What Is A Hero?

I neglected to post about this sooner, so I should do it now before I forget again.

Pop culture offers an occasional lesson on our challenges as a people confronting an unlawful government and a wayward civilization, as I mentioned in my previous post about the film "300." One such lesson presented itself in a place I never would have suspected, the campy television show Who Wants To Be A Superhero? broadcast by the SciFi channel. Hosting the show is none other than Stan Lee, creator of several famous superheroes such as Spiderman and the Incredible Hulk, who challenges the contestants to prove their mettle each week or suffer elimination. Each contestant has created an alter ego complete with costume, back story, and the all important superpowers.

I didn't take much interest in all this until the man dating my sister-in-law decided to try out. He forged a costume and even shaved his head to bring to life a character he had dreamt up long ago, and he proceeded to audition for one of the show's highly sought-after spots. Wouldn't you know it, he succeeded! Admittedly, in the beginning I had thought this was a waste of time for a young man who needed to focus on his (and his girlfriend's) future, but I was happy to be proven wrong. His character -- whom he named "Omnicron," but whom the producers of the show re-named "Mindset" for legal reasons -- had traveled back in time to the present in order to save humanity from certain doom. Now being quite interested in the show, I watched him survive the first week's elimination and even work in some funny remarks. However, the second week saw him on the chopping block for reasons that embody the purpose of this post.

Mindset adamantly refused to misspell a word at the behest of a supervillain, who threatened to unleash a horde of bees on him and his captive teammates unless he demeaned himself with deliberately poor orthography. Instead of backing up his move and facing the danger à la Spartacus, his teammates weaseled out on him and meekly tried their best to obey the supervillain's commands (often failing and bringing on the bees anyway). Stan Lee chastised Mindset for his "pride," but to his credit, Mindset refused to kowtow or concede any wrongdoing.

Although this show is merely a form of light entertainment, the mindset behind Mindset's elimination is causing many of today's troubles. Government and its corporate vassals crave obedient "team players" that will seek to maximize material well being rather than take a principled stand that might threaten the status quo. To that end, the mercantilist powers that be convey this message in thousands of small ways every day, and what better delivery device than the pop culture to which Americans are addicted from birth? As I mentioned in a recent post, characters of unbending principle are often portrayed in modern cinema as obnoxious prigs or crazed criminals. Even the SciFi messageboard for the show is filled with comments by people who view Mindset's stubbornness as more becoming a supervillain than a superhero, which goes to show just how embedded the modern ethos of cooperation über alles has become. This ethos is, to put it bluntly, unmanly.

I told Mindset that he did the right thing, but he didn't need any reassurance from me -- he already knows. We could use a lot more superheroes like him.

Hall Of Shame -- First Installment

I have decided to compile some of the most shameful moments in recent American history, moments that illustrate how thoroughly the intertwined concepts of freedom and personal responsibility have decayed. The Hall Of Shame's inaugural entry is none other than the tobacco travesty.

In the 1600s, King James I despised the colony of Virginia because it cultivated, among other things, tobacco. In the 1800s, James Buchanan Duke built an empire founded on cigarettes, which many contemporaries nicknamed "coffin nails." In the early 1900s, baseball player Honus Wagner threw a fit upon discovering that something so noxious as tobacco was being advertised on the reverse side of the card bearing his image, so he demanded that the series desist (producing the most valuable baseball cards in existence).

Despite tobacco's well-established notoriety, a cohort of sickened smokers in the latter half of the twentieth century claimed to have been "betrayed" into its plight and linked arms with the government to partake in a massive looting of the tobacco industry. Many legislatures stripped cigarette companies of the legal defenses that had parried shameless lawsuits in the past, so the show trials commenced unhindered. Desiring to steal the golden eggs rather than slaughter the goose, government kept tobacco legal while forcing the industry to subsidize self-flagellating commentary in the broadcast media, often mouthed by brainless youths who mistake ritualized plunder for a noble cause.

Devoid of any transcendent concept of virtue, modern America also invented the new "sin" of smoking, an activity that threatens the body rather than the soul.

Kelo Confusion

Libertarians often have noble intentions, but their penchant for running to federal court to vindicate their liberties is supremely self-defeating. America's troubles stem from a surfeit of federal intrusion into realms marked off-limits by the Tenth Amendment, whose ingenious goal is to promote competition among the States and thereby restrain wrongheaded policies. Leftists demean this dynamic as a "race to the bottom" because it frustrates their monolithic utopian vision, and they have made great strides in advancing that vision by aiding the federal courts to scour the States of their internal sovereign authority. Therefore, I find it very disheartening when self-proclaimed libertarians at places such as the Institute For Justice or the Center For Individual Rights do the leftists' work for them.

This misplaced libertarian zeal surged forth in the wake of the Supreme Court's holding in Kelo v. City of New London, which decreed that States and localities may use the power of eminent domain to seize land from one private owner and hand it over to another private owner (if the transfer enhances overall taxes). Such a ruling apparently flouts the Fifth Amendment's command that any taking of private land be for a "public use," namely parks, schools, or other non-excludable goods that the entire community can use. So widespread was the outrage that not only libertarians went nuts, but also many leftists, who saw red at the prospect of transferring blue-collar homes to Wal-Mart. How on Earth -- both camps must have wondered -- could our beloved Supreme Court impose such a "wrong" decision when we habitually rely on it to impose the "right" one? The irony of their confusion is probably lost on them.

What really happened is that the Supreme Court indeed reached the right decision, but for the wrong reason. There was no basis for striking down the transfer program in Kelo because the Fifth Amendment binds only the federal government, not the States (as explained by Chief Justice John Marshall in his famous Barron decision). A 100% correct opinion would therefore have read, "Sorry, we have no jurisdiction to second-guess the city, have a nice day." But the modern Supreme Court has decided to "incorporate" the Fifth Amendment into the Fourteenth Amendment -- whose purpose is to prevent States from violating the civil rights of blacks -- as part of the twentieth-century campaign to assert total federal dominance in every way, regardless of whether blacks, whites, or Martians are at issue. So the Supreme Court arrogantly invited itself to approve or disapprove of the city's program, ultimately stretching the Fifth Amendment's "public use" restriction to include an amorphous "public purpose."

The real damage here was to the Fifth Amendment, whose newly distended language will benefit the Tumor whenever it may wish to redistribute land. As for the States, they have regained a small measure of what was rightfully theirs under the Constitution, namely the power to set internal policy free from federal interference. But you would never know it by listening to the cacophony of condemnation, much of it from people who never before displayed any scruples about robbing Peter to pay Paul to support the "welfare state." Many States have responded to the Kelo outcry and passed laws restricting the uses of eminent domain -- proving that the Founders' vision works, if you let it.