Oh, no. I sense that the recent joy will melt into tragedy. What personal details do these men know about each other, and what antipathy will arise as they tell each other's stories and disagree about what really happened?
“We’re poor — look at the place we live... you live off our stories, so why can’t we make money from this opportunity to feed our children?”
Miners have asked for as little as $40 and upward of $25,000 for interviews....
“We paid $500 for the interview,” Ari Hirayama of Asahi Shimbun of Japan, said upon exiting the house. “And it felt like he was withholding details.”
33 men with 69 days together. That's over 50,000 hours of human drama to be remembered and put into words — words that men who've always been poor can now sell. What a strange market! So there is the betrayal of the secrecy pact being broken, and the competition for money, in which the most talkative and imaginative men will win the most and, perhaps, cause the most pain.
[One] interview also touched on the crying fits some men had, the unsanitary conditions they endured, even the rumors that some had sexual relations with others underground...
We will never hear the end of this.
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So we'll discover that these miners were human.
In other shocking news, water is wet.
They made it out, they're ok, time to move on.
FOX reports that one of the miners is selling out for $40...
It must really suck to be a miner in Chile.
The military has always had rules against men collecting and telling their own battle stories while still on active duty. The sheer awfulness in ground war is not easy to tell about or to read. The Eugene Sledge book from his forbidden notes taken on Pelilieu and Okinawa comes as close to telling the rest of the story as possible. HBO was able to use some parts from it in their recent series, The Pacific.
I like the survival tag. They did what they had do to survive below, and now the same rules (survival rules, though different setting) apply, above. Like GMay said, they're human. I'm actually glad for that.
"We will never hear the end of this"
Au contraire, Professor ... something else will come along and grab our collective attention, and since these men are little more to the media than poor Chileans, they will go away in time.
Peggy Noonan's going to hit the bottle after she sees this.
I don't think these guys are gonna make the kind of money they think they will.
Then again, miners in Chile. A little could go quite a ways.
I've already heard too much.
Of course, this might rope in Sully. What am I saying - of course it will!
"We will never hear the end of this."
Perhaps, but you don't have to listen.
The reporters hope a popular story will increase their income. It seems rather hypocritical to deny payment to the source of the story when the intent is to make money for yourself.
Whatever the miners realize from their stories should be put into gold.
The "hero miners" story is just another case of our culture and the media narative confusing Victimhood with heroism.
Flight 93 is maybe the greatest case recently. "Instead of sitting in their seats waiting to die, the Heroes of Flight 93, like heroic terminal cancer patients, bravely fought for their lives!!"
The Chilean miners were tough pros who organized together and braved eating two teaspoons of tuna a day for 17 days until located. Then "heroically" sat and awaited rescue. As plenty of food, supplies, and entertainment came down a small pipe for the remaining 40 days.
If we look at what "hero means" , it tends to fall and be legit for those who are altruistic in danger, or those who perform with unusual skill in achieving a great accomplishment others admire because it stands out from others so much.
If there are heroes in the Chilean miner saga, look to the standouts among the rescuers.
The media will hype victims as heroes for a long time to come because they have firmly latched onto that narrative, and will also try and create heroes by job title "all teachers, firefighters, soldiers are heroes"...as if there is some hero screening done at teachers college and in GI basic that only lets 1 in a thousand prospectees or recruits advance into hero status.
They can continue to call any celebrity that charters a private jet so they can hand out NBA sneakers to Katrina victims a "hero", even run footage from the celebs hired videographer.
But that sort of ersatz hero does last as a "hero" much past media focus. But 50 years from now, in a Chinese officer's school, they will study "Black Hawk Down" in Somalia, and discuss at great length how 2 American Delta force snipers volunteered to drop into certain death, surrounded by thousands of armed Somali Muslims - for honor's sake.
And Mickey Mantle will still be a hero while the name of the 17th "hero-victim" in the Chilean mine is long forgotten.
Inevitable.
We will never hear the end of this.
End of what?
wv: loater
Jurgens told his own battle stories of the First World War, he went as a voluntary three days after finishing high school, and wrote one of the best book of the xx century
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