"People must agree to differ about heroes", says Paul Johnson in his Heroes (2008), "one person's heroe has been another's villain". For him, Pinochet remains a heroe "because I know the facts". He explains: "I admire Chile and its people greatly, and became concern when my friend Salvador Allende became its president and opened the country to hordes of armed radicals from all over the world. The result was the world's highest inflation, universal violence and the threat of civil war. So I applauded the take-over by General Pinochet, on the orders of Parliament, and still more his success in reviving the economy and making it the soundest in Latin America. But by preventing the transformation of Chile into a Communist satellite, the general earned the furious hatred of the Soviet Union, whose propaganda machine successfully demonized him among the chattering classes all over the world. It was the last triumph of the KGB before it vanished into history's dustbin".
Four principal marks the author says a heroe today must have. The first one is courage, "the noblest and best of all qualities, (...) regardless of the consequences to yourself". Courage starts sometimes from quite simple things. Ronald Reagan was not an intellectual at all, perhaps he was more a simpleton who "ducked" the risk of make a fool of himself by other virtues, being his sense of humour an important one. He was not afraid of asking stupid, silly questions ("asking simple questions sometimes require courage", says Johnson): Where is Sri Lanka? Why are The Blue Ridge Mountains blue? What was funny about The Divine Comedy?
I know from experience that, sometimes, good-hearted people tend to smooth the sharp corners of critics and criticism by telling jokes about oneself (Reagan did that a lot) and I know from experience that such habit becomes a boomerang flying back against oneself. It is nice to learn that Lord George Curzon (is the cinema over Shaftsbury Avenue named after him?) "was a notable victim of this endearing propensity".
A heroe "is not a saint", can be evil (Johnson includes the evil De Gaulle in his essay) nor smart or successful _Heroes can become losers or victims or tragic beings. Marylin is a heroe to Johnson as well. And heroes manifests themselves at times inconspicuous.
The other three features of a heroe: absolute independence of mind ("to treat whatever is the current consensus on any issue with skepticism"), act resolutely and consistently and ignore everything the [media] says about you.
Who wants to be a heroe? What for?
Sometimes I think that being a heroe is not that difficult, as it is part of one's fate, an urgency one must satisfy: nobody is a heroe if he is not meant to be. The difficult side must be to deal with this irrevocable, unabridged impulse to self-nomination as indictment against all odds.
But, alas! It is sweet. The sweet bitter-sweet flavour of the fight and loneliness.
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