Bowon Jenny Hong

Jon Drinnon

English 126

July 26, 2004

Heroification and Its Damaging Effects

In the Disney movie Life-Size, actress Tyra Banks plays the role of Eve, a Barbie-like doll, who is "perfect in every way," come to life. Later in the movie, the once-very popular Eve doll's sales decrease dramatically, and the company stops the production of the Eve doll not realizing what they are doing wrong. Distressed, Banks, the "life-size" Eve doll, turns to her owner Casey and learns two valuable lessons—that perfection is boring and unrealistic, and it is okay to make mistakes. Casey tells the life-size Eve that the Eve doll is too "goody-goody" to be real, and girls need more realistic role models—heroes—with personality, inner struggles, and mistakes. Almost everyone likes heroes from Spiderman to firefighters to Dad who inspire the young and keep them motivated; however when the heroes' lives and beliefs are fabricated to fit a stereotype, these humans regress into nothing more than a boring ideal. Heroification with cognitive dissonance blind students to the reality of this world and limit their ability to view controversies objectively.

Heroification is the process where details—both important and trivial—are left out or changed to fit the archetypical mold of the flawless, inhuman "heroes." This "degenerative process" makes "flesh-and-blood individuals into pious, perfect creatures without conflicts, pain, credibility, or human interest (Loewen 19)." For example, many people know of Helen Keller only as the blind, deaf girl who despite her handicaps learned to read, write, and to speak, but this is only the first twenty years of her life. Whatever happened to Keller for the next sixty-four years of her life? Keller was, in fact, a radical socialist in Massachusetts starting in the early 1900s, and was one of the most passionate and famous woman during that time rallying for the new communist nation. Keller's love for socialism did not stem from a vacuum but was rooted deep within her experiences as a disabled person, and she sympathized with other handicaps and learned that social class controls not only people's opportunity but also their disabilities. But during the heroification process, the schools and the mass media omitted Keller's lifelong goal and passion to bring about radical social change because we would rather teach our young to "remain uncontroversial and one-dimensional" than to have a room full of leftists (Loewen 35). Historians, in an attempt to idealize and make Keller into a hero, deleted the last sixty years of her life from history making Keller into a "bland source of encouragement and inspiration to our young" rather than a real human being with feeling, passion and excitement.

However, the fault does not lie entirely with the educators "editing" information because with heroification, comes cognitive dissonance. Social psychologist Leon Festinger states that cognitive dissonance is the "psychological discomfort caused by inconsistency among a person's beliefs, attitudes, and actions" which drives a person to change his/her personal beliefs, attitudes, or behaviors to be consistent to reduce the discomfort caused by the discrepancy (Atherton). By treating another human being inhumane creates inconsistency between the act and belief, and since changing the past is impossible, we learned to change our attitudes to be consistent with our actions. The celebration of "The First Thanksgiving" is a prime example of American cognitive dissonance and ethnocentrism. To many, the scene of the First Thanksgiving consists of Pilgrims clothed in their best black outfits entertaining their near-naked Native American guests. The contrast between the clothed Pilgrims and the "primitively" under-dressed Native Americans suggest two things: that the Pilgrims are doing the serving, and conversely, that the Native Americans are incapable of doing the serving as implied by their primitive dress. However, all the foods commonly mentioned such as the pumpkin, turkey, squash, and corn are "exclusively indigenous to the Americas and had been provided by [or with the aid of] the local tribe. (Loewen 95)" In addition, the Eastern Indians have observed the autumn harvest celebration for centuries, and it is not until the Civil War that this "First Thanksgiving" was observed and celebrated to seek patriotism among the Union. Instead of admitting to the fact that the first "settlers" would later commit something very close to genocide against the Native Indians and risk inconsistency, Americans created the idea of the "First Thanksgiving" giving the illusion that the Pilgrims were indeed God-fearing "good" people who embraced the primitive Natives and even provided the "savages" with a feast. Providing false images and robbing the students of the truth to validate the wrong done unto the Natives, reaffirms the falsehood of white supremacy and ethnocentrism.

Heroification and cognitive dissonance blind us to the reality of this world and give rise to a sense of American exceptionalism that promotes ethnocentrism. For example, when asked "who first discovered the Americas and why," most students would answer undoubtedly "Christopher Columbus set sail in 1492 to explore the waters for a new trade route to Asia;" however, almost none of the students know that Afro-Phoenicians from "Morocco and Egypt reached the Atlantic coast of Mexico in about 750 B.C." and when Columbus' "purpose from the beginning was…conquest and exploitation" of slaves and gold, for which "he used religion as a rationale (Loewen 45, 49)." By 1495, Columbus and his men started a great slave raid in Haiti by gathering up fifteen hundred Arawak men, women, and children, and between 1494 and 1508, Hispaniola's population reduced dramatically from over three million people to mere sixty thousand from war, slavery, and the gold mines. But instead of admitting that "discovery of the Americas" was first made by Africans and a near genocide of the Natives was committed by the Spanish, the Europeans use their most powerful weapon, cognitive dissonance to somehow justify their actions. For example, Columbus first described the Indians as well built and intelligent; however to justify his wars and enslavement of these Natives, he quickly changed his description stating that the Indians soon became "cruel and stupid (Loewen 68)." In addition, John Winthrop, governor of Massachusetts Bay Colony, created an excuse to take the Indians' land by declaring that the areas are legally a "vacuum" because the Indians "had not 'subdued' the land, and therefore had only a 'natural' right to it, but not a 'civil right (Zinn 14).'" Finally, when the Europeans nearly wiped out the Indian population with diseases such as smallpox, influenza, and hepatitis, Winthrop displays the American exceptionalism by stating

…God hath so pursed them, as for 300miles space the greatest part of them are swept away by the smallpox which still continues among them. So as God hath thereby cleared our title to this place, those who remain in these parts, being in all not 50, have put themselves under our protection…

Falsifying information to idealize and justify Columbus and history, deprive students of the truth and ignorant of reality, reasoning, and argument, and as a result of this heroification, the American exceptionalism and ethnocentrism still thrives today because "we have learned to bury them…as radioactive wastes are buried in containers in the earth" rather than accepting and learning from our atrocities (Zinn 9).

Creation of these "heroes" by the ruling elite is quite understandable. They want to motivate and make the students feel good about themselves. "No one likes to think of himself or herself as a bad person," and because ideals and cognitive dissonance makes students feel better about being an American, a vicious cycle is started where any wrong committed is swept under the rug (Loewen 68). Students need and want a good role model—a hero; however, these heroes that the students want and need are not idealistic "too-good-to-be-true" heroes but real human beings with inner struggles, passion, character traits, and mistakes. Rather than flooding the students with ideals, students should be showered with real heroes that "[struggle] for peace, and justice, and freedom, and human rights, and for social change, and elimination of authority structures, whether in personal life or in the institutions" such as Helen Keller in the later days (Chomsky 262). The right-wing ruling elite also use heroification to keep the general population mindlessly conformed and keep the ideological systems under their control. The ruling elites do not want a room full of students questioning, making decisions, criticizing, and analyzing what is taught to these students because it will create a "bunch of crazies running around burning down the universities and making noise" like the hippies in the sixties protesting for social change (Chomsky 266). Although these right-wing elites control almost everything from the school textbooks to politicians, this isn't enough; they want totalitarian power. Idealizing and heroification cripples students by denying them the "humanness of [heroes] and keeps students in intellectual immaturity (Loewen 35)."

Heroification with cognitive dissonance is clearly used by the elites to give an illusion of American exceptionalism and while doing so, give way to ethnocentrism. The teachers around the country teach this idealized history to students everyday, but the fault does not lie within the teachers alone because teachers and "historians has been trained in a society in which education and knowledge are put forward as technical problems of excellence and not as tools for contending social classes, races, nations (Zinn 8)." Everyone needs to recognize the right-wing elite effort to keep the population within the palm of their hands. Slavery, near genocide and abuse of the Native Americans, broken treaties, and lost history "cast into the past, deplete our moral energy for the present (Zinn 10)." Because Americans have learned to ignore and deny the questionable social issues like discrimination, ethnocentrism, American exceptionalism, corrupt politics, and fabricated history, these issues remain unresolved and prominent in the society today. What America really needs do is "honest and serious intellectuals, the people who are committed to what [is] called Enlightenment values—values of truth, and freedom, and liberty, and justice (Chomsky 261). The mainstream culture is never "going to tell you you've succeeded—they're always going to tell you you've failed," but we must remember that there have been many success stories from the civil rights movement to gay/lesbian rights. We need to start opening our eyes to the world and take one step at a time to bring about changes to rid of all the injustices. It's about time we take back the truth that was denied of us.

Works Cited

Atherton, James. Learning and Teaching: Cognitive Dissonance. August 2003.

<http://www.dmu.ac.uk/~jamesa/learning/dissonance.htm>.

Chomsky, Noam. Understanding Power: The Indispensable Chomsky. Eds. Peter R. Mitchell,

and John Schoeffel. New York: The New Press, 2002.

Loewen, James W. Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got

Wrong. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995.

Zinn, Howard. A Peoples History of the United States 1492-Present. New York: HarperCollins,

1999.