When Heroes Change

Thinking of Jane Fonda, makes me consider what happens when heroes change. Are they still my heroes? The eighties in general was a decade for fallen heroes. It was dubbed the Decade of Me, a moniker incompatible with a basic tenet of heroism--selflessness, or at least putting others before the self. As my favorite Vulcan, Spock, would say: "The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few." How can heroism survive a decade of selfishness. It can't and in 1991, Jane married Ted Turner. What did that union imply, at least to me? I looked at my political activist aerobics diva and saw a wife hanging on the arm of her husband, cheering on a baseball team that wasn't the Oakland A's, wasn't even Western Division. My devotion was definitely rocked. Wasn't Jane a Socialist? How could she affiliate herself with a man who owned more land than anybody in the nation? Who owned more things than most anyone alive, whole baseball teams, whole television networks (granted only cable). It seemed the socialist had turned socialite. What was I to think?

I could still do aerobics. That much was in tact. But what of speaking out against oppression, inequity, nuclear proliferation. . .what happened to Jane's hollery voice? I missed the raspy indignation. Her shift may have been a decade later than many who rose to fury in the late sixties, who gave me the long list of things to be against, only to descend into human self-absorption, but Jane's descent bothered me more. I really didn't care that Joan Baez was taking some me-time in the eighties. I didn't feel let down. But Jane was different. Her retreat into the arms of capitalism and her embrace of the role of doting eye-candy wife gave me pause. Maybe hollering just gets your throat sore. Maybe there was a kinder and gentler way to save humanity from itself? Or did Jane just give up?

I learned that heroes change and they don't always change into another kind of hero. Jane changed and forced me to consider my own convictions, since holding up the wife of Ted Turner on a heroes stool was out of the question. While she bought up Montana, I had time to search my own soul and take personal responsibility for what mattered most to me, since it could never be the Atlanta Braves.