In a particularly shrewd episode of HBO’s Curb Your Enthusiasm, a cast member from the CBS reality show Survivor finds himself across a dinner table from a survivor of the Holocaust. The two men argue about who most deserves the designation. Funny stuff, but also a kind of warning to those who would apply heroic labels to the undeserving. For “survivor” inflation persists in American culture, threatening to warp moral authority and accentuate a culture of victimhood.
Examples abound. For every defensible use of the term (e.g., “survivor of [a] Russian missile strike”), three or four deployments are silly, wanton, or otherwise wrongheaded. …
With apologies to George Will, when we make “survival” a coveted status, “survivors” proliferate.
This is precisely the motive in forever dredging up new categories of heroic perseverance. To be a victim, though indisputably valuable, is of diminishing partisan utility. To be a survivor is to soar to new heights of authority and insight. It is to sit with men and women who endured the Shoah itself and not blink.
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