantrymen in the Ardennes, using rifles and grenades to try and stop German tanks....
...Airborne troopers jumping into France in the darkness, hours before D-Day...
...Young destroyer sailors fighting off kamikazes off the coast Okinawa, because there IS no place to retreat to...
...The poor bastards on Bataan, holding out for a few precious months against overwhelming Japanese numbers, with ZERO chance of getting help... the men and nurses on Corregidor, getting pounded by artillery day after day...
...The cops and the firemen that rushed into the World Trade Center to pull people out... and never got out...
.. and a myriad of other acts of individual and collective heroism, where lives were lost, and others saved because of those actions.
THOSE ARE HEROES. And the true mark of it is, every one of those people involved would NEVER even remotely think of themselves as “heroes”.
I was raised by Men like that. And they truly were a magnificent generation. My old man and his brothers were 55 feet tall to me. Every one of them, Depression era hardasses and combat vets.
If I had any say in course materials for grade and high schools, one of the books I’d mandate is a book listing EVERY Medal of Honor recipient and their citations for valor.
Sorry for the rant. This article just struck a raw nerve.