Postmodernity would seem to be an era wherein heroes and the heroic are anachronisms, unless the cause is related to the emancipation of the passions or the demolition of ancient moral restraints. Thus, the epithet of hero can be laid at the feet of abortionists and cop assassins when the private and the public are merged in the great homogenous mixing bowl of the aggrandizing liberal state. Moreover, when a man who walks hard in the calling of a God-ruled conscience is presented as a heroic archetype to a population that lionizes Planned Parenthood and Black Lives Matter, the disconnect is doubly offensive, since any deviation from the City of Man by the disciple of an arcane patriarchal deity is deemed a form of nihilism -- a scandal to minds flushed with the decrepit mores of Sodom and Babel.

The story of Desmond Doss in Mel Gibson’s Hacksaw Ridge is an incomprehensible tale told to a culture that values pleasure and life above honor, duty, sacrifice, and a disappearing virtue we once called charity. That a courageous Christian soldier without a weapon would spend a terrifying night at the gates of Hell rescuing the maimed and dying from the clutches of devils cannot register to a generation intoxicated with the Waters of Narcissus. The fact that such a feat is displayed against the backdrop of an American election where a cretin and a traitor vie for the trajectory of the Western World is ironic only in the most polluted and depraved sense.