HEROES AND VILLAINS

 

 

By Linda Lee Greene, Author & Artist

 

It was August 13, 1961 and Walter Cronkite, on his CBS Sunday Evening News program, was saying something about a wall under construction in Berlin, Germany, a report that rooted my parents in place on the sofa across from the family television set in our living room. I remember it more because it was my eighteenth birthday than for its geopolitical significance. I had graduated from high school three months before and a yellow brick road stretched out before me from Columbus, Ohio to somewhere then not yet clear, but I was pretty sure it didn’t go anywhere near Berlin, Germany. So you can imagine that the newscast was mere white noise in my maiden voyage as an adult. Not until the subsequent and most eventful decade of my life had passed and I was a young wife and mother living in Long Island, New York did I pay that wall in Berlin any mind. Against the backdrop of the Vietnam War raging on the television in my own living room, I found distraction in Ian Fleming’s JAMES BOND 007 books. I read one after the other of them through the long and frosty winter of 1971. And then I put my embryonic brain on serious notice when British spy, Alec Leamas goes on one last dangerous mission in East Germany in John le Carré’s incomparable espionage novel, THE SPY WHO CAME IN FROM THE COLD. Thereafter I was hooked on the whole World War II/Berlin Wall/Cold War zeitgeist.

            Fleming was a master at sculpting clear-cut heroes and villains. Unless we are a sociopath or worse, we know exactly for whom to root in his 007 exploits. On the other hand, le Carré is unbeatable in the way he subtly mixes up his heroes and villains so that the reader has to constantly check in with himself to make sure he hasn’t been led astray.

            In the extreme, the building blocks of barriers such as the Berlin Wall are malformed minds and puny hearts, both nature and nurture forming the vessels. Added to the mix are people who just refuse to take their medication, as well as bullies and power-grabbers. There are also normal minds and adequate hearts in the group who are poisoned by half-truths or out and out lies—and others who are downright mad, because they’ve been stepped-on, spit-on, left-out, passed-over—humiliation, betrayal, disrespect, and resentment do not make for friendly relations. We cannot forget those whom if they didn’t have bad luck they wouldn’t have any luck at all, and that list includes persons of the wrong color, gender, or age; or having an address on the wrong side of the tracks and no way to the other side. There must be others right and left that do not come to my mind just now. But I do know that a further component is perfectly reasonable people who simply do not see eye to eye—the “clash of opposites,” as le Carré puts it.  

The Berlin Wall stood unyielding for 28 years, separating Berliners east from west. It is naïve to insist that all good Germans lived on one side or the other. A full complement of above described individuals made a home on both sides, but an uneasy home, because when the stars lined up for it, they took hammers and axes and shovels and all manner of instruments of demolition to the wall. It was then that the open floor fight began. The people who were all mixed up about their heroes and villains had a hard way to go in their mending. The tougher challenge was for those who had the whole thing straight. They were the adults in the room—the heroes among the rank and file—and the bulk of the reformation was on their shoulders, as could only have been the case.   

They were faced with a big decision about the wall. Tear the whole thing down and bury the remnants? Eliminate it completely so nobody ever had to look at it again, to be reminded of the bad old days? Or, retain it in a different form as a symbol of Berlin’s turbulent past and as a memorial of the city’s triumphant recovery? To this day, portions of the wall stand in parts of the city in answer to that question.

It didn’t end with the wall’s physical fate, though. There is an old saying that when we have finished ninety-five percent of a task, we are only halfway there. Any female who has carried a child to full-term pregnancy knows the truth of the adage. The last few weeks seem as long as all the other 35 to 36 weeks put together. The larger truth is that the job goes on and on, because after giving birth, the responsibility of raising the child begins. Rearing a well-rounded child or reforming a community is a nonstop endeavor. 

The muddling of heroes and villains is a central plot of the chaos underway in the United States, not only as it pertains to its leaders and would-be leaders, but also in relation to its symbols in the form of monuments, sculptures, and other types of effigies. Human beings like and need symbols of their story. But symbols rarely, if ever, tell the whole story. There has to be room for complexity and mystery in the human drama, and tolerance of diversity. That is not to say that we should not strive to do better for one another, but what good are footsteps up the ladder if we fail to keep our hand outstretched in case somebody a bit slower needs a lift up too?! This is a time like no other for heroes to stand forward strong and firm.©

 

Image: SISTINE CHAPEL CEILING (DETAIL) - Michelangelo

 

#WalterCronkite, #IanFleming, #JamesBond, #007, #JohnleCarré, #Germany, #Berlin, #BerlinWall, #ColumbusOhio, #LindaLeeGreene

 

Books by multi-award-winning author, Linda Lee Greene are available for purchase at Amazon.com.