Reject Modernity. Embrace Pulp Heroism.

, I know this is a joke and a quite funny one at that but I'd be remiss if I didn't point out that Europe has heroes like that as well, Beowulf, Chu Chulainn, Heracles, Roland, the Knights of the Round table, Achilles, the Vikings in the Icelandic sagas and so on.

This whole thread is about invented hero stories. It's about heroes like the Shadow, Doc Savage, the Phantom, Zorro, and John Carter of Mars portrayed in magazine short stories written in the 1930's called Pulps. These characters were the forerunners of superheroes like Batman, Superman, Spiderman, the X Men and the like, comic book superheroes being considered by literary types as American Mythology.

Furthermore it is not clear that these European heroes are at all fake heroes. Mythology is a hazy dreamlike remembrance of an ancient past wrapped in symbolism, hyperbole, mysticism, and the supernatural. The Greek myths for instance take place in the, "Age of Heroes" which is just the remembrance by classical age Greeks of the Mycenaean Period of Greece in which events like the Trojan war (the Trojans were in fact Hittites) actually did happen. The fact that these ancient peoples are writing about figures like Achilles and Odysseus, and for that matter King Arthur or Beowulf probably means that they were real people even though they probably didn't slay monsters and whatnot. 

Anyways my point was the type of badarse heroes found in American Pulps and Comic Books can be found in the mythologies of Europe as well and that in fact the type of heroism portrayed within these American forms of literature are based on the European precedent as the United States is a European country (culturally) founded by Europeans who were tough enough to leave their country of origin, cross the sea on a dangerous voyage, and carve out a new society on a hostile frontier filled with tribal savages that hated their guts, deadly disease, harsh terrain, animals, and weather to make a better life for themselves. The rugged American hero is a continuation of their European predecessors.