Comic book writer Peter David commented today on his blog about some remarks fellow comic writer John Byrne made on his website about Christopher Reeve. Byrne said, essentially, that it is inappropriate for people to be thinking of Reeve as a hero because he did nothing heroic following his accident. Byrne says (and I’m lifting this quote off of David’s site, so apologies if it is taken out of context), “I do not wish to take away one iota of the courage he must have needed not to wake up screaming every single day, but the hard truth is there was nothing ‘heroic’ in what happened to him, or how he dealt with it. In fact, as far as how he dealt with it, he didn’t even have a choice. We could imagine he spent every hour of every day (when not in front of the cameras) begging family members to simply kill him and get it over with — but none of them did, so he had no choice but to deal with each day as it came. Heroism, I believe, involves choice.”
John Byrne, I believe, is an idiot.
I’m not even going to comment on the colossal lack of good taste he displays with that crack about Reeve begging for death. But I will comment on his criteria for heroism. People don’t choose to be heroes, and those who somehow try to become one are usually idiots who only manage to get other people killed in their quest for glory (watch a few episodes of M*A*S*H for some fictional examples of this type).
I will grant that the term “hero” gets thrown around a lot these days, and often for pretty flimsy reasons. I don’t believe that celebrity makes one a hero, and I don’t believe that athletic skill, wealth, political clout, or fabulous looks do either. Appearing in a popular film doesn’t do it, and, sadly, neither does being in the wrong place at the wrong time and dying a tragic death. If that were the case, we’d be calling every victim of a car accident “heroic,” and we certainly don’t do that. But those people who are confronted with tragedy and who somehow make something good out of it, who honestly try to make things better for those around them or for the generations that will follow, or who manage to somehow inspire others to try and improve themselves… those people are heroes are in my book. If there is a choice involved, it’s a choice to make the best of a bad situation, and by that criterion, Christopher Reeve was a hero with a capital “H.”
Reeve was dealt the shittiest hand imaginable, a fate literally worse than death, and he did, in fact, wish for death in the first weeks after the accident. He admitted as much in his book Nothing is Impossible. But in the end he confronted his personal tragedy with courage and dignity and humor. The advocacy work he did will have a payoff someday, and I utterly dismiss the argument that his work in this area was motivated by self-interest. No doubt Reeve was hoping that a cure would be found for himself, but I believe he was also genuinely concerned with ensuring that no one else would have to go through the same hell that he faced every day. However, the most important thing he did was put a recognizable, human face on a condition that few people ever think about unless they or someone they know ends up in a chair. He made people care about paralysis. This wasn’t entirely of his own doing — Chris Reeve was a celebrity, after all, and the irony that Superman himself had broken his neck ensured that the story would receive some airplay — but it was Reeve’s personality and eloquence that ensured the story continued to play.
The title of his first book, Still Me, says volumes about what Reeve’s continued presence in the public eye really meant. He managed to convey a message that the guy in the street so often doesn’t get, that the sick and debilitated and handicapped, as strange-looking as they may be, as discomforting as their condition often is to those around them, are still human beings. Underneath the chair and the hoses and the hospital gowns and the deformities and all the other crap, they are just like every one else… And maybe that’s something no one thinks about because the idea that we, too, could end up trapped in a useless shell of a body is too damn disturbing. But we should think about it nonetheless, and we should ask ourselves how we might react under those circumstances, and then we should consider how Christopher Reeve reacted. And only then can we honestly say who deserves to be called “hero.”
My ramblings here largely echo what Peter David has to say over on his site, but it’s worth reading his remarks anyway. It’s also worth your time to read the comments section on his post, where a lively debate over the meaning of “heroism” has sprung up…
