I’ve had a rotating cast of heroes in my life, which change based on my mood and the times. Sometimes I imagine them gathered around me—like a dinner party I’ve always wanted to host. This is where the ache of my shortcomings meets a who’s who of historical achievement.

There’s something childish, I fear, about maintaining a pantheon of heroes. Who does this past the age of 12? Nobody asks—save in awkward job interviews or second-rate dating sites—about their interlocutor’s heroes. And few broach the topic unprompted. It’s esoteric at best and invasive at worst. Despite this, I find heroes essential to surviving this particular nadir in American life.

Whom do you idolize? Whom do you envy? Whose ideals do you aspire toward—however lurchingly and asymptotically—across a lifetime of striving and strife? And why are those ideals most worthy? We reveal our vulnerabilities when we answer these questions. We reveal them when we name our heroes out loud.

OK, here’s my current roster: Joan Baez, W. S. Merwin, Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, and Cecillia Wang.

Baez, of course, is the folk singer and activist who withheld the portion of her taxes that went to the Vietnam War. One of my uncles—I’m guilty of advertising this widely—befriended her in the 1960s.

Merwin might be my favorite lyric poet and the only one to retreat to a rainforest in Maui, grow palm trees, and write. It’s from there that he reminds us, in his poem “Rain Light,” that “all the flowers are forms of water” and that “they wake without a question / even though the whole world is burning.” I met him once; he died in 2019.  

Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain died about a century earlier, succumbing to the worst of his sixCivil War battle wounds. Fifty years before that, he saved the Army of the Potomac at Gettysburg. And three years before that he was, like me, a professor at a small liberal arts college. When he finished fighting slavery, he returned to the classroom.

Cecillia Wang, the latest addition to my list, is the national legal director for the ACLU. In April she defended birthright citizenship—of which she’s a beneficiary—at the U.S. Supreme Court. Earlier this summer, we learned that she won that argument, though by a gallingly small margin of 5-4.  

These are, it’s safe to say, a representative band of do-gooders for an over-educated humanist in 2026. Or they might be a superhero squad in the making—if MoveOn made morning cartoons or the co-op stocked comics. I can picture Chamberlain in dress blues barking orders. Or Baez’s guitar emitting hypnotic rays. Merwin could marshal Mother Nature in defense of the dispossessed while Wang fires off dockets of hot jurisprudence.

But there’s a slice of my psychology in these choices, too, a worry that has clawed at me for years. Should I abandon my bookishness—not to mention the anchor of tenure—to address the crisis in our democracy, as Chamberlain did? Maybe I ought to forego my professional stability for a different cause altogether and the one most closely aligned with Merwin: writing poems? Or could I marry my art and my activism without comprising either, like Baez? Would any of it matter in a country that’s disavowing, as Wang has argued, its pluralistic roots?

I hesitate to write any of this, not because it’s ridiculous (we’re past that) or because I’m averse to airing my anxieties in public. I’m a poet; that’s just part of the job. No, I worry that these names give the impression that good living is painting by numbers. That biography can masquerade as self-help.

Nothing, of course, could be further from the truth, though heroes can momentarily create that impression. They offer a model, perhaps even an alternative, for one’s actions, all while eliding the luck—and, in some cases, privilege—that led to their success. There’s no way, lest you pull the world’s greatest Tom Ripley, to really be like them. To do so, you must abandon yourself.

That’s one issue I take with heroes. There are others, too.

The hero, I fear, is synonymous with the GOAT—an acronym dripping with the internet’s casual bombast—and the GOAT is synonymous with the Great Man. As in Great Man Theory. As in Thomas Carlyle’s belief, advanced in 1841’s On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History,that humanity is shaped by, you guessed it, famous dudes doing famous things.

This concept has fallen out of favor, and not simply because it’s patriarchal. Great Man Theory preferences charismatic leaders over vast social movements. And it conveniently fails to ask—as it tabulates tectonic shifts in politics, science, or the arts—a key question: “great for whom?” Do we really believe that the gods allocate renown in discrete portions, tapping mortals on the shoulder—Abraham Lincoln, say, or Isaac Newton—as we queue up to be born?

The earliest heroes, if we trace the concept back to its Greek roots, provided exactly that: a link between mortals and gods. Aphrodite gave birth to Aeneas. Heracles’ papa was Zeus. Their exploits mattered, I imagine, not just because they slew hydras, but because they brought their audience closer to the divine. A whiff of ambrosia wafts up from their tales’ recitation. For a few moments, transported by story, we forget that we’ll die.

These are the same heroes, leading the same epics, who must establish empires and build nations. Whose authors and audiences task them with representing vast tribes. The Roman poet Virgil elevated Aeneas into Rome’s father. We do something similar with certain presidents in our New World democracy. George Washington is the “father of the nation,” never mind that we’re a nation built on immigrants, like Cecillia Wang’s parents.

And yet, I still turn to my heroes when I need someone to tug me closer to what’s honest, just, or aesthetically sound. Institutions can do that, and so can great works of art. But neither feels as relatable as humans with a story and a face. I want a person to emulate when I feel powerless or off kilter, as I often do in the U.S. today. (There’s a reason all my heroes are American.) I want someone who represents my potpourri of values. I want someone who guides me to take my next steps, or offers a possible step I might take.  

That’s because they exemplify certain life choices but don’t eclipse others. Their collective good works provide nudges, but not rules, for how to negotiate this world. Or, as I once read on a bumper sticker featuring a former (and likely future) hero: “What Would Walt Whitman Do?” It’s a question I’ll occasionally pose to one or all of my current quartet.   

And, as that quartet implies, I want a counterweight to our era’s many villains. Some broadcast their villainy by naming corporations after Sauron’s all-seeing crystal ball from Lord of the Rings. Others hide behind masks and unmarked cars, abducting our undocumented neighbors. Some take their cues, and others their direct orders, from our villain-in-chief, a man who descended a gold escalator, in full Bond villain fashion, to launch his political career with a racist screed.

“Show me a hero,” F. Scott Fitzgerald once wrote, “and I’ll show you a tragedy.” There’s a thin line, in other words, between heroes and martyrs. Alex Pretti taught us that, and Renee Good taught us that, and they’re only the most conspicuous victims of a state that currently prides itself on pain.

But Fitzgerald is more of a storyteller than a doomsayer, and for all the fatalism that his pithy quotation portends, there’s hope, too. Tragedy here is synonymous with drama, comedy’s opposite. Tragedy is the vehicle through which a hero—the audience’s avatar—suffers and learns. It matters little if the heroes are real or fictional, so long as the payoff, the catharsis, feels earned. That’s what heroes leave us after the last ovation. That’s what we carry into the cool evening air.

Derek Mong is a poet and critic, an English professor at Wabash College, co-editor of At Length, and a contributing editor at Zócalo Public Square. His newest poetry collection, When the Earth Flies into the Sun, is shortlisted for the Indiana Authors Award.

Primary editor: Sarah Rothbard | Secondary editor: Eryn Brown