They may know David Bowie, but have never heard of James Bowie. Houston and Austin are cities in Texas. Travis, Washington, Jefferson, Lee those are the names of high schools. If you ask a kid today what is a Texas Ranger, most will say a baseball player. Even the word hero itself.
Hero is a rock group, and heroin is a drug.
Since everything is on the internet these days, and it seems to reflect our culture, I did a search on the word hero and the top twenty sites included the rock group, computer games, comic books, and a web page called Heroes of the Gridiron. It was based upon rankings by 360 journalists, scholars and political leaders. And I found their conclusions very surprising. Or consider the comment of one expert about Winston Churchill, who was incidentally ranked 52 on the list, just behind Mary Wollstonecraft. The expert said that Churchill would probably not be so highly thought of today, because we don t care much for heroes any more.