More on Manly Men
Bookworm at Bookworm Room on Apr 26 2006 at 12:26 pm | Filed under: Feature Article, The War on Terror
To a hammer, everything is a nail. Currently, I’m hammering away at the idea of manly men. I did so yesterday in a post that alluded to early posts and articles I’ve written. Today, I’m doing it in connection with a New York Times article about Paul Greengrass’s . It turns out that there’ve been some murmurings of discontent from family members who think four male passengers have been given too much credit for the events on that flight:
As the courageous behavior of passengers and crew members who battled the four hijackers on the plane that crashed in a Pennsylvania field on Sept. 11, 2001, became public, some families grew troubled that four former athletes who made phone calls from the plane — Todd Beamer, Mark Bingham, Tom Burnett and Jeremy Glick — received almost all the sunlight of media exposure. Many others aboard were left in shadow.
It’s not that other victims’ families discounted or resented the valor of those men. But the families resisted early attempts by politicians to honor only these four. There was concern that bravery aboard United Airlines Flight 93 not be made into a kind of Olympic sport, where some passengers received a gold medal for gallantry while others had to settle for silver or bronze.
That’s a very personal fight the families are having with a media that likes to focus on individuals the media deems more charismatic than others. I’m not going there, because deep emotions such as these are beyond the realm of argument or analysis.
New York Times, Paul Greengrass, hijackers, Todd Beamer, Mark Bingham, Tom Burnett, Jeremy Glick
