Number 3 — Save your salutes for the very few people that actually deserve them.
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Imagine you have access to a slightly-broken time machine. It works like this: you could travel back in time, but only to other times in your own life. And when you got there, you couldn’t change anything, you could just hang out, invisibly haunting your younger self. But you could then see yourself perfectly: what you looked like, what you wore, how you spoke, what you thought about, how you really were. And maybe — if you were really lucky — you could even understand some things about yourself differently.
No, role-models cannot be assigned. You have to discover them for yourself, but not like a favorite writer or favorite song, more like discovering a favorite teacher.
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That happened for me tonight. As you have have heard, the first five seasons of the television show M*A*S*H have been released to Netflix. And for me, it’s been a time machine. I was zipped right back to my childhood home, sitting on the living-room couch next to some unfinished homework, channel 38 on the TV.
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Turns out, in my early adolescence, I chose Hawkeye Pierce as my role-model. Somehow I had forgotten this, but while watching M*A*S*H tonight, it came back with a sudden, absolute certainty, like remembering a severe debt, a solemn oath I had long ago skipped out on.
I was raised in a divorced family, with an absent father. My mother’s own father died when she was six, and I believe one thing she sincerely regretted about the divorce was that it left my brother and I without a fulltime dad at just about the same age that she had lost hers. Throughout my childhood, mom proposed various adult men in my life as potential role-models for my brother and I: her twin-brother, my uncle who carried an ocean of secret regrets; the young priest, newly arrived at our neighborhood parish; the scoutmaster of our troop, the one I essentially ruined by ratting him out for being a child molester.
My path is not hopeless; someone else has walked it before.
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No, role-models cannot be assigned. You have to discover them for yourself, but not like a favorite writer or favorite song, more like discovering a favorite teacher. Because finding them depends on what you’re ready to learn about yourself.
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Here’s what I learned from Hawkeye:
1.) Be dedicated, loyal, and really, really good at something essential. If you can accomplish this, feel free to be as playful and irreverent as you need to be while doing it.
2.) Use your powers for good. It takes very smart, talented people to be doctors and to build nuclear bombs. Choose the doctor.
3.) Save your salutes for the very few people that actually deserve them.
4.) Say all of your jokes out loud, even if you’re the only person entertained by them.
5.) Cherish the magical, healing properties of the women you’re lucky enough to have around you.
6.) Apart from a weekend pass to Tokyo with a cute nurse, nothing is quite as restorative after a very difficult day than a good, stiff drink with friends.
Here’s the thing about role-models: they’re not aspirational. I didn’t look at Hawkeye on the TV, and think to myself: I want to grow up and be like him someday. It’s very different. It’s much rather: that person is who I already am. My path is not hopeless; someone else has walked it before.
When I was a kid watching M*A*S*H, I was so alone, such a stranger-in-a-strange-land, it didn’t matter that my role-model was a fictional television character. Because — and I’m going to quote Camus now — fiction is the lie through which we tell the truth. And it is true: Hawkeye gave me permission to be me.
Thanks, Netflix, for the time machine. And thanks, Hawkeye, for just being you.
This post originally appeared on Medium. Reprinted with permission.
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Photo: Youtube/venus1112
Actually, all seasons are on Netflix, not just the first five. Great article!
Brilliant article… thanks for sharing.
I shared this in response to “Enlisted.” I think it has the same sentiment…
http://www.militarysuccessnetwork.com/2014/01/enlisted-m-a-s-h-humor-warrior-roles/
All the Best,
-Nate
What I don’t like about Captain Hawkeye Pierce was that he was always playing jokes on Major Frank Burns so he was acting like a bully. How would Hawkeye like it if he was being picked on? Save salutes? Well in the military you don’t have much of a choice in which officers you would like or not like to salute even if they have not earned the right to be saluted. Even in the civilian world, you have people who feel that they are entitled to a “salute” because of their profession/status like a cop, doctor, CEOs, lawyers, politicians,… Read more »
Hawkeye, Trapper John, and BJ were always playing pranks on everyone, including each other. If they played pranks on Frank more often than on other people, it was because Frank was a narcissistic, self-righteous hypocrite with no sense of humor and no humility. A perfect straight man.
And yes, Hawkeye was picked on plenty of times. How did he like it? He always ended up laughing along with the pranksters who picked on him.
In all fairness, Frank Burns ( and Winchester) deserved the pranks!