This Is Not America: Patrick Swayze Dies At 57

When a famous actor dies early of a terrible disease, people generally talk about how many golden globes they would have won, the roles that made their stardom, how they battled the illness and there’s a general air of gossip and shallowness.

What they don’t talk about is what the figure represented to people philosophically, yet this is what their fans are rallying behind implicitly.

Patrick Swayze represented the ‘can do’ America I once knew and revered. In fact, it’s one of the last things and, now one of the only remaining things there is to revere about America.

Not too unpredictably the media characterized him for his big money making roles, but I think, aside from perhaps, Ghost, it was movies like Point Break (despite its cheese) and Red Dawn that really gets across the sense of integrity driven rebellion, individualism and tenacity that characterizes the American sense of life, that Swayze should really be remembered for.

Aside from this Swayze embodied the old classic romantic idea of the hero. He’s almost chivalrous in many of his roles, and in Ghost, as in many talk shows, he’s a man who can cry, express his feelings and remain very much a ‘man.’

Even up until the last, Swayze was working on a new series, and told the press “ "One thing I'm not going to do is chase staying alive.” This is what it used to mean to be American.

Now it’s the Kanye West’s sense of tittle-tattle and tabloid bent philosophy that is not just beginning to characterize our society. For females we’ve gone from bold, brash, daring singers like Madonna to little girl pop icons that screech out bubble gum in waning exasperation rather then belt out what it means to be alive in this world. Madonna began as a bubble gum pop girl used like so many cheap commodities by the company that hired her, until she stabbed them in the back, and ended as multi-millionaire matriarch of media.

You might say that I’m making these famous people into something that there not, or aggrandizing ‘mere actors.’ But there’s a reason we revere artists—whether it be actors, painters, musicians or writers: they make art, and art is essential to how we live.

Art is a reflection of how things are, it can teach and instruct and also concretize things many of us could never imagine. If its good art, it embodies how things ought to be, and Swayze, in defiance of the status quo to portray life merely how it is, remains a hero in my heart for standing for a believable sense of how things might and ought to be.