What's in a name?

Like all political discourse in America today, the McCain-hero exchange is a circular discussion.  It goes round and round with everyone producing evidence to support his or her position and it all goes nowhere.  My recent post on the McCain/Trump episode was not so much about whether McCain was or was not a “hero,” but an observation that it is now a political requirement to label everyone who wears a uniform as a “hero.” This "hero" attribution is intended to assuage the collective American conscience and to give politicians a way to demonstrate how patriotic they are.  I am not the only one who looked at the issue from this point of view.  Here is a transcript excerpt from an NPR interview between Robert Seigel and David Greenberg, professor of history and journalism at Rutgers University:

SIEGEL: And we have the John McCain experience - being a POW for more than five years, being tortured by his North Vietnamese captors, a man who literally agonized for his country - an unusual description of the war hero?

GREENBERG: Well, certainly not the conventional one. But I think it's fair to say that we can go back in history and also find examples of people who were taken captive and for that reason are considered heroes. Nathan Hale was the first one that came to mind for me, who famously said he regretted he had but one life to give for his country. He was, of course, a spy for George Washington, going behind enemy lines and was apprehended and executed by the British in the Revolution. So that too has a longer lineage than we might suppose.

SIEGEL: And of course, many medals have been awarded posthumously to people who've died in combat - not been taken captive, but didn't survive the battle.

GREENBERG: Yes, that's exactly right. These are things we recognize as heroism. I think with the Vietnam War though, there is something of a change or a new understanding of heroism. And we have the celebration, if you will, of the POWs and MIAs, who it was assumed were abandoned by our leadership in the Vietnam War. Now, a lot of research has found these claims to be overstated, but it's had a power hold on our imagination because the Vietnam War was such a troubled war for us. And the MIA legends or myths came to embody, I think, a sense that it wasn't our soldiers who let us down. It was we who let them down.

In other words,  the classic definition of “hero,” was modified to include Viet Nam POWs and MIAs and is now applied to all active duty military personnel, which is a guilt reaction not only to the fact that American young people have no obligation whatsoever to serve and to the rotten way Viet Nam veterans were treated. 

At any rate, whether McCain was or was not a “hero” is now a moot point since anybody or anything can be one these days.  Remember the video that went viral of the cat who saved the little boy from a dog attack which was carried repeatedly on national tv news networks?  That cat was called a “hero.” 

To read the full transcript go to:   http://www.wbur.org/npr/424722437/donald-trumps-remarks-on-john-mccain-question-meaning-of-war-hero