Tyrants love pomp, puffery, and pretend heroics.
The pomp entertains the populace, the puffery salves his pride, and pretend heroics are pacifying play. Real heroism comes with a cost, but worst of all for the tyrant genuine accomplishment makes the posturing look pitiful and creates a genuine leader.
The question is whether we are capable caring.
I will enjoy the new Justice League movie and already have tickets for the whole family for the next Star Wars. Fun films for a friends and family who love sharing a motion picture are welcome, but we have seen a lot of these films in the last decade. Hollywood keeps making them and they are pleasing, but they are more unreal every outing. Physics is defied. Superpowers even the differences between old men (we can fight in the movies!), lightweights and heavyweights (one hundred pound people pound three hundred pound villains), and guarantee that the hero can have six pack abs, a witty vocabulary, and know how build a nuclear bomb.
The stories are small bore, no studio risk, but Stan Lee simplied is borderline silly. Instead of bread and circuses, perhaps, we will be superhero-ed into compliance.
Yet I am not afraid. There are so many real heroes and real life forces us to see them. Natter about the church, complain about televangelists, but Harvey hit Houston the real churches, the regular pastors were there. Houston (like so many other places) helped herself with heroic regular folks whatever the government did. A Christian college president arrived in a boat to help one of The Saint Constantine School faculty. Men in big trucks saved many of us who drive nothing bigger than a Ford Fusion without asking for anything. My church raised money and sent it directly to those in need, our young people worked to make medical kits, and neighborhood watchers made sure there were not riots.
Real heroes were here and not one radioactive spider was in sight.
So I am not worried, yet, about all the fake folk heroes, because my church and city turned out to be jammed with people who had greatness ready at call. When one of our college students spends his day bagging sand and shoring up the neighborhood and never mentions it to me, then I know that the American cowboy is not gone. He just reads classic literature and paints between catastrophes.
There is a mighty remnant of those who pray, pay taxes, and put duty over pleasure. This side of Tom Hanks or Ron Howard nobody is telling their stories: the loud, proud, endowed get all the media. They placate us with silly stories and hope we have forgotten how to make do, fend for ourselves, and love our neighbor.
We remember. I saw it. Houston was strong, because Houstonians were ready to serve.
No party owns us and the media (right or left) does not understand us. We put God over government, family over frivolity, and eternal values preached from our pulpits over ephemeral vices peddled from politicians.
Bad news sells, but the center holds. Weird gets clicks, but normal runs a soup kitchen in the storm. The triple divorcee has his reward, but give me the Dad I see every day dropping off his kids: faithful even though Mother has gone to glory. That is a hero. That gives me hope.
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