Don’t lie, you know you have one. Even though it’s more than just a little bit queer to refer to somebody as a “hero,” there’s at least one (maybe several) accomplished person that you admire. Over the course of our lives, the “hero” can change several times as experiences, exposure to new ideas, and self-assessment alter our personalities. Maybe as a child you look up to a family member, but as an adult you begin to admire an athlete, politician or entertainer.
I tend to favor the figures time has somehow forgotten. I admire history’s underdogs—not in the sense that odds were stacked against them—but in that nobody really cared what the hell they did. Here are three examples of “heroes”, with short biographies written on-the-fly by me.
– Sir Jagdish Chandra Bose: A physicist from Bangladesh who was the inventor of the coherer that Guglielmo Marconi used to receive his first transatlantic radio communication. Marconi is like the Wallflowers of communication studies, and Bose is David Bowie (you know, the song “Heroes”? How fitting!). While Bose was acting all, “whatever, maaaaan,” totally disinterested in profiting from communications systems, Marconi ripped off his coherer and combined it with a telephone receiver to make a radio. Then, in an ultimate act of post-mortem degradation, some entrepreneur came along and slapped Bose’s name on his outlandishly expensive HIFI equipment, which I guess is history’s way of whipping its dick out and jerking off all over Bose’s dead face.
– Lawrence Oates: A British explorer who explored Antarctica. He applied to join an expedition, and was selected by Robert Falcon Scott (the most famed Antarctic explorer) to travel the final distance to the South Pole. Unfortunately, he had scurvy, and was dying. Scott asked him to continue anyway, the dick. They made it, but on the return trip from the pole, Oates was frostbitten and his progress slowed everybody else down. An epiphany led him to sacrifice his life in order to give the other men a chance for survival. He fought to save his peers, but died in a blizzard, and the rest of the eleven explorers (including Scott, who Oates hated) soon also died. Oates’ body was never recovered. Why is he a hero, you ask? He overcame his rampant selfishness to struggle against harsh conditions and his rapidly deteriorating health, only to die (feeling rather altruistic, I’m sure), and—by extension—kill eleven other men in the process.
– Suleiman I: The Ottoman Empire would not have flourished into a super-power without his leadership for over forty years. They conquered Belgrade, Rhodes, and most of Hungary. His navy dominated the Mediterranean Sea, Red Sea and Persian Gulf. Talk about globalization! He was also a poet. Not as good as Leonard Cohen, or myself, but pretty good for an Ottoman.
