WHERE ARE THE HEROES?

We have seen them time after time in American movies. Valiant heroes whose intentions you know are good just by looking at them.

In the past there were a few in real life too, JFK, Churchill. Flawed but with stature.

Where are the heroes now?

In these modern times they are very few... and what happens to them if they rise?

What happened to Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn? Both shafted by institutional powers, undermined by establishments in their native lands who felt threatened by them.

This is how the few heroes we have are treated now. Brought low and relegated to the sidelines where they suffer their fate, remaining loyal to those who destroyed them and denied us all the chance of a future safe for more heroes to rise.

And what does this say of the political cultures of the UK and USA that they serve as cauldrons of fire to burn our heroes alive? Do they not resemble the sort of villainous nests of evil seen defeated time and time again in movies, widely distributed brothels of competing ideologies, the lairs of the most hideous human snakes imaginable?

'No More Heroes’ sang The Stranglers in 1977.

What heroes are there now? All strangled by the times we live in. By the cynical abuses of those in power. Any that rise are conspired against, smeared and every dirty trick in the book is used against them to reduce the threat they pose to the status quo their opponents rule.

So many of us know it now, that the system reeks of corruption from end to end across the West, particularly in the USA and UK. Except of course those blissfully ignorant or prostituted to the cause.

The system is rigged as George Carlin, another hero said, so many times in so many inimitable ways.

 

The villains are in total control and as Carlin said, “They own you.”

And the media companies, some of which provide you with those wonderful movies and TV serials where heroes win out against all the odds... ensure you stay enmeshed within an evil system of two-party politics where true heroes never win.

Isn’t that something?

Every consider you are being gulled?

The seduction is all about getting your hard-earned cash, not at all about inspiring you to challenge ‘the system’, it assuages those feelings in concepts that contain an ersatz world, a tableau of goodness, of rightness and heroic endeavor where the good guys always win and are honored by grateful nations.

In the West, as Bill Hicks pointed out, “We kill those people.”

There are too many people with too much invested in how things are for themselves to allow idealistic fools to ruin their set-up. And they have all the means to hand to deal with them. As long as insufficient numbers fail to back them that is.

The failure of our heroes is ultimately also partly our failure to support them in sufficient numbers. We are all flawed and heroes are not exempt from human failings. They bear part of the guilt along with us in seeing their dreams dashed on the rocks of a western world set up for them to fail.

And will there be new “heroes” tomorrow? In any of the tomorrows to come? It must be in doubt as we have seen just how powerful and deadly the forces who own just about everything are. The system has been honed to perfection, all the power bases are occupied. The guardians of how things are scan the horizon for any reckless soul unknowing enough to think they can scale the heights above and wrest power from them. Imagine the most wicked laugh you ever heard from a screen villain to imagine the scene. But they can laugh only when we sit as spectators as if we were watching a film. If we were to stand up and stand shoulder to shoulder with our hero those guardians of how things are would stop laughing immediately.

But we don’t. Not in sufficient numbers. Most of us comply with the system and obediently vote for one of the two supervillains that represent the status quo. Time after time after time.

Then we turn around and ask without a trace of irony...

“Where are the heroes?”