Where have all the good men gone and where are all the gods?
…
I need a hero
I’m holding out for a hero till the end of the night
He’s gotta be strong and he’s gotta be fast
And he’s gotta be fresh from the fight
— Bonnie Tyler, “Holding Out for a Hero”
For an astonishing 40 years, I’ve had a barely varying matrix of 400-plus songs on my workout playlist, the great majority of them from the ’80s. Doing pullups this morning (half the number of what I did back then), I listened to the lyrics of Bonnie Tyler’s motivational Holding Out for a Hero, from the 1984 hit film Footloose. This caused me to lament and resent the precipitous decline in the culture since that uplifting decade, when almost all was right with the nation and the arts, before men relinquished both to the mad Left.
Tyler’s song, for example, beautifully captures the eternal female yearn for a real man to romance her. Today it would be banned in practically every college in America as a sexist ode to toxic masculinity and the patriarchy. Although the movie — about just such a man (Kevin Bacon) who excites a religiously repressed town youth out of their complacent stupor — did huge business in ’86, no modern studio would touch it. (READ MORE: Culture Matters: Righting the American Ship)
The sequence featuring Holding Out for a Hero depicts a macho game of chicken between two white guys competing for a hot woman atop dueling bulldozers. Eighties boys and girls dug it and popularized the song. Yet the same scene would trigger their 21st Century snowflake successors into their safe spaces. Mostly the overpopulous beta men like “Richard,” whom I cited in a recent article here, while the feminazis will be leading the shrill charge to cancel the entire film.
Yet the fascinating tragic flaw of the Western hero is that though perpetually a loner, he understands the family is the building block of civilization.
Ironically, the blame for this cultural deterioration goes to men, in particular alpha males. Obeying the natural order of things, men dominated all of history and world-leader America since its constitution. But in the late ’60s and 1970s, real men took a break, temporarily letting hippies, feminists, Marxists, and racialists take over the culture as surely as the Democrats did government post-Watergate. The resulting geopolitical debris — humiliating defeat in Vietnam, Roe v. Wade, Jimmy Carter, gas lines, American hostages in Iran, Soviet expansion into Afghanistan, malaise — was matched by artistic feminization.
The screen, large and small, became a canvas for unmanliness. I remember an old interview with the fine actor Dustin Hoffman, whose picture, The Graduate (1967), helped spearhead this emasculation. Describing his time at the New York Actors Studio, Hoffman recalled how all the other taller, manlier students would spend their free moments fast drawing invisible handguns. This was no game for them. In the early ’60s, you couldn’t imagine being a successful actor on film or television without seeming at home in a Western. (RELATED: The Left’s War on Young People)
The beloved genre had long before iconized the male hero via inseparable virtues: courage, physical prowess, respect for women, and proficiency at violence when required. As Bonnie Tyler sang, “He’s gotta be strong and he’s gotta be fast/And he’s gotta be fresh from the fight.” Boys wanted to be him, and girls, like Tyler, wanted to be with him. Because he reflected the basic reality about men and women.
Yet the fascinating tragic flaw of the Western hero is that though perpetually a loner, he understands the family is the building block of civilization. So, he risks his life to protect it as only a man can. Try as they did, feminist filmmakers and TV producers could not devise a Western female counterpart to him. Which is why he had to go. Hence, in the ’70s, he went thataway, along with any semblance of masculinity.
Conservative men turned into objects of scorn in film and television (see Robert Duvall as Frank Burns in M*A*S*H the movie and Larry Linville on TV, and Carroll O’Connor as Archie Bunker in All In the Family), or psychotic Vietnam veterans like Bruce Dern in Black Sunday and Coming Home. Meanwhile, asexual women dominated the media, most notably Jill Clayburgh, Barbra Streisand, Ellen Burstyn, early ’70s Jane Fonda in the theater, and even more obnoxiously on TV with Maude, Alice, One Day at a Time.
There were a few prominent exceptions in the year 1971, embodied by three major male stars who refused to liberalize — John Wayne (Big Jake), Clint Eastwood (Dirty Harry), and Sean Connery as James Bond (Diamonds Are Forever). But they bucked the trend, along with the one-year later blockbuster, The Godfather. Then, in 1976, came “a streetwise Hercules to fight the rising odds,” Sylvester Stallone as Rocky.
Rocky’s effect on the culture cannot be underestimated, since it caught two waves already forming: a celebration of young manhood via physical fitness — Rocky’s Theme became the ultimate male workout inspirer — and a defiant new conservatism personified by a real-life hero, Ronald Reagan. Both forces culminated in the glorious 1980s. Men and America were back. (RELATED: The Left’s War on Young People)
Reagan restored the patriotic pride which led to economic prosperity and the military resurgence that ultimately destroyed the “evil empire,” the Soviet Union. And the arts exploded with machismo on film — Stallone, Schwarzenegger, Gibson, Norris, Crocodile Dundee, on TV — Miami Vice, The A-Team, Knight Rider, The Greatest American Hero — and in music, like the awesome songs still keeping me in shape: Tarzan Boy, In a Big Country, White Wedding, Call Me, Dancing In the Dark, Under the Milky Way, Eye of the Tiger (from Rocky III), and hundreds of others.
Unfortunately, good times make weak men. And after Reagan came a whole lot of them — Bush, Clinton, Bush, Biden, Obama — with a two-year turnaround by Trump, until the forces of darkness, a global pandemic, and his own poor choices brought him down, and the country with him. But I’m still holding out for a hero, and I pray that in 2024, we’ll elect him. Until then, it’s up to us to fight the rising odds like strong men.
Looking for an endearing holiday gift book? Try my romantic Christmas ghost story, The Christmas Spirit, available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and other fine bookstores.
