INDIANOLA — We relish tearing down our heroes.
It’s as if we don’t like any public figure to be who they portray themselves to be.
Peyton Manning, football’s saint, is going through it now, facing absurd allegations of “sexual assault” based on a teenage prank he may or may not have done. At the very worst, what he is accused of doing when he was a college sophomore is in the same category as mooning.
In fairness, the questions raised about medication delivered to his wife, allegedly human growth hormone, when he was recovering from potential career-ending neck problems are more credible and raise serious questions.
Yet the vicious reaction to those disclosures reveals a side of our culture that loves to see the worst in people. A few cases in point:
• John Wooden, the sage who represented the archetypical Coach, took a see-no-evil, hear-no-evil stance with boosters who paid the great stars Wooden coached to all those NCAA titles at UCLA.
• Thomas Jefferson, one of our nation’s Founding Fathers, is remembered more for fathering children with slave Sally Hemings.
• Bill Cosby, America’s dad, stands accused of drugging countless women for sex.
• Mickey Mantle, symbol of youth and 1950s Americana, turned out to be a cruel drunk.
• Martin Luther, who launched the most important religious movement in the history of Western Civilization, wrote some of the hate material against Jews that the Nazis seized upon to justify the Holocaust.
• JFK and MLK, heroes of civil rights, were serial adulterers.
• J. Edgar Hoover, who created the world’s greatest investigative police force, is almost always portrayed as a crossdresser who abused his power to spy on rivals.
Hey, it’s the truth, and I wouldn’t argue that it shouldn’t be disclosed. As one old pressman once told me, “If you don’t want it in the newspaper, don’t let it happen.”
But it hurts our national psyche to think every great man is actually a fraud.
Perhaps the healthier course instead of creating a false dichotomy where everyone is either good or bad would be to understand that people who do good things can also have serious faults and vice versa.
Still, I would like us to retain one righteous American hero out of a thousand.
I think there is: Fred Rogers. The gentle man on public television who encouraged children to be kind and delight in learning new things was the same person off camera. One wife, normal kids, no scandals. It wasn’t an act; Mr. Rogers really was that nice.
Yet the Internet mob still disseminated a patently false story that Rogers, who never served in the armed forces, was a sniper in Vietnam with all these confirmed kills.
If you can’t find faults, make some up. So goes our world.
Smith is editor and publisher of The Enterprise-Tocsin in Indianola.
