A good read not only makes you feel being judicious after you’ve done the reading, but also gives you a pleasant mood with tang of humor. These are the things that allure me – either in English or in Chinese. There seems no shortage of both in Gibbs’s writings that I have been following since last year. Here is another good one published on this week’s Time.
Do-It-Yourself Heroes
By NANCY GIBBS Monday, May. 18, 2009
Human beings have always created the heroes we need, from Hercules and Sherlock Holmes--whose supernatural gifts let them conquer mighty foes--to Underdog and the Ugly Duckling--whose transformations were themselves acts of heroism. Right now, when the headlines clang with catastrophe and confusion, it's natural that we'd be at it again, searching for heroes to suit the times.
First there was Captain Chesley (Sully) Sullenberger, walking the length of his sinking plane to be sure every last passenger was safely off. Then came Captain Richard Phillips, battling pirates in angry seas. And finally there's Susan Boyle, the unemployed church lady whose dying mother had told her to chase her ridiculous dreams of musical stardom.
Any one of them could be your Uncle Oliver or Aunt Florence, living lives innocent of fame until faced with a sudden test. Not much chance to prepare, other than a lifetime spent becoming themselves. Sully had 19,000 hours of flight time; he flew gliders as a hobby, had two master's degrees, studied crisis psychology to learn how to keep a crew on task in an emergency. "Me and my crew, we were just doing our job," he told the President, who had called to congratulate him.
Phillips, a former Boston cabdriver, didn't have any weapons to take on the pirates with, so he tried to trade himself for the pirate his crew had captured. But the pirates decided he was more valuable and held him hostage for five days, until the Navy SEAL snipers performed the Easter miracle that rescued him. "What they did was impossible," he said of the SEALs. "They are superheroes." Which is what his crew said about him.
And then there is Boyle, the youngest of nine children, deprived of oxygen at birth, bullied in school, living what seemed an airless life with her cat, Pebbles. When she auditioned for a TV talent show in 1995--in the age of arrogance and affluence--she was scorned. So she sang karaoke at the pub and cared for her ailing mother until the day she died. "Mum was my life," Boyle said. "She was the one who said I should enter Britain's Got Talent. We used to watch it together. She thought I would win."Boyle arrived center stage, with her awkward dignity and eyebrows like live mice, and even then fame mocked her with the nickname the Hairy Angel.
Of course the song that made her famous is among the most miserable of show tunes, sung by a broken, destitute girl: "I had a dream my life would be/ So different from this hell I'm living/ So different now from what it seemed./ Now life has killed the dream I dreamed."
Except Boyle's dream was gloriously resurrected. Ashton and Demi, king and queen of the Twitterati, tweeted about her, but she could not know this, since she has neither a cell phone nor a computer. All she knows is that there are now photographers camped outside her council house and she's been invited on Oprah and somehow she has made hard people quit sneering and cry.
Once a month the news gods have delivered these parables to us, gifts in a gold box reminding us where value lies. It's so much better to discover that Superman could be anyone; that everywhere you look, there are hidden reserves of majesty and honor and genius and luck. The stories wouldn't have worked if Susan Boyle had been a yuppie barrister or Phillips a SEAL himself. Their normality gives them wings.
The qualities these stories celebrate are telling. Competence--as manifested in a pilot with a perfect feel for his machine. Sacrifice--in a captain who would trade himself for the sake of his crew. Persistence--in the singer who knew from adolescence that this was what she wanted and would allow no humiliation to deter her. These are, not by accident, the qualities Barack Obama, national life coach, regularly exalts. He commends the public for its patience, which convinces me that he has read the parenting books that instruct us to pre-emptively praise our children for the qualities we want them to develop. Any real recovery will require an "extraordinary sense of responsibility," he says, which just means we roll up our sleeves and clean up after ourselves.
This epoch rejects the glamour virtues: it calls for modesty, patience, perseverance, proficiency. We crave the company of ordinary heroes, especially now, when we're all on our own, thankful for small distractions from all the big threats we face.It's a karaoke moment: we can't afford a band, but we'll gladly sing of normal nobility all night long.
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1896722-1,00.html
