Unit 4: Selection Vocabulary 3

Right now, almost anyone can be a celebrity just because his or her name or face can be recognized. But money, notoriety, and flamboyant behavior don’t make someone a hero.

Heroes have been defined as people who have demonstrated admirable qualities such as strength, honesty, courage, and perseverance, sometimes at great risk to themselves.

When celebrities are idolized just because they play heroes in movies and on television or are famous for dangerous or inappropriate publicity stunts, they end up overshadowing real heroes.

“We are sociologically preprogrammed to ‘follow the leader,”’ he says.

Many people are dismissive of celebrities just because they are celebrities.

This suffering, epitomized by shoeless soldiers’ bloody footprints in the snow, is the darkest image that comes to us from that winter at Valley Forge, Pennsylvania.

They emerged tougher, stronger, and better, rather than weaker, crippled, and dispirited, as would surely have been the case without the entrance, towards the end of that winter, of someone almost more prototypically American—or at least more self-made—than George Washington.

Von Steuben was, though, indisputably a Friedrich, a Wilhelm, a Rudolf, and a Gerhard, all at once, which is more than most people can say for themselves.

If the inflated military rank was of the same provenance as the “baron” title—which might, to be fair, have been the fault of faulty genealogical work by his father, not deliberate mendacity on the part of either von Steuben fils or père—or if they were both puffery, we still won the war, which we might not have done otherwise.

The “baron” may have been eccentric, but then geniuses often are, aren’t they?