A Hero Should Be Self-Made, Not Manufactured

All of a sudden, you can’t turn around in this town without bumping into someone who’s being held up as a hero.

Maybe it’s the prop wash from Memorial Day and its solemn homilies about sacrifice and valor. Maybe there are no more heroics around than usual; maybe we’re just more alert to them.

Last week it was David Zuniga, a La Puente second-grader, delivering a Heimlich hug to a friend who was choking to death on a chicken nugget.

On Wednesday it was Richard Garcia, plunging into the freshly flowing Los Angeles River to save Hunk, a golden retriever who wasn’t even his.

And on Tuesday it was Conrad Buchanan, the mall security guard, going home from the hospital in a wheelchair, a quadriplegic from trying to break the fall of a distraught stranger who leaped six stories to her death right in front of him.

If you think I’ve overlooked someone here, I haven’t.

Andrew Ramirez, soldier and briefly prisoner of war--not really a hero, just a guy in the Army who ended up getting caught.

Before you blow a gasket about my want of patriotism, let me tell you that those are not my words, they are Ramirez’s:

“I’m just a guy in the Army who ended up getting caught. I don’t see myself as a hero. My idea of a hero is something different than what we did.”

Closeted with the president, feted at Dodger Stadium and Disneyland, acclaimed in a parade in Canoga Park and another in his own East L.A., these too are Ramirez’s words: “I’ve had about 10 minutes of fame. My 15 minutes is almost up.”

This is not false modesty; it is the authentic modesty of a man who knows the job description and knows, too, of the men who have truly transcended it. He can’t have grown up in East L.A. without passing by Eugene A. Obregon Park, can’t have driven the East L.A. freeway interchange without knowing that it now bears the name of Eugene A. Obregon.

Eugene A. Obregon was a 19-year-old kid from Evergreen Avenue and a Marine PFC in Korea when he paused in battle to help another dogface who had been wounded. He put his body between his pal and the enemy, and he held them off and bought time for the other guy at the price of his own. That, Ramirez would tell you, is a real hero.

Obregon got the Medal of Honor.

Ramirez got a lifetime pass to Dodger Stadium.

And Conrad Buchanan got only a lifetime pass to a wheelchair.

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The worrying thing about news is not that we dwell on the bad--we’re in the business of tracking the remarkable, not the routine. No, the worrying thing is when the appalling becomes so ordinary that it skews the curve, and the sight of human beings acting at their best is cause for astonished headlines.

Maybe we are all so starved for the cleanness of courage, so emptied of it ourselves, that we elevate to the exceptional what is simply our species on good behavior.

I’m delighted that an Anaheim couple named Ernest and Mabel Schwobeda found $1,500 left behind on a tray at a local hot dog stand last weekend and unhesitatingly handed it in to police. That’s how they were brought up.

But I’m alarmed that police insist on giving them a commendation for it. We go too far down that road, and every kid who doesn’t shoot up his school, who doesn’t snort a line of coke will expect a medal for it, and one day the boastful bumper stickers will read, “My child was not expelled from Natty Bumppo Middle School.”

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The New World hero was the uncomplicated man who made his solitary way in the trackless frontier, who stood up to the elements, a model of physical fearlessness. Think Daniel Boone.

The Old World hero lived in settled places, and stood up not to bears or blizzards but to the church or the king with intellectual and moral courage. Think Galileo.

The Galileo hero still makes Americans uneasy; give us Daniel Boone, or whoever plays him in the movies.

We may burn incense at the altar of the Founding Fathers--how stalwart they were, how wise. But ours is the century not of Jefferson but of the poet Yeats, for whom “the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.” And who wants to be the worst, or to believe in him? Who could speak now, straight-faced, of pledging his life, his fortune and his sacred honor, knowing that by midnight, Leno and Letterman will loft an eyebrow and curl an inflection to say, “Oh yeah?”

So we confine our hero-worship safely, unassailably, to men in uniforms--whether they have our team’s medals on the front of them, or our team’s numbers on the back.

Patt Morrison’s column appears Fridays. Her e-mail address is patt.morrison@latimes.com