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Peter Gibbon is a researcher at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Education. The author of numerous articles in such publications as Newsweek, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and the Washington Post, he is currently at work on a book about the disappearance of public heroes in American society.

I contrast two westerns: High Noon, which won four Academy Awards in 1959, and Unforgiven, which was voted "Best Picture" in 1992. The Hero of High Noon, Will Kane, is a U.S. marshal. The hero of Unforgiven, Will Munny, is a reformed killer and alcoholic reduced to pig farming.

I mention that our best-selling postage stamps feature Elvis Presley and Marilyn Monroe and that our most popular TV show was, until it left the air recently, Seinfeld

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I remind my audiences that Thomas Jefferson is now thought of as the president with the slave mistress and Mozart as the careless genius who liked to talk dirty.

I offer some reasons for the disappearance of public heroes. Athletes have given up on being team players and role models. Popular culture is often irreverent, sometimes deviant. Revisionist historians present an unforgiving, skewed picture of the past. Biographers are increasingly hostile toward their subjects. Social scientists stridently assert that human beings are not autonomous but are conditioned by genes and environment.

Hovering in the background are secularism, which suggests that human beings are self - sufficient and do not need God, and modernism -a complex artistic and literary movement that repudiates structure, form, and conventional values.

Finally, in an age of instant communication, in which there is little time for reflection, accuracy, balance or integrity- the media creates the impression that sleaze is everywhere, that nothing is sacred, that no one is noble, and that there are no heroes.