What is a Hero?

This post is a little different from my other ones. But it is something I’d like to share.
What’s a hero? I was reading about a controversy that is brewing in Canada over the awarding of scholarships – the so called “hero scholarships” to the children of soldiers who were, and will be, killed in the war in Afghanistan. As a former soldier myself, this controversy has me questioning just what is a hero in our contemporary society. Hero is a word that has a lot of mileage on it if we go by the number of times it is used in our media. Webster’s defines a hero as someone who is an illustrious soldier, a person admired for his or her achievements and noble qualities and as someone who shows great courage. First of all, let me narrow the field of who, by this definition, is a hero. It’s not our sports ‘heroes’ or our action heroes. While our sports ‘heroes’ may on occasion play in pain, put up incredible statistics, throw, catch or run with a ball when they know they are going to be hit hard by a 200-300 lbs. human missile, or just demonstrate incredible athleticism, none of this makes them heroes in the sense of our definition. A hero is someone who gives of themselves for the betterment of their group or of society. What sports ‘heroes’ are are incredibly good athletes who are rewarded for their athleticism through money or fame or entitlement or all of the preceding. I don’t know of any athlete who does what they do for the betterment of their group; most of them, particularly professional athletes, seem to be in it ultimately for themselves. It is the media who bestow upon these athletes the honorific description of hero rather than the term that should be used which is idol. The media, and most  sport fans, project our own fantasies of athletic greatness onto those athletes we admire for their incredible skill. This idolatry of athletes can border on outright worship. But that doesn’t make them heroes.
Action heroes are strictly a media creation and we can leave it at that. The Jason Bourne character created by Matt Damon is just that, a created character who, if any of us tried to accomplish just a fraction of what Jason Bourne did, we would be dead.
This leaves us with the emotionally charged issue of contemporary soldiers who die in combat in Afghanistan and are then called heroes. I think it goes without saying that the war in Afghanistan is a mess, a quicksand of a situation that is sucking NATO into eventual submission, however they will disguise that submission. Canadian soldiers are in Afghanistan because that is where they were sent by our government. They did not volunteer to go; as professional soldiers they go where they are told to go and perform the tasks they are told to perform. They really have no say in this except that when joining up they gave up the option to say ‘No’ to going to war. For the most part the war in Afghanistan is a guerrilla war that is not winnable by conventional military means. I think a couple of points need to be made here. First, soldiers on the ground are not fighting for grand geo-political goals like a democratic Afghanistan. That may be the ‘official’ reason presented to us in newscasts and briefings by politicians and generals but soldiers who actually look for Taliban fighters to engage, in the heat of the engagement, fight primarily for their own survival and for the safety of their fellow soldiers. Geo-political goals are for politicians and maybe generals. They are not the main reason why the vast majority of soldiers actually fight the Taliban. Second, most of the engagements in Afghanistan are messy and shifting and most of the casualties come not from actual close quarter’s engagement with Taliban fighters but from IEDs that explode and kill and maim before the soldiers are even aware of what is happening. With IEDs the Taliban are nowhere to be seen. Military vehicles are blown up with the occupants barely having time to realize what has happened or troops walking on the ground are killed or wounded before they know what is happening.   An exploding IED will destroy perhaps one vehicle in a column of vehicles or kill or maim a few soldiers in a line of soldiers. Death in these instances is more a case of being in the wrong place at the wrong time than an act of heroism.  These deaths are horrific and tragic. Young lives and all the potential that accrues to those lives are lost forever. This is heartbreaking, painful and distressing. But it is not heroic in the sense of the definition of heroic. It is tragic.
When I think of heroic and hero I think of Romeo Dallaire in Rwanda. Seeing genocide beginning and being orderedby his superiors to leave for his own safety and for political expediency on the part of the UN, Canada and NATO, Gen. Dallaire and his aides freely chose to disobey what they thought was a cowardly, unethical order and stay to try to do something to save people’s lives. He willingly put his own life in danger to save others. He suffered personally from this decision having to deal with psychological demons that tormented him from what he experienced and he literally had to pick himself out of alcoholic despair due to those nightmarish experiences to eventually serve the greater good. That is heroic.
This controversy over the use of the term hero to describe all the dead service people in Afghanistan is caused by the media. I blame the media in Canada for distorting the meaning of the term, applying that term indiscriminately, playing on the raw emotions of those families who have lost sons and daughters in Afghanistan and then fanning the controversy which they themselves created in the first place. I believe this whole misuse of the term is simply a case of poor media ethics. Not every soldier, sailor or air force member killed or wounded in World War 1,WW2, Korea, or on UN Peacekeeping operations was described as a hero. I have to ask the media, why now?

A Blinding Insight or Did I Choose the Wrong Vocation?

I had a blinding insight a few weeks ago and then watched Jon Stewart a couple of days ago “steal” my insight and do a much better job of presenting it than I ever could. But, what the hell, this is my blog so, for those of you who haven’t seen the Jon Stewart show, I figured out how all of us insignificant tax payers could make a bundle. How? See, here’s the insight and it’s so simple…we act like corporations! The Supreme Court views corporations as ‘individuals’ from a legal point of view. Corporations have all the rights that you and I do (except they can’t be sent to jail). With this legal understanding of that thingy called a corporation as really a person, the people who run that corporation can’t be held personally liable or accountable when that corporation goes rogue like all those Wall Street financial corporations did as they set about bankrupting us and destroying so many lives so those corporate cats could make a killing. It wasn’t those greedy financial types who wiped us out, it was the corporations they worked for who wiped us out.  So those greedy financial types can’t be held accountable for their duplicity and greed, its their firms who are accountable.  Indeed, their firms will pay those greedy financial types large bonuses to keep them in the fold because they have “talent” that is too valuable to fire.

So this got me thinking…if corporations can be viewed as people then maybe the courts could be fair (the law is fair, right??) and view me as a corporation. Instead of just being Phil I could be Phil Inc. As Phil Inc I could head off to my banker and ask for a loan. Now when a financial wizard on Wall St. does this the banker would ask for collateral and that collateral would be, yes you guessed it, billions of dollars in financial vehicles based on worthless sub prime mortgages packaged as great investment products. What made these worthless investments worth so much? Well, the financial wizard has a buddy called a financial rating agency like Moody’s and they work hand in hand to support each other so they both can make enough money to choke a herd of horses. So the financial rating agency slaps an AAA rating on these worthless investment vehicles and this allows the financial wiz to unload them onto trusting investors as great investments. And so this worthless shit gets moved around by other financial wizs who recommend them to their clients as really solid investments (whatever happened to fiduciary responsibility? Oh well, what does fiduciary responsibility really mean if the financial wiz is making money?).

So here’s how Phil Inc could allow each of us to oink our way to the money trough. As Phil Inc I need something with which I can go to the bank to get a loan to get this money machine rolling – I need some collateral. As Phil the real person I really don’t have anything in the real world to use for collateral to get this money maker rolling but I do have a 2005 Yamaha Vino 125 cc scooter sitting in my driveway. Its gotta be worth something like $1000 which if I was Phil the person isn’t much but with which as Phil Inc I can be very creative. I call up my good friend Louie who has recently incorporated himself as a financial rating agency known as Louie’s. Louie comes over to my place and looks at my scooter, places a value of $500,000 on it and slaps a Louie’s rating of AAA on it as well. I take this on paper collateral of $500,000 and its Louie’s triple A rating to my banker who happily presents me with a $500,000 loan. I’m so happy with myself I pay myself a bonus of $250,000 to keep myself from moving across the street to work for someone else and give them the benefit of my financial acumen. Not bad for a Yamaha Vino, eh? But I’m not finished.  I need to make some payments on this $500,000 loan but I don’t want to use “my” $250,000 bonus money to make some payments to keep the bank happy – after all, I worked really hard to earn that money so its mine and I’m not parting with it.  I could create a Ponzi scheme like Bernie Madoff but, lets face it, he was really sleazy and I’m not – I’m a businessman who is doing everything legally even if it is just a wee bit ethically suspect.   So I need to come up with another way to keep this gold mine producing.   So the bank wants to see some payments on its $500,000 loan so I create another corporation, I’ll call it 2Phil2 Inc and I sell this worthless piece of shit (OK it is worth $1000) to 2Phil2 Inc for $2,000,000 and, of course, I just have to pay myself another bonus of $500,000 for increasing the worth of my original corporation, Phil Inc, by another $2,000,000. Now 2Phil2 Inc is selling this crap to its clients as a great investment and the clients, believing 2Phil2 really have their best interests front and centre, jump on board. A bit later these clients are looking for a return on their investment only to discover that maybe the ol’ Vino 125 at the heart of their investment portfolios isn’t really worth $2,000,000. Oh oh, trouble is brewing. Now in real life something like this did happen with Goldman Sachs placing its clients in these worthless sub prime based investments which the big wigs at Goldman knew to be worthless but Goldman covered its bases by taking out insurance on firm it didn’t own, AIG, and when AIG crashed and burned because of these worthless investments, Goldman collected lots of money. So 2Phil2 Inc has learned from the pros like Goldman how to play both sides of the same coin (sell worthless investments to its own clients and collect the commissions from those sales and bet against these same worthless investments they put their own clients into by taking out insurance to collect more money when those worthless investments inevitably do collapse). 2Phil2 takes out insurance on his neighbour for $2,000,000 and when his neighbour commits suicide because his investments, based on the Vino 125 which I of course steered him into because he trusted me, have crashed leaving him penniless 2Phil2 steps up to collect that insurance money.

Now here’s the real beauty of all this deceit. According to our courts I, Phil the real person, am not responsible for this mess. Legally, Phil didn’t do any of this. It was the corporate persons Phil Inc and 2Phil2 who did it. They are the guilty culprits but they have no money left in their accounts. I paid all that money to myself as bonuses for a job well done and to keep myself and my ‘talent’ from leaving Phil Inc and 2Phil2 to work for some other outfit.  As Phil the person I’m legally safe and sound lying on a beach in Tahiti while the investors who trusted me are left holding the now very empty bag (or, like my neighbour, dead). Geez, I should have gone to business school instead of studying philosophy and ethics and religions.  At the very least some MBA school should hire me as a professor to teach these ‘alternative’ investing methods to those aspiring students who dream of making their own killing once they graduate.  I could even teach their ethics course…no wait, that might be seen as a conflict of interest.  But I’m sure there is some ‘creative’ way around that dilemma too.

I wonder if it’s too late to jump on this money making bandwagon????  Praise the Lord for insight!