I Want to Be a Hero

But the death of place makes it impossible.

An early work of Giovanni Francesco Barbieri depicting the face of Moses.

I’ve been wrestling with this for, well, a lot of months now. A few times, I thought it was not going to survive scrutiny, but the heart of it didn’t want to die.

It’s a map of what exactly has killed the hero archetype in the modern world. By describing it, it attempts to offer a way forward. An impossible one. But one that I believe we have to do, anyway.

I’ve recklessly put myself into this essay. I believe it’s the only way I could honestly say I’ve lived the problem enough to offer something that’s not either glib or Pollyanna.

Thank you for reading.

Act 1: Genesis

I popped into existence in a Baton Rouge movie theatre in the Summer of 1994.

That’s probably not far from the truth. Seeing The Lion King with my dad when I was three is my first conscious memory. I got the VHS and I rewatched it until the upper third of the tape went snowy. I was fixated on that scene where the glowing sky-Mufasa says, “Remember who you are, you are the son of the one true king.”

I wanted to be a hero.

My friends must have had the same thing going on, but we never talked about it. We just found stick-swords to fight dragons and ran around the…