If you’ve seen the movie Footloose even once, you are familiar with Welsh singer Bonnie Tyler’s rendition of the Steinman and Pitchford song, “Holding Out For A Hero.” It was covered by the fairy godmother in Shrek 2 as she tried to manipulate Princess Fiona into falling for Prince Charming. In both cases, it was, at best, a wistful hope, and, at worst, a miserable failure (though, in the case of Fiona, it led to a much better life with Shrek).
In these troubling days, many of us seem to be holding out for a hero. Frustrated, overwhelmed, feeling an increasing helplessness in the face of the relentless snatch, grab and destroy machine, created and carried out by the oval office decorator and his band of soulless mental health facility escapees, we want a hero to come and save us.
This is a familiar theme throughout our long history, and has only grown in our recent shared-instantly-with-everyone times.
In 1933, a comic strip writer named Jerome Siegel, the son of Lithuanian Jewish immigrants who had fled antisemitism in 1900, began pushing to find a newspaper syndicate that would publish his Superman character on their comics page. No one was interested, so he and a high school friend and illustrator, Joe Shuster, agreed to peddle it to Detective Comics, a forerunner of DC Comics. In 1938, they succeeded and the long and still-growing legend of Superman was brought to a hungry public.
Siegel was aware, throughout his life, of the world-wide mistreatment of Jews and, perhaps taking inspiration from the story of the omni-powerful Jewish golem, he and Shuster invented a super-man to save us all.
The Golem was a creature, the story goes, created out of clay by Rabbi Judah Loew of Prague in the 16th century, to protect the Jewish community from attacks. This hero, created with the Hebrew word “emet” (truth) on its forehead and a piece of paper with the name of God in its mouth, may have served these two young Jewish men as the focus of their longing and the model for a hero and a protector who would save us all from evil. This was the story that eventually morphed into an entire band of super-powerful do-gooders and rescuers.
In this century, these stories continue to dominate our imagination and our film industry box offices.
We want a hero, now more than ever. It would take a lot of ink to cover the many ways we have expressed this, from looking for the perfect Democratic candidate for president in 2028, to turning out by the thousands to hear Bernie and AOC just talk about it. But, as we learn at the end of The Wizard of Oz, there is no Wizard, just us. We have the tools, we simply have to use them.
So what kind of hero will we be, individually and collectively?
There are all kinds of heroes and superheroes, but my all-time favorite is Frodo Baggins. I confess I have read Tolkien’s The Lord of The Rings twenty-six times and always want to begin all over again the minute I finish it. The story brings together a group of disparate characters, each of them representing a different population of Middle Earth. They decide they must set out on a long and dangerous road trip to destroy the Ring sought by a hugely powerful entity bent on controlling and enslaving every race of beings in the world. Though the Fellowship of the Ring is forced, by circumstances, to separate, each does their part, and it is Frodo who makes the final move by destroying the all-powerful Ring which has, by purpose or chance, come into his possession.
Frodo is my favorite hero because he is a regular hobbit, the last person you would likely choose for such a daunting and impossible task, and, most importantly, no matter how painful and burdensome the possession of the Ring becomes, or how clear it is that he has only to don it in order to become his world’s most powerful being, he is not tempted, focusing only on the task of destroying the Ring and the evil Sauron. In extraordinary circumstances, he is good, in an ordinary way. Which, I submit, is what we have to be.
Others have picked up various pieces of the LOR story in interesting ways, but not always for the good. As one post by the ever-thoughtful Robert Reich pointed out, if you were to draw a venn diagram with one circle around US assets devoted to Artificial Intelligence, a second circle around US military assets, a third around assets being used to help Trump centralize personal information on all of us and a fourth around Silicon Valley pro-dictatorship bros, they would intersect at Peter Thiel’s technology hub, Palantir.
To unpack: Peter Thiel was a founder of PayPal, an early investor in Facebook and now owns several companies, including one called Palantir. Thiel grew up in a German, Nazi-leaning community, lived in South Africa and West South Africa, and heavily supported Trump for President. He hired J.D. Vance at his venture capital firm in Silicon Valley, and bankrolled his rise to the U.S. Senate and, eventually, V.P. He was, for a time, deeply engaged with Elon Musk’s work on DOGE, lending his young acolytes to gather all federal information into one big, accessible (to them) pot. Oh, and was listed as the 103rd richest man in the world.
He is a libertarian and a huge fan of Tolkien, having read Lord of The Rings (LOR) a paltry ten times.
Thus: Palantir. In Tolkien, a Palantir is one of several seeing stones placed in various towers of Middle Earth through which the evil Sauron can mislead and control those who are captured by its sight. Saruman the wizard, for instance, is turned toward evil through his contact with Sauron in a Palantir.
Thiel’s Palantir sells an AI-based platform through which military and law enforcement subscribers, and now, thanks to Trump, all the alphabet agencies of the federal government (DHS, DoD, DHHS, SSA, IRS and others) are consolidating and sharing personal data collected by each of them into one big file to facilitate the identification of enemies. As with Sauron, many lesser mendacious wizards are corrupted and brought together.
So where is the hero who will save us?
I think immediately of Tina Turner’s We Don’t Need Another Hero from Thunderdome. Thunderdome: just the kind of dystopian place we are beginning to see here.
For me, I want our hero to be just like Frodo Baggins, which could, in the long-run, mean us. Someone who does not wish to take power simply to replicate the dictatorial nature of it and just make everybody do what we want. Someone who knows one has to destroy the thing that gives an evil person power and change the world through other means. For me, and, yes, I still believe in it, it will be the electorate, person by person, you and me, awakening from our nightmare sleep into the day, and, thus, breaking the hold that evil has taken over the levers of power.
Not With A Bang But A Whimper
Speaking of levers of power…In 1925, Hitler established a group of personal private bodyguards and, as his power grew, so did theirs. Under the leadership of Heinrich Himmler, the terror troops increased greatly in number and were given control over intelligence operations, policing, and the concentration camp system. They have been described as a “virtual state” within the fascist structure, and were ultimately responsible for many of the Nazi regime’s most brutal acts. Freed by Hitler of all legal restraints, with the complicity of the courts, they were tasked with the removal and murder of political and “racial” enemies of the regime, and specifically charged with the task of carrying out “The Final Solution”.
This history is chilling on its own. It becomes even more chilling as we watch Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) growing into just such a private police force for the president. Suffering from Constitutional restraints on his power to use the military in our cities, he has turned more and more to this rogue branch, many of whom do not even seem to be actual federal officers. Masked and brutal in their tactics, they haul (brown-skinned) immigrants (and some American citizens) away to undisclosed and barricaded locations.
Seemingly to prove that the blood feeding their hearts has been replaced by ICE water, the bloated president and his Stepford Secretary of Homeland Security, Kristi Noem, grin and pose, thumbs up, in front of beaten-down “detainees” bent over in their little cages, or, lately, at a new concentration camp in Florida, apparently guarded by real alligators, in addition to the human reptiles we already know.
Interestingly, however, even though his private police force is expanding to include federal officers from the FBI, the Department of Justice, and at least six other federal Departments, where “investigations” are launched, allegedly to bring his political enemies to “justice” for “interfering” with ICE raids, asking a question of a Cabinet member, inspecting his concentration camps, or participating in past investigations leading to his conviction on 34 felony counts, all of it is beginning to look a little comical. Think Keystone Kops, or Toy Soldiers.
This was abundantly apparent in this week’s show of force in LA at MacArthur Park. Armored personnel carriers, bristling with soldiers costumed for World War III, rolled into an almost completely empty MacArthur Park near downtown LA. Dozens of horses, carrying heavily armed riders, lined up like GI Joe soldiers arranged by a four-year-old on a table. They faced nothing. They stood for a time, puzzled, with nothing to do and no raison d’etre.
They wanted a bang, but they looked more like a pitiful whimper. I know you recognize the TS Eliot line from his poem The Hollow Men. An apt title for what we are seeing.
After Mayor Karen Bass gave them the look of death and somewhat politely told them to get the heck out of her park, they did. No one was arrested or, thank heavens, manhandled. This doesn’t mean they are not, essentially, dangerous. It simply means that, in their eyes, we are even more dangerous. Yeah, I think we should use that.
We know that the concepts of shame and conscience will never be found in the same room with the cowardly white house resident, thus, it is left to us to become the solution. The buck stops with us. We also would do well to recognize that the risks to us and all our friends and neighbors will become ever more dangerous. That said, I feel certain that we will find the actions and take them. We will become the heroes we’ve been waiting for.
Like Frodo and Samwise, we will suffer these unknown dangers in order to restore legitimate power to representatives who want to exercise it for our good, and not as despots. As Sam Gamgee put it, to Frodo, “There’s some good in this world, Mr. Frodo, and it’s worth fighting for.”
