Trump Attacks Cheapening of Words like “Heroism” & “Marriage”
Donald Trump is gambling that large portions of the US population are fed up with politicians who are easily cowed by the liberal media monopoly. “Give us someone who has the guts to fight back,” they seem to say. So it was fitting that one of his first attacks was against using the adjective “hero” to describe captured aviator John McCain, a POW during the war in Vietnam.
At issue was not McCain’s military service, but only the question of “hero” status assigned these days to prisoners of war. Japan’s top fighter pilot during World War II, Zero ace Saburo Sakai, would surely have agreed with Trump. Sakai’s 1957 autobiography Samurai! reports that even wearing parachutes was avoided, though they were assigned, not only because they interfered with cockpit agility in combat, but also because they hinted at cowardice:
The majority of our battles were fought with enemy fighters over their own fields. It was out of the question to bail out over enemy-held territory, for such a move meant a willingness to be captured, and nowhere in the Japanese code or in the traditional Bushido (Samurai code) could one find the distasteful words, “Prisoner of War.” There were no prisoners. A man who did not return from a flight was dead. No fighter pilot of any courage would ever permit himself to be captured by the enemy. It was completely unthinkable (p. 163).
We all tend to sympathize with victims of any kind, from crime to terrorist attacks, though mass media’s up-to-the-minute re
porting of horri
fic tragedies everywhere on the globe is blunting people’s sensibilities. But are victims necessarily heroes?
It’s almost as if the anti-war, anti-hero campaign following World War I, evidenced in novels like Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front and Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms, has reversed tactics: make everyone a hero, then nobody will be one. Donald Trump has argued against the cheapening of terms like heroism and marriage.
