I feel bad that I left out the pertinent fact that Ramsey himself has persistently swatted away all the “hero” talk; this is really more about American society than it is about him:
What’s so heroic about kicking down a door (which Ramsey may not have even done) after hearing screaming behind it? The Searchers this sure as hell ain’t. Hell, it’s barely Taxi Driver. (…)
Yet the worn-out expression “the soft bigotry of low expectations” isn’t adequate to the task of explaining what we witnessed last week: a nation so nakedly neurotic about race and righteousness, so unmanned and unmoored, that it hastily embraced a shady-looking African-American guy on TV because, for once, at least he wasn’t being tackled on COPS or questioned on The First 48.
