Finn of “The Force Awakens,” a hero for our times

This note contains mild spoilers about "The Force Awakens."]

For me, the best part of the new addition to the Star Wars series, "The Force Awakens," is its three new heroes. And, contrary to what Tina Turner might have to say on the matter, we need another hero. We almost always do.

The movie wastes no time introducing us to two of these new heroes: Poe Dameron (Oscar Isaac), a dashing, x-wing fighter pilot, who is the top-gun of the beleaguered Resistance, and the unlikely FN 2187, a storm trooper serving in the infantry of the evil First Order. We come to know him as Finn (John Boyega). A short while later we meet our third young hero, the beautiful and resourceful, Rey (Daisy Ridley). Rey is stuck in a dead-end job as a parts scavenger on Jakku, a planet that is little more than a junkyard for crashed and abandoned spaceships.

We don't learn that much about Poe in this installment of the series. Whatever his backstory is, it remains to be told in future episodes. Rey is easily the most prominent of the new heroes. As the movie unfolds, it is Rey who will be positioned to take up the mantle of Luke Skywalker and begin the proverbial hero's journey, one which will lead her from a solitary life as a scavenger on a desolate planet to become a citizen of the Galaxy and a leader of the Resistance in the struggle against the First Order. But it is everyman Finn who wins my vote for the kind of hero we need most right now.

I'll be the first to admit that there's no shortage of heroes on movie screens these days. Superheroes, especially, bound and abound. Endowed with special powers, either at birth or by fateful accident, they fight, often after much kvetching, to save the world, all the while battling inner demons and bickering with their super friends. You could get a movie green-lighted on less of a pitch.

Now, it is the case that both Finn and Rey possess special powers. There are hints early on that the Force is strong with both of them. And much of the suspense of the story has to do with whether and when their powers will be revealed. But having superpowers is not what defines the two of them. Instead, their heroism is rooted in character and talent. And, in Finn's case, it is firmly anchored in his sense of common decency.

When we first meet Finn in his guise as FN 2187, his face is hidden behind the mask of a storm trooper's helmet and he is kneeling to come to the aid of a fallen comrade whose bloody hand print marks him for us to follow for the rest of the scene. What follows in that scene is a massacre of disarmed villagers by Finn's stormtrooper platoon. Finn's defining act of heroism is saying "no" to participating in this atrocity.

Finn does this despite the fact that he understands that his disobedience will lead to his being cast out from the only family he has ever known. He also is aware that his refusal will mark him as a despised traitor who will be hunted down relentlessly by his former First Order comrades-in-arms. But Finn says "no" to killing the prisoners, not because he imagines himself a hero, but simply because saying "no" is the right thing to do.

Finn's act of unselfconscious heroism is reminiscent of the stories of the Europeans, many of them Dutch, who saved the lives of Jews seeking refuge during the Holocaust. It is fascinating to watch interviews with these people made long after the war. They appear sometimes genuinely puzzled by the notoriety that has come their way and seldom regard themselves heroes. Quite the contrary, they often protest the designation, saying that they were only doing what conscience demanded, insisting that their deeds were what any right-thinking person would have done under similar circumstances. If only that were the case.

This same "ordinariness" is what makes Finn's kind of heroism such a refreshing change. It doesn't originate with his being rocketed away as an infant from some faraway, doomed planet or from a bite from an errant radioactive spider. And his kind of heroism doesn't set him apart from the rest of society like, say, a misfit with a bizarre genetic mutation or an ancient Norse god unwillingly exiled to Earth.

Indeed, what makes Finn a hero is not how he transcends his humanity but how, in spite of years of inculcation by his First Order captors, he recovers it.

And it is the masterful performance by Boyega that brings Finn's everyman hero convincingly to life. His Finn is unassuming and vulnerable - a veritable ingénue, who casts the shell of storm trooper uniform aside to find himself freshly hatched into a brave, new, uncertain world - but also a person capable unalloyed courage when circumstances demand it.

So, to my delight, what we discover with Finn in "The Force Awakens" is, perhaps, the first fully human character of the Star Wars saga. (R2-D2, a droid more human in most respects than his human masters, is the long-standing contender for this title, at least in my opinion.) It is Finn’s humanity that reminds us that real heroism emerges not from super powers or royal birth, but from a compassionate regard for our fellow beings and a willingness to say "no" when the world around us would have us forsake our obligation to their welfare in favor of a life of security and predictability. He is indeed a hero for our time.

Atlanta’s most unexpected Civil War memorial and a farewell to Reconstruction

Monument to Union General James B. McPherson in East Atlanta

Without a doubt, the “Death of McPherson” monument in East Atlanta has to be the most unexpected Civil War memorial to be found in the entire city.

First, it's not located in a large public space or on a notable battlefield, although, truth be told, all of Atlanta was a battlefield when Sherman's Union forces encountered the city's Confederate defenders in the summer of 1864.

Instead, the monument occupies a small enclosure at the intersection of McPherson Monument Avenues, nestled in an unassuming neighborhood shorn decades ago from the rest of the city on its northern side by the unforgiving concrete knife of Interstate 20.

What is also surprising is that, unlike the myriad of other plaques and statues which commemorate famous battles or once-revered Confederate leaders in this region, this one memorializes the death of James B. McPherson, a Union general who was killed only a few blocks from the site while attempting to escape capture by rebel "skirmishers."

McPherson was the second highest ranking Union officer to die in combat in the Civil War. His young age at the time of his death, 35 years, is a reminder that wars fought at the level of ferocity of the American Civil War quickly become pitiless, but efficient, meritocracies.

But how is it that a Yankee general came to have a monument erected in his memory so deep in the heart of Dixie?

It is utterly inconceivable that a memorial like this one would have been undertaken by the citizens of Atlanta at any point in time during the hundred years or so following the conflict which some Southerns called the War of Northern Aggression.

It turns out that the authors of “Death of McPherson” were none other than U.S. Army engineers. They erected the monument in 1877, shortly before all Federal troops were withdrawn from the South as part of the deal struck by the incoming Rutherford B. Hayes administration to bring an end to the fraught period in this country's history known as Reconstruction.

Although little discussed today, Reconstruction was a failed attempt to bring about genuine political transformation in the vanquished states of the Confederacy. Equal protection under the law and universal enfranchisement (of men), promises of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution, went unfulfilled. And that “special institution,” slavery, abolished in name by the Thirteenth, was soon exchanged for the apartheid regime that came to be known as Jim Crow.

A dozen years after the end of hostilities, little about the political facts on the ground had changed. As late as the the election of 1876, hundreds of black men were being massacred while trying to exercise their right to vote as members of the Republican Party. It is a sad irony of history that it is this same Party of Lincoln now pursues the suppression of the African-American vote in the states of the former Confederacy with the imposition of unjustifiable voter identification laws.

So, in a premonition of the futility of military occupations to come, the U.S. government gave up on its plans for “regime change” in the South. Instead, in order to extricate itself from an open-ended, bloody mess, the Hayes administration declared Reconstruction over based upon the scant facts that slavery had been eliminated and the Union restored.

But what also makes the monument to McPherson unexpected is its design: a bare cannon barrel elevated skyward, with its short trunnions projecting to either side suggesting, perhaps, a meager cross, but a very meager one, if that. That it is a brazenly phallic goes without saying.

Maybe there is some subtle war memorial iconography at work here, but I doubt it. With the dispiriting circumstances of Reconstruction in mind, it's hard not to imagine “Death of McPherson” wasn't intended to be a defiant farewell by departing officers of the U.S. Army to Atlanta and the South, a profane gesture marking the end of a hopeful project to transform the world that ended only in more spilled blood and profound disillusionment.

A modest proposal for the future of the Stone Mountain Confederate Memorial Carving

I think I’ve come up with a compromise that may put an end to the controversy that surrounds the Stone Mountain Confederate Memorial Carving.

For those unfamiliar with the situation, the Memorial Carving, the largest bas-relief sculpture in the world, adorns the broad side of Stone Mountain, a granite-like monadnock located on the outskirts of Atlanta, Georgia. It depicts three heroes of the Confederacy, its president, Jefferson Davis, and two of its most celebrated generals, Robert E. Lee, and Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson.

The idea for such a sculpture was hatched by the United Daughters of the Confederacy in 1912 when Stone Mountain was pretty much a private reserve of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. It was cross-burning central.

After several attempts to get the project off the ground, the effort was abandoned in 1928. It would have remained little more than a partially completed sculpture of Lee’s head, had it not been for the Georgia General Assembly’s decision in 1960 to revive the endeavor.

I’m not quite sure how much this was an act of segregationist defiance by a yet another southern state reluctant to give up on Jim Crow or how much it was a bizarre tourist industry vision to transform the mountain and the surrounding area into an ante-bellum theme park. The line between out-and-out racism and gross racial insensitivity is a thin one sometimes.

In any event, a dedication ceremony for the Confederate Memorial Carving was held in May of 1970, which makes the monument a relatively recent addition to our cultural heritage, if you can call it that.

Not surprisingly, in the wake of the massacre at the Emanuel AME Church massacre in Charleston last month, there have been calls, most notably by the NAACP, to have the carving removed from the side of the mountain.

Opposition to expunging the sculpture have been widespread, too. Some of it, no doubt, emanates from racist quarters or a misguided pride in the cause of the Confederacy that turns a blind eye to the fact that it was, at its core, a struggle to preserve the “special” institution of slavery.

Some of the opposition, though, has to do with not wanting to endorse a program of historical revision that comes across a lot of like the feeding of the “memory hole” described by George Orwell in his novel 1984. I can grok that.

But when it comes to a compromise for the Confederate Memorial Carving, it is memory itself that may come to the rescue.

It is a little remembered fact that Jefferson Davis decided to “hastily put on one of his wife’s dresses” in order to try to escape capture by Union forces in May of 1865. That he was still dressed this way when he was taken into custody was the source of an abundant amount of public ridicule at the time.

So, I say, instead of jettisoning Jeff from the side of Stone Mountain, dress him up in a nice period bonnet. This could be done with an installation using a frame anchored (non-destructively) in the sculpture itself, decked out with durable, brightly colored fabric.

It would serve as a visible reminder that, while these three men were heroes of the Confederacy, they were not victorious ones.