Modern Day Beowulf

         It is difficult to find a "modern day Beowulf" because there are not many people with the same values as Beowulf, and those that do share common values with him are not going around killing monsters. It is my belief that there is no sole person who is a good representation of a modern day beowulf, rather, I feel that the closest thing there is to a modern day beowulf is the United States, and more specifically the United States military.
         One example of this is the "war on terror" in which the government of the United States has identified several terrorist organizations, most notably Al Qaeda and set out to destroy them, in much the way Beowulf set out to destroy Grendel. In both situations the villain is looked at as having no rationale other than being purely evil, regardless of any evidence to the contrary. The United States Military is considered by Americans, and many other western nations as heroic, whereas there are many onlookers who condemn them for being too heavy handed. This is similar to Beowulf in the sense that when he kills Grendel and Grendel's mother, his men as well as the Danes see him as a great hero, however it is easy to see how someone looking at the situation from another perspective might think that he went too far.
       In some regards, it seems as though the responses to both situations, 9/11 and Grendel slaughtering the Danes, were only marginally more moral than the situations themselves. In both cases the response was to seek out, and kill, the perpetrators. Well it is subject to debate as to whether or not those were the right responses, they do seem very similar in nature, hence my likening Beowulf to the United States military.