I am always surprised at how many people want to take up a stick to beat the notion of heroism. It seems to me that nothing could be more necessary to a peaceful human future than the heroic model. This has been argued extensively in the past on this page, but here's another chance to take it up again.
From J. Cohen's "Medieval Masculinities":
"As a political mythology, heroism is surprisingly quite poor" (Peter van Heusden): it offers a mode of behavior, but by making its best representative more than human (hypermasculine, sanctified, even perhaps divine), it disallows that mode's successful repetition. The necessary end for heroism is death, even if that death is construed as a valorization through "glory" of the preceding life; and so heroism as a gender code has built within its deep structure the inevitability of its own passing, and to a degree, its own failure."The necessary end for heroism is death[.]" Glad we've got that straight. Now, tell me--what kind of life has a different ending?
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