Examining the Profile of Courage

It’s been one of those strange, tough weeks, gray gloom in sunny Oklahoma City--where 168 bombing victims are memorialized--giving way to 20-20 clarity.

What is true courage, for example? Do we see it in sinewy hard bodies on a basketball court? In dilettantes clamoring for fame on prime-time entertainment shows like “Survivor” and “Fear Factor” that simulate peril, whip up scares on cue and falsely call themselves “reality”?

Now take the phenomenal Shaq, who like the transcendent Kobe no longer has a last name. These young Los Angeles Lakers are anomalies among adored, stroked, pampered, fawned-over NBA superstars, being not only extraordinarily rich because of their physical gifts and box-office value as players and commercial spokesmen, but extraordinarily nice and likable as well. Really, what were the odds?

Yet. . . .

When Shaq this week stonily challenged Philadelphia 76ers center Dikembe Mutombo to play him on the court “like a man,” this taunt en route to Wednesday’s Game 4 of the NBA Finals refocused attention on what constitutes strength and bravery in our society.

Yes, yes, you’re thinking, but that was “trash talk,” the peculiar bravado of jocks, chamoised to a mirror sheen by Muhammad Ali in his heyday, and intended to mess up “your opponent’s head” verbally instead of by brute force. Besides, Shaq was jawing for the sports media, knowing they were leaning forward on the edges of their seats, sponging it up as if hearing Moses read the Ten Commandments. And who is ever to know what mischief the playful Lakers center hides behind his poker-faced glower?

But he did say “like a man,” didn’t he, in effect relating manliness--commonly defined as being strong, resolute and honorable--to himself and fellow hulk Mutombo elbowing and leaning on each other to gain an advantage under the basket?

I mulled that a bit after reading a story in Wednesday’s L.A. Times about boys as young as 7 being forced to join rebels battling the government in such hot spots as civil war-ravaged Sierra Leone in southwest Africa. It echoed “Cry Freetown,” a “CNN Perspectives” hour that I saw earlier this year just before it won a Peabody Award.

Deeply troubling and almost too painful to watch, it existed because of Sorious Samura, a Sierra Leone photojournalist who risked his life to report horrors in a devastated region that most of the world and its news organizations had either ignored or abandoned. No shoe contract for him.

The day after rebels entered the capital of Freetown on Jan. 6, 1999, and vowed to kill every journalist, Samura hit the streets with his camera, somehow staying alive while shooting pictures of charred bodies and recording atrocities even on the part of Nigerian peacekeeping troops. The Nigerians were in a tough spot, getting picked off by children who had been armed by the rebels and forced to butcher their own families and then become snipers. But that didn’t justify the peacekeepers’ response.

“I am still haunted by this boy,” Samura said in the program over his jarring footage of a kid of perhaps 13 pleading innocence and begging for his life as a Nigerian soldier pushed him down the dirt street, then shot him dead. An even younger accused sniper, crying out as he was beaten repeatedly by the soldiers, was spared only after a government official intervened, but scores more were summarily executed.

Hoping to gain sympathy for his tiny, impoverished land by giving the West this “wake-up call,” Samura kept on shooting TV pictures even though he could have been killed at any moment. Pretty manly, wouldn’t you say?

Strong, resolute, honorable.

Bernice McGee qualifies, too, although she’s hardly masculine. I met her Sunday afternoon at a small park in Lawton, Okla., where she had come after services at Bethlehem Baptist Church to be interviewed by a local TV reporter less than 24 hours before Timothy McVeigh was to be executed. McVeigh’s bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City had killed her brother, Clarence E. Wilson Sr.

He was acting regional director of the Department of Housing and Urban Development when McVeigh set off the blast that killed him and the others. McGee raised $13,000 to erect a poignant public memorial to her brother on this government-owned green spot just off downtown, where she personally tends the flower beds she planted herself.

She mentioned this odyssey with pride, not self-pity.

Self-pity--that’s the prerogative of prime time’s celebrities of the moment, the ones whose suffering for dollars and vamping for viewers earns them time with TV interviewers everywhere.

I didn’t ask McGee if she watched the titanic struggles on “Survivor I” or “Survivor II” on CBS, or had seen those good-looking amateur Evel Knievels jump through fiery hoops on “Fear Factor,” NBC’s new series that each week pays 50 grand to a contestant who bests five others in overcoming a series of challenging traumas created for them by the producers.

Hmmmmmm. I doubt if she has. She’s probably had enough legitimate trauma in her life and wouldn’t find lying in a bed of icky-poo worms or bungee-jumping much of a fright compared with what she’s faced the last few years.

Unlike stout hearts queuing for “Survivor,” “Fear Factor” and other such shows--people facing mild hardship for the purpose of earning money and three-picture deals--her trauma was not of her own doing. The slaughter of 168 people in Oklahoma City was not of their own doing. The killings and mutilations of civilians in Sierra Leone were not of their own doing.

Which raises another question, one extending beyond those clearly fictional Hollywood thrillers like “Psycho” or “Jaws” or “The Exorcist” that strap your emotions into a roller coaster. With so much real jeopardy and terror out there, why are so many of us entertained by the manufactured kind that TV presents as reality? Aren’t we getting our fill of the real thing?

Wasn’t the Oklahoma City bombing enough to last a lifetime? No movie and TV deals for those folks. Or shoe contracts, either.

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Howard Rosenberg’s column appears Mondays and Fridays. He can be contacted at howard.rosenberg@latimes.com.