heroes

To what degree need our heroes be immaculate to be worthy of admiration?

Two case studies for this Fourth of July, one wry and one stern.

First, humorously taking down Ben Franklin as perhaps less-witty than perceived:

But a while back I realized that not all the wit and wisdom contained in Poor Richard’s Almanac was equally witty or equally wise. It happened like this: Feeling that my life had lost direction over the years, that I had strayed too far from the path of the righteous, I decided last winter to go back and take a Poor Richard refresher course, in the hope of reconfiguring my moral and ethical infrastructure. In doing so, I was stunned to discover how many of Franklin’s axioms failed the acid test of validity and usefulness.

The first thing I noticed was that a lot of Franklin’s folksy little gems were a bit on the obvious side, the sort of things anyone but an outright idiot would already know. [...]

But it wasn’t just that the sayings were banal and obvious. What was worse, I discovered as I proceeded with my brushing-up project, was when I began to notice that not all of the sayings were equally clever.

Second, reflections on the life's work of the late Senator Robert Byrd (D-WV) and his younger embrace and maturing rejection of racism in its most invidious forms:

[Byrd] had been an Exalted Cyclops in the Ku Klux Klan in the early 1940s. As he moved toward a political career after World War II, he wrote to a notorious bigot, the Democratic Senator Theodore Bilbo of Mississippi, to rage at President Truman’s efforts to integrate the military: “I should die a thousand times, and see Old Glory trampled in the dirt never to rise again, than to see this beloved land of ours become degraded by race mongrels.”

That letter was not unearthed until the late 1980s, but by then Byrd had long since renounced and apologized repeatedly for his ugly past, with words as well as deeds, including his avid support for the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday in 1983. Byrd referred to his K.K.K. association in interviews as an immutable stain. He always noted with rue, not complaint, that it would haunt his obituaries. He wasn’t wrong. But when those obituaries finally appeared last week, after his death at 92, Byrd’s résumé in racism was dwarfed not just by his efforts to atone for it but by his legislative achievements on many fronts during his epic Senate career.

In his eulogy of Sen. Byrd, President Obama, perhaps the epitome of the "race mongrel" the younger Byrd railed against with such malice, answers the previous question thusly:

"We know there are things he said and things he did that he came to regret," President Obama said on the steps of the West Virginia capitol in Charleston, W.Va., referring to an early conversation he had with Byrd.

"He said, 'There are things I regretted in my youth. You may know that.'

"I said, 'None of us are absent some regrets, senator. That's why we enjoy and seek the grace of God.'"

"And as I reflect on the full sweep of his 92 years, it seems to me that his life bent toward justice," Obama said. "Robert Byrd possessed that quintessential American quality, and that is the capacity to change, a capacity to learn, a capacity to listen, a capacity to be made more perfect."

Happy Independence Day.