Your Heroes? Random Top 5.

[Stephen Morgan]

Norman Baker
Subcommandante Marcos
Prince Kerensky
John Wycliffe
Warren Farrell
Arthur Scargill
Herewark "the Wake"
Moazzam Begg and Ed Husein both.
Billy Bragg
Llewellyn ap Gruddyd
The Levellers, both the band and the seventeenth century movement
Allan Frankovitch and Adam Curtis.
Others.

[Searcher08]

Stafford Beer - wizard and cyberneticist and colleague of Allende

Edward de Bono - inventor of Lateral Thinking

Alex Jones - asskicker

Sibel Edmonds - the mouse that roars

Genghiz Khan - for achieving the impossible

Victor Wooten - for finding the soul of a bass

Don Lawrence - for making comic art that lives

Nathaniel Branden - for embodying and teaching integrity

John O'Neill - for bravery and not shutting the fuck up

David Allen - For "Getting Things Done"

[NeonLX]

Wally Booth



Also:
Isaac Asimov
Mahatma Gandhi
The nameless, faceless people who get up every day and do their thing, in the face of horrendous oppression and violence around this world.

[IanEye]

Childhood heroes

Evel Knievel


Harriet the Spy


Roosevelt Franklin


Shang Chi


Taran Wanderer


honorable mention: Willie Whistle
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i-2-pwuDSsA

[compared2what?]

No heroine or hero here, other than the image itself, which is heroic in its beauty. Mostly I wanted to give Shang Chi a little gender balance, for visual purposes. Please don't shoot the intellectuals.

[compared2what?]

Homage to four great artists, for the price of one video; the principle nominated hero is Jonathan Richman, who wrote the song, but shout-out to Stephane Evezard, direteur artistique, who did the video, and about whom I know not one other thing. Still. I guess he can be heroic, just for one post:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XSccHqk9s64

[Skunkboy]

John Kennedy
Robert Kennedy
FDR
Edward Abbey
Hunter S Thompson

Sincerely
Skunkboy

PS. I think that Jeff Wells should get an honorable mention

[Skunkboy]

Oh yeah... and Jimi Hendrix

Skunkboy

[judasdisney]

Although I grew up in the heyday of Sesame Street (early 1970s), I don't recall "Roosevelt Franklin" -- IanEye ("I & I"? Bob Marley?) has done me a service by shocking me into awareness on this matter. Does Roosevelt Franklin still exist?

Until Joe H. mentioned it, I was also unaware of "The Magic Pudding." I looked it up, expecting a hallucinogenic reference. Hmmm. Hasn't been keyword hijacked yet?

Fictional heroes:

Atticus Finch

Nancy Thompson

Alexander Cutter and Richard Bone

Sherlock Holmes

Hamlet

Additional personal heroes:

Clarence Darrow

Evo Morales

Peter Garrett

Huey Long

Dennis Kucinich

John Steinbeck

Louis Tackwood, the real hero of Watergate

Gary Webb

Alan J. Pakula

Peter Weir

Salvador Allende

Special mention:

Frank Serpico, when asked by Al Pacino why he became a whistleblower on the NYPD (and was subsequently shot in the face for his trouble), Serpico told Pacino: "Well, Al, I don't know. I guess I would have to say it would be because ... if I didn't, who would I be when I listened to a piece of music?"

[Joe Hillshoist]

Norman lindsey is worth checking out too JD, nothing special, painted and sculpted some sexy chics, but he seemed to have a knack for getting as much as he could out of life.

The pudding itself is cool, a bit standoffish, but it feeds everyone all the time. In fact thinking about it, it could pass off as a hallucinogenic metaphor.

Peter Garrett is on shakey ground at the moment, thats why he didn''t get a mention in my list.

First the Pulp Mill, now this.

He hasn't signed off on it yet so I guess we'll have to wait and see.

[judasdisney]

Peter Garrett is on shakey ground at the moment, thats why he didn''t get a mention in my list.

First the Pulp Mill, now this.

Thanks for the heads' up. My list of falling/fallen heroes is also long... Thomas Jefferson, Ray Bradbury, Wim Wenders, Oliver Stone... living heroes are always a dicey proposition.

[brainpanhandler]

A couple more...

Fritz Perls I like to believe his last words really were, “Nobody tells Fritz Perls what to do”.

Apropos of heroes, Joseph Campbell

Willie Nelson “You could die from the cold in the arms of a nightmare”

[compared2what?]

A fictional heroine too rarely recognized as such:

Lolita.

When the thought of adding her to this list first occurred to me, I thought I remembered reading a Nabokov interview in which he called her the most courageous person he had ever known, or words to that effect.

Following a lengthy online search, however, I'm not at all sure that I even remember thinking I remembered that. Which is, I guess, thematically appropriate in a Pale Fire way, just minus the intelligence.

She is very brave, though.

"The spiral is a spiritualized circle. In the spiral form, the circle, uncoiled, unwound, has ceased to be vicious; it has been set free." -- Nabokov

[professorpan]

Already mentioned: MLK, Gandhi.

Guy Murchie (author of The Seven Mysteries of Life)

Thedor Seuss Geisel

Robert Anton Wilson

Terence McKenna

Albert Hofmann

Jacques Vallee

J. Allen Hynek

Edgar Allan Poe

H.P. Lovecraft

John Keel

Philip K. Dick

[FourthBase]

Ladies:

Ti-Grace Atkinson
Sarah Silverman
Inez Middleton
Laetitia Sadier
Dian Fossey

Gentlemen:

Socrates
Friedrich Nietzsche
Martin Luther King
Bill Walton
Bill Lee