Sam Smith on heroism and mythmaking in American politics: As Joseph Conrad noted, heroes, like cowards, are people who for one brief moment do something out of the ordinary. It takes nothing away from the honor of that moment to understand that the courage of a critical event may not be a particularly good predictor of future behavior...Even in positions of power, the magic inner strength with which they were once blessed typically recedes except for campaigns and banquets. Certainly in this election, military heroics did not correlate with courage to oppose three of the worst bills ever passed by Congress: the Iraq War authorization, the Patriot Act, and the absurd Bush education plan. It is also true that Americans tend to rank military heroism far above all other varieties and so we overlook many heroes, such as firefighters, who routinely display bravery yet are rarely honored to the same extent, let alone get to run for president. Or the grandmother raising her second generation of children admidst crime and drugs, a rotten school system, and a society that cares not one whit about any of them. It is useless in a time of such mythological fetishism, however, to argue the point. As John Kerry has recently demonstrated, it was only after he reincarnated himself as someone he had been three decades ago that the public - desperate for honor, decency, and bravery - leapt to his side. The myth that grants such tenure to heroism gains ascendancy when a different sort of bravery is stunningly absent from our political life, which is to say bravery marked by public lives of steady, constantly reiterated courage and integrity. With such heroes lacking, it is not surprising that so many give their support to what a candidate once was in the hope that somehow it will happen again.