From Essays After Montaigne
The law of resolution and constancie implieth not, we should not, as much as lieth in our power shelter our selves from the chiefes and inconveniences that threaten us, nor by consequence feare, they should surprise us. Contrariwise, all honest meanes for a man to warrant himselfe from evils are not onely tolerable, but commendable.
The wise Peripatetike doth not exempt himselfe from perturbations of the mind, but doth moderate them.
Courage is not the lack of fear in the face of danger--it's the overcoming of that fear, the mastering of it to do what must be done. I find it the most moving of human qualities to observe, yet it's generally poorly identified and portrayed. It often appears in movies as a breast-beating declaration over swelling brass or drums, much as sadness is rendered as a sunken face under swelling strings. But having said that, I admit that I find The Longest Day, a sprawling, four-square John Wayne epic about the Allied invasion of Normandy, to be unspeakably moving.
I grew up in a cynical home where grand emotions and ideas like constancy and sacrifice were viewed with suspicion, if not derision. But as I sought greater acquaintance with my emotions, I came to see those emotions otherwise. My first inkling of this emerged while I was watching the re-released version Star Wars (a movie my father took me to see at least six or seven times during the summer that it was released) the year after my father died. For the first half of the movie, I was embarrassed that this piece of crap had ever meant so much to me. But then, quite by surprise, I found myself weeping, from the moment that Obi-Wan Kenobi was killed until the end of the movie, for all that my father never knew and thus never taught me about being a man. And from the first time I stumbled upon The Longest Day on PBS one afternoon, I have been able to reliably reproduce that weeping whenever I watch it.
What affects me about The Longest Day is the reality of all the sacrifice that the Normandy invasion required. It's one thing to watch an action hero make some rousing speech and run off imperviously into a hail of bullets and explosions, and quite another to watch thousands of regular people, without any audience or opportunity for pontification, spill out of boats to an anonymous death. And as quaint as it may sound to our ears, these soldiers did this to protect us, our culture, our way of life. That ideal is frequently and cynically appealed to in current discourse, but in Normandy, such sacrifices were actually risked and made in the thousands and on those terms. Watching its portrayal, I'm acutely aware of and deeply grateful for never having been asked to make any such sacrifice.
This is why I found Jackass The Movie so strangely engaging. In a time and culture where the vast majority of people have never had cause to contemplate that sort of sacrifice, what role is there for courage? How are we to put the impulse that fuels the courageous protection of our society to good use in times of relative peace and prosperity? Rather than seeking the cruel and violent outlets of so many adolescents, Johnny Knoxville and friends focus their aggression and try their courage in ways that hurt no one but themselves (and one of their fathers). It could certainly be argued that they might aspire to more. But as asinine as their stunts may be, it is genuine courage that they display in their undertaking--they never mask their fear or their pain, they overcome them. There is no point to what they do, but they do it with such good humor and such a lack of bravado, that I can only find them charming.
8:05:21 AM 
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