This is a conversation that has multiple dimensions. One dimension is the skeptical one: the awareness that celebrities build public personas that may not correspond to private realities, and that coverage of celebrity good deeds often serves the celebrity’s image as much as or more than it serves any community need. Another dimension is the validating one: the evidence that the specific qualities being celebrated in a public figure are genuine qualities that produce real effects in the world.
The Sylmar rescue, as a public event, engaged both dimensions simultaneously. The skeptical reading would note that the coverage served Trejo’s image and that a man who was already famous for playing tough guys was being given additional credit for behaving consistently with the image. The validating reading would note that the image, in this case, appears to be consistent with the reality — that the rescue happened, that Trejo was there, that he helped, and that the character he demonstrated in Sylmar is consistent with a biographical record that extends back more than fifty years.
Both readings contain something real. The skeptical reading correctly identifies that celebrity culture creates incentives for the performance of virtue as well as the practice of it, and that coverage of celebrity virtue often cannot distinguish between the two. The validating reading correctly identifies that the biographical record, in Trejo’s case, is unusually extensive — the drug counseling since 1973, the prison visits, the community work, the community’s own recognition of his sustained presence — and that the rescue is consistent with this record rather than anomalous to it.