When they got home last week, the spy plane crew members were
                    hailed as American heroes. Even reporters got caught up in the
                    enthusiasm: The woman covering the arrival at Seattle for CNN got so
                    excited I thought she might swoon, or fling her Ramada key out onto
                    the tarmac at one of the flyboys' feet.

                    All the salaaming had me feeling like I must've missed something. What
                    was it exactly that they'd done that made them heroes? I reviewed
                    briefly: They were doing their jobs, top secret but pretty much routine,
                    when the hotdog Chinese fighter pilot buzzed them too close. The
                    collision damaged their plane and they were obliged to land uninvited in
                    Chinese territory. They were held there for several days and treated
                    less than hospitably while the Chinese government politicked the
                    incident. Then the Bush administration weenied them loose with that
                    sham apology, and they were promptly airmailed home, apparently
                    none the worse for the experience.

                    It doesn't seem to have been the case that any one of them ever risked
                    his neck in traditional hero fashion to save one or all of his colleagues.
                    A couple of them complained that they were deprived of sleep, but
                    obviously they were not tortured, as, say, the airmen captured in
                    Vietnam were tortured, or even as the Iran hostages were. They
                    weren't hung up by their thumbs, or given a New York Police
                    Department-type howdy to a broomstick. They made up "Saturday
                    Night Live" skits to keep up morale, and they taught their guards there
                    in the middle of the South China nowhere Eagles' songs. Eleven days of
                    boredom might have been their toughest challenge.

                    Is there a McDonald's on Hainan Island? If so, were the detainees
                    allowed to order in? If not, maybe it was having to go nearly two
                    weeks without a Quarterpounder that qualified them as heroes.

                    That would conform with the societal trend to hyperbolize everything
                    that we are and do and know and experience, and to subvert the language
                    to serve that trend. It would represent the devaluation of yet another good
                    old hard-metal word-this time the word "hero"- for that purpose.

                    In the wonderful world of hyperbole, the intensifiers are squandered so
                    liberally that they soon lose all credibility. Plain statement becomes as
                    rare as understatement. Everything has to be made to sound bigger and
                    more important, which requires expropriating the bigger-sounding,
                    more-important-sounding words and awarding them to lesser creatures
                    performing modester feats. So the recent ice storm grew from a
                    big-time nuisance to the Bro-gov,'s greatest natural disaster in our
                    state's history; Bill Clinton isn't just a scoundrel but the New York
                    Post's second-most evil human being of the 20th century; Tiger Woods
                    is not just a good golfer but the Miami Herald's greatest athlete in any
                    sport in human history, and the 2000 Yankees are ESPN's greatest
                    team of the greatest dynasty of the greatest pastime of the greatest
                    country that ever was.

                    And the 24 crew members of that EP-3 spy plane aren't just some
                    mighty lucky survivors of a freak encounter with a crazy man, they're
                    the near unanimous media selection as the first great American heroes
                    of the 21st century.

                    Dirt on the spy-plane crew won't be long coming. Shocking ways they
                    spent the time!