We are very aware.
In a space occupied half a century ago in America by baseball heroes, war heroes, and The Splendid Splinter -- who was both! -- our admiration of the famous, skillful, and merit-worthy has become an obsessed dependence because they are viewed as those who have won the day while inside The System. We're all stuck within The System, aren't we? And these visible, modern heroes are just like us, flaws enhanced because we asked them to be magnified mortals, enlarged to show texture. We have unwittingly bestowed the kiss of death on our former aspirations that we abandoned long ago. Our own dreams were killed years ago. Our heroes disgust us now, weird-shaped things in a very aware word being pounded into square holes. We certainly want them to fit. We would like that very much. We want to see their failure as one they are sharing with us. We observe their troubles and co-opt their drama, nodding assuredly at one another at their unenviable lives when the tragic turn arrives.
We think there are no more heroes.
The pedestal remains vacant and the podium is nigh-unapproachable. Anybody that ascends to it, to embrace heroics, to carry the crown themselves, willfully or not, is dragged down. Their positive traits are warped. Their triumph is temporary. They age and wilt. They are skinned and spun. They are entirely transparent. Even the best become icons to be loathed for their over-exposure, rather than loved for what they do or have done. Because those are the rules that we've decided upon. We want it to be unfair. For everybody.
That makes it fair for everybody.
The art that our lives imitate, myths and fairy tales, thrive on magnificent, magnified unfairness. More relevant is how the heroes in those stories acknowledge the unfairness -- starvation, class warfare, draconian declarations and decrees, all things monarchy, external rule-breaking magic that's never on your side -- and they are overcome them, usually not by being smart or out-maneuvering the system (lower case "S"), but by using their own brand of stupidity. The heroes throw faith at the problem and all the things that blind indifference can encompass. Faith in their willful ignorance to how structured and calculated and shrewd their enemies' plots are. Faith in love, faith in intangibility, faith in commonality of man in the face of cruel, inhuman rationality. Villains will be beguiling, mechanical tacticians with their own set of planned rules more often than emotional, destructive brutes.
Take Sleeping Beauty, the Disney version, for the sake of recognition. The villainess Maleficent holds a 16-year grudge against the king for not being invited to his daughter's birthday party. She schemes. A princess will be cursed and sleep forever after pricking her finger on a spinning wheel. The king accepts this threat so dutifully as fate that he destroys every spinning wheel in the kingdom in an attempt to stop the prophecy from being fulfilled. He's working within the construct of Maleficent's unfair scenario. In this way, the villain has used common-knowledge to her advantage, terrorizing and accouncing to the entire kingdom what will happen -- detailing the rules, or at least all the rules that she needs to in order to make things appear defined and fair. You had fair-warning, bitch.
The prince, who is a ponce, let's face it, overcomes though, partially because he understands the rules, but more so because he just doesn't give a fuck. That's why beginner's luck exists. Free from a fear of not just miscalculation, but calculation entirely, is what helps make a hero -- from the FEAR of it, not excused from it. It's faith in one's ability in the moment that makes a hero, focusing on the present, just like Yoda told us. That's how you slay the dragon. You will have those stories like Game of Thrones or The Dark Knight movies where the characters have no choice but to play the game they're presented, otherwise they'll die -- see, Ned Stark. At the same time, being defiant and listening to advice, not necessarily taking it, helps these people not be paralyzed by the possibility of failure.
Daenerys, despite her occasional bout of whining, subverted the corrupt city government of Qarth in Game of Thrones' second season, burning the villainous warlock alive rather than accepting that she couldn't overcome the death-magic that had been described to her. She's seen magic herself. Batman didn't accept the weighted rules of the game the Joker forced him into playing. He put faith in his abilities and in the city's citizens. And then he beat the Joker's brains out. So much for chaos.
In modern reality, despite being occasionally overwhelming, knowledge is common, and it should be. Once upon a time, shielding people from being able to possess knowledge was a powerful weapon. We got centuries of stone castles and witch hunts when "knowing" was often a crime, and not just a movie starring that lovably-asymmetrical mongoloid, Nicholas Cage. At one point, it's possible that somebody who was moments from being flayed upside-down told a syphilitic man of the cloth that hundreds of years in the future, he would look like a fucking ignoramus for ordering other humans to believe in the rules gnarly old farts were scratching down on paper in a language that isn't spoken and can barely be read. There is no way coercion and cruelty against the masses ends well for the man at the podium. It never has. No chapter in history ever read: "And then a dozen or so guys ruled the earth from an ivory tower, dispensing laws that strengthened their foundation's mortar forever and ever." Those are empires. Empires eventually abhor their people and people do not abide being used for mortar.
That is fairy tale villain shit. It's a scenario that can paralyze a free-thinker that tries to reason and rationalize every last thing opposite them. A good villain makes a great deal of their plan known so the heroes have an environment to be hopeful, and hopless, in. That's why the bad guys in movies explain their plans -- it gives just a small enough amount of knowledge to the protagonist, leaving time to send his or her mind racing, trying to deconstruct the situation based on the information available.
Well, the likes of Bond and Kirk know that there is always a way out of a Kobayashi Maru, and the rules can be re-written. They're just something the bad guy made up, a half-truth. Knowledge makes us equal and it makes us all vulnerable, forcing us to stand on our legs and not on other peoples' shoulders, and it always goes both ways.
The biggest challenge for a hero is to understand that there might be rules, but they can be broken -- to put it in the most 1990's way possible, there is no spoon.
Back here in reality though, the rules are near-unbreakable.
We believe there are no more heroes. To approach the podium is to become transparent, to become human. You aren't going to undo gravity. You aren't going to liberate the kingdom. You aren't going to remake truth -- too many loud voices are shouting that we need to go in reverse, that dammit, we had the truth defined and correct decades ago in America. Back when old, bitter men had all the power instead of just most of it. Back when tricking people was as simple as saying so. Again, there is no way this regressive reverse-mindedness will end well. There is no version of the future where our digital records read, "And then smart men gave money to those that already had too much, and took from the gullible, and took from the poor, and took from women, and took from those that they hated and couldn't comprehend, and took from as many citizens as they could BECAUSE they could, because they had already gone too far, and they believed their definition of knowledge was singular and total." Man's fear of personal shame is a powerful motivator. It is an even blacker muse.
There is no operating inside of a system where we've been told a princess will die when she pricks her finger on a spinning wheel. For better or worse, that system is unsustainable. And that's why we need fairy tales -- well-meaning ignorance of shrewd games described by somebody you've never even met.
Does anybody else feel very small, being manipulated by a world that's way too big and confusing with amorphous laws of nature we thought were set up and definite? I do. So do a lot of people that think the opposite of the things you think. We're all fighting that same dragon.
I'd like to accept that the world isn't definite though, so long as I'm comfortable changing with it, and it with me. Don't be afraid of mixing in some stupid with your knowledge, the world surrounding you certainly is. Don't be afraid of disrespecting your papa's version of the truth if it's become a bit of a round peg. It need not be forced in. It won't just be that you'll be operating inside of a fixed-future environment if you do force it, you'll also be accepting your lot in life too. Yes, maybe things are unfair, and that's the cruelest crime, whether you're a kid with a bent ear, or a schmuck in an office building continuing to do -- whatever. It's the cruelest because it's the most accepted and visible to the most people.
If we all function within the construct of a visible and recognizably unfair world, then there can be no more heroes. And that's why we need fairy tales. That's why we have to be morons in moderation, comedians that speak the truth from the side for a diligent audience, touchstones for gaps in sanity, and wiser than the world we can't control.
-- @Alex Crumb (originally published 8/22/12)
