Heroes are a tough sell in today's world. Time was when you could fixate on a public figure you admired, read just about everything in print, watch every television interview and never become disillusioned. Today the media makes a fettish out of digging up dirt on just about everyone. Hero worship has become near impossible to sustain, except through persistent and willfull ignorance, which is perhaps to say that it's run its course and should be let go.
I've never had much use for hero worship, myself, but I have occasionally suffered from it. The person who has been front and center on my personal pedestal for the better part of my adult life is a musician named Peter Gabriel. Yes, that Peter Gabriel. I put it that way because one of the reasons his music has always appealed to me is its degree of intimacy. Gabriel never came off as a superstar. But here's where that willfull ignorance thing comes in. I stopped going to his live performances many years ago, partly because I absolutely hate large crowds, but probably mostly to avoid the recognition that the intimacy was gone. I prefer to remember him sitting casually on the edge of a small stage singing Mother of Violence with his feet danging down into the first row of the audience.
My supersized admiration for this man stemmed from a number of things: sheer delight in his music, admiration for his creativity, his sense of drama, the immensity of his vision, and deep respect for his global perspective, his focus on human rights, his powerful inclusion of musical influences and personalities that might otherwise have found access to Western markets difficult. Among all of these talents and ideals, though, consistent with them but increasingly uncomfortable for me, it was becoming obvious that there were some political perspectives that I would prefer to ignore. So I prepared for disappointment but tried to avoid the inevitable by more or less hiding my head in the sand. And then, today, I happened upon this*, and this:
Gabriel would also like to separate the signal from the noise in the realm of current events. "I think it's really important for America to open its borders at this point," he says. "Obviously, since September 11, it's gone the other way. It's so critical that enough people in England as well as in America ask, Why is it that these young men and women would be willing to lose their lives as well as take a lot of us down, to punch a hole in our way of life? Until that question gets answered, if we just think these are bad, evil people, and we must destroy them, we're not going to get anywhere. Historically, yesterday's terrorist is tomorrow's political leader. Nelson Mandela was a 'terrorist,' and he's probably the man, the politician, I most admire."
You can't go back. While I was reading those words, I could hear the pedestal crumbling into dust, as it probably should have long ago. Still, it's a difficult transition. Part of me is in denial, grumbling that the guy has clearly lost it, that he's adopted the "look" of his old buddy, countercult guru and convicted murderer Ira Einhorn, that he's now playing music with monkeys and imagining that he's got "something magical there." Well, that may be the case, but I realize that this is actually a personal issue. It's really sort of the end of the process of my letting go of my last links to the wide-eyed idealist peacenik flower child I used to be and moving on.
Maybe this is why, although I'd been anxiously anticipating the release of the (way overdue) new Peter Gabriel album, I only just listened to it for the first time this weekend. And the magic, the power and, yes, the intimacy are all still there. But the baggage is gone.
------------------
*From the current edition of Jewsweek. You can check it out if you like, but I can't find corroboration anywhere, so I'm skeptical. Feel free to disillusion me further.
