"You're Not A Match for Him, Cap"

The scene is tense. A nine-foot-tall robot is this close to taking over the world and wiping out humanity. Just one man is close enough to stop him. But this man (while a very strong and active man) is only that—not enough to stop this remorseless mass of metal.

It’s comic land, of course, and a Marvelous one, at that. Captain America is going after Ultron in Seoul during the epic Avengers: Age of Ultron, and he is alone. None of the team capable of going toe-to-toe with the villainous robot—Iron Man, Thor, the Hulk—is even on the same continent. It’s up to him.

And at the precise moment he goes into the fray and is dodging fire, his teammate calmly informs him, “You’re not a match for him, Cap.”

Encouraging. Real sunshiney bedside manner you have there, Hawkeye. Way to stand by your teammate.

I can relate. Most of my focus problem stems from another monster of modern technology: the entertainment culture. Whether that’s computer games and Netflix or the darker side of the net, it seems irresistible. Sit down. Be consumed. You tried scheduling? No dice. You try abstaining? You have to be near it for work. The siren call draws you in and consumes not only your free time but your sleep and time for other projects. You get hollow eyed and exhausted and instead of learning your lesson, you just fall quicker. Every time, nothing works. You try to fight your habits and desires, and you find out… you’re not a match for him, Cap.

Eye roll. Thanks, Barton.

No, actually that’s good news. You see, laziness/gluttony is a sin. It stems from Sin, proper. And if there was ever a monstrous baddie that was too big for one man to fight, sin qualifies. You really can’t win, James my lad. Not a hope. Impossible. Might as well give up. What’s the world worth, anyway?

But against all measured wisdom, Cap shows us the right solution. Jump in and fight. Go hand to hand. Slow it down with every trick, dodge, and evasion in the book, even if it feels like you’re throwing peas at a tank. Hurl the shield and watch it bounce off. Again. And again.

You don’t have to win. You just have to slow it down long enough for help to show up. Sin is inherently self-absorbed. It likes to forget about God. The greatest Power of all time, the one who promised never to leave you or forsake you. You may complain that He’s not here. You’re fighting alone just as usual. God’s absent!

Of course He is. Like any good hero, He likes to show up just in the nick of time. The story’s better that way.

So the next time temptation, technological or otherwise, stares you in the face and your mind tells you with a perfectly straight face, “You’re not a match for him, Cap,” what do you do?

Jump in. Throw the Shield.

Once Upon A Day--July 30th

Two hundred and twelve days into Anno Domini MMXI, it is time to remember the past once again. Let us see what transpired in days of yore.

A.D. 1619—The first representative body in America, The Virginia House of Burgesses, convenes in Jamestown.

1818—Emily Bronte, the famous English author, is born.

1863—Henry Ford is born. He would create more bored employees than ever before with the principal introduction of the assembly line principle, and more vacation possibilities than ever before with the mass production of the Model T.

1864—The Battle of the Crater—during the Petersburg campaign of the War Between the States, Lt. Col. Henry Pleasents, a former Pennsylvania miner, came up with a plan to break the trench warfare stalemate by using the old tactic of mining to blow a hole in the Confederate lines. They drove the tunnel over 500 feet before packing it full of four tons of gunpowder. It was exploded at 0444 hours and threw the Confederates who survived into a panic. However, a last minute change in the attacking column from Ferrero’s division of Colored Troops to Leslie’s division meant the troops were untrained and uninformed. They bunched in the crater, as did the supporting forces of the second wave, and the steep sides trapped them. Confederate general Mahone later described the result as a “turkey shoot.” After 3,789 Yankee casualties and 1,419 Confederate, the situation of the siege remained unchanged. Grant later called it “the saddest affair I have witnessed in this war.”

1918—Joyce Kilmer, the poet most famous for Trees, is killed while serving with the 165^th RGT (“The Fighting 69^th”) during the 3^rd Battle of the Marne by a sniper bullet while scouting enemy lines.

1932—Flowers and Trees is premiered by Walt Disney—it is the first color cartoon short.

1971—Apollo 15—David Scott and Jim Irwin land on the moon, bringing the Lunar Rover and becoming the first men to drive on another planetary body. Presumably with a license. 

Send in the Clouds

I have said often (as the poor friends who hear all my smart remarks five times probably know) that God smiles indulgently as his children smear oils and watercolors on canvas, and then proceeds to use water vapor, colliding helium atoms, hot and cold air currents, and planetary rotation to paint something like this… every twenty-four hours.

Less, if you count the sunrises and sunsets. It also changes every second that you watch it, looks different depending on what longitude you happen to be at, and can’t actually be fully captured by a photograph. At least, that’s what my shutterbug friends tell me.

Most people like sunshine better than clouds. Bright, luminescent days full of deep green grass and deep blue sky and deep, clear water to drink as it sparkles. Those are the days for fun, for picnics, football, painting, flying kites. Cloudy days are for scrubbing floors and listening to old lugubrious country songs. Even on mostly sunny days, clouds are when your mother shivers and reaches for her second sweater. Nobody likes clouds.

But did you ever stop to think that without clouds, sunsets wouldn’t be nearly as glorious? They cover the light, sure, but in the right place they can reflect it, refract it, and produce more colors than we have names for. Rose. Purple. No, pink. Rosurplink?

Life is like that. Who wants clouds in their life? A lost job. A sick relative. Addiction. Depression. Loneliness. Pressure.  It can seem like they cover you and suck all the joy out of life, all the light and warmth out of your picnic. You shiver and reach for that second sweater, thinking something like, “Ah, how the Lord in his anger has set the Daughter of Zion under a cloud!” And then, if you’re watching, if you’re standing in exactly the right place, the sun behind the clouds makes an appearance. And the troubles change color. “Count it all joy, my brothers, when you meet trials of various kinds, for you know that the testing of your faith produces steadfastness.” So wrote another fellow named James. And he was, if I may freely translate, telling all you sunshiny people that you should ask God to send in the clouds. Otherwise, where is your testimony? Who tells others of their thankfulness for how God got them through the blissful Hobbiton days of life? It is in the Paths of the Dead and the slopes of Caradhras and Orodruin where stories are made. If the sun always shone uninterrupted, where would your sunsets come from? This is how God works. Darkness turned to glory. Crosses turned to honor. Clouds… turned to sunsets. Clouds are what make the relatively ordinary circumstance of the sun dipping below the horizon into something you pull over and watch until it stops.

Actually, it technically never stops at all. Sunlight is always angling off of some atmosphere somewhere. God just ceaselessly speaks the word “sunset” (or sunrise, depending on your point of view) and there is sunset. And God sees that the sunset is good. “See, look what I painted you. Right there. Just for you and the few hundred in the right spot to see it. Darkness made into even better light. I even gave you those wonderful eyes to see it with. Look, look, before it’s gone! You missed it? Well, don’t fret. I’ll do it again tomorrow.”

The Normal World

Black. White. Cops. Snipers. Muslims. Gays. Innocents. Guilty. Dallas. Orlando. Ferguson. Paris. Boston. New Town. Virginia Tech…

They roll by in soundbite ribbons at the bottom of screens. They pop up in newsfeeds as we see what our friends are up to. The next day, they glare crookedly out of glass-fronted boxes, daring us to spend a few hard-earned quarters on an actual newspaper.

I wonder what our great-grandfathers would have thought about that?

The headlines, not the newspapers. A world where fifty people can die in a day—that’s nothing. In 1911, 126 people died in a fire at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory in New York City. 130 died in 1944 Chicago as a result of a natural gas explosion that leveled a square mile of the city. Over six thousand died in the Galveston Hurricane of 1900. And that doesn’t include the wars. But a world where individuals can kill others just for being different—en masse and at random—what kind of a world does that look like?

The normal one, actually. Those who lament about such crimes, such unheard-of atrocities, really betray their ignorance, or perhaps more charitably, their innocence. The fear of the unknown, of the different, of the outsider—these drove most of human civilization. For in most places and times, the guiding motive in relationships with outsiders was one of suspicion and hostile distrust. Love your enemy? Please. Be realistic. Protect the tribe! Defend the clan! Guard the city! The foreigner, the barbarian, the infidel, the gypsy—it was safer to be rid of them. Banish them. Kill them. In the city square or the battlefield if you can, in the dead of night or the alley if you can’t. And the guns? Please. That’s a pretty merciful way to go. They used to use swords. Nooses. Or bonfires. Hitler is famous, not because his goals were a new idea, but because he figured out how to accomplish them in the scientific-industrial manner—cleanly, efficiently, and wholesale. Before that you had to do messy genocide like the Assyrians.

When faced with those who are different from you, the natural result is to assume that something is wrong with the other guy. I’m a white middle-class Harvard businesswoman from the suburbs, so it must be the black boy’s fault. I’m a fatherless, abandoned kid whose mother won’t stay off drugs, just trying to survive in a hostile world, so it must be the cop’s fault. I’m a teenager who after a lifetime of ennui and purposelessness finally finds something that demands total commitment and promises total reward, so, as the Prophet said, it must be infidel America’s fault. All three of these can grow up in the same city, root for the same ball team, even go to the same supermarket—and in a very real sense speak totally different languages. Try the word America out for starters. What does that mean for each of them? Opportunity? Oppression? The Great Satan?

And lo, secularism claimed that it could reach past that language barrier, that through education, or societal improvement, or some other fifty billion dollar program it could remake brutal man into a naturally loving cooperative, where being different was appreciated, not feared. The lion could lie down with the lamb, Muhammadan with lesbian, police chief with junkie. All those differences really didn’t matter (unless you were trying for a scholarship or government position.) The Federation of Star Trek in real life.

Fifty years (perhaps more) later, here we are. Kill the pigs. Deep six the sodomites. Allahu akbar.

If you suppress the differences, they pop out eventually. If you magnify them, you can’t get anything done. Catch-22, secularism. So much for the brotherhood of man. You can’t even figure out how to define one of those anymore, anyway.

People don’t ever naturally love what is different. That’s a Hollywood myth, reinforced by cute pictures of ‘innocent’ children playing on the same playground. The pictures that don’t ever show you the playground bully or the name-calling. Rogers and Hammerstein were wrong: you don’t “have to be carefully taught.” We just like to love... what’s just like us.

And then a man came into the world. He was like us in every way except one: his love went where it wasn’t supposed to go. Gentiles. Tax collectors. Rich fat cats with education. Poor prostitutes with none. Warmongers. Bottom-class laborers. Outsiders—and insiders. Dark men from Ethiopia. Light men from Rome. He loved them all so much that it threatened the very existence of order, and so they killed him outside their city as a troubler of the peace. Someone had to pay, and it was his fault.

And then he kept coming back. Greeks started eating with Jews. Rich men sat with poor men on the first day of the week. The woman who could give tuppence was valued as much as the man who gave talents of gold. He was the countryman, he was the urban nobleman. He was everywhere. So they killed him again. And again. And again. It was his fault the city fell, that the plague came, that the harvest was poor. Justice was done. His fault.

Finally they gave in through sheer exhaustion. They watched as the lion laid down with the lamb, as unity of mind, sympathy, brotherly love, a tender heart, and a humble mind became commonplace. Oh, there were hiccups, flare-ups, occasional imbalances. But eventually everyone got so accustomed to this state of affairs that after a millennium, they assumed it was normal, the base state of mankind.

But it’s not. That kind of unity only comes when we can look not at but through our differences to something beyond. But what? An abstract “brotherhood of man” will only cut it for the mushy, imaginative, often gullible ones. A lofty government that can force you to love at the point of a bayonet will only appeal to the greedy ones who love power. Even the other religions won’t love everybody the same, not if they want to remain unchanged and consistent. Women, heathen, the unenlightened, the unborn, the old, the unfit—somebody has to pay. It’s their fault.

But it’s our fault. We did it. The Triangle Trade. Auschwitz. Boston. Orlando. Dallas.  But that man who loved in the wrong places took the blame. Justice was done. We’re not guilty. And so we have nothing left to protect, and nothing left to hate in the others. Here is unity. We speak the same language, with the same Word, behold, we are one people, and we have all one language, and this is only the beginning of what we can do. And nothing that we are commanded to do will now be impossible for us.

Change the “normal” world. Love God. Love your neighbor.

Heroes II

The Lone Ranger

Stats

Classification: Hero of Fiction (TV, Radio, Film)   

Origin: 1933, Radio Station WXYZ in Detroit

Skills: Excellent horseman, strategist, pugilist, and unsurpassable quick-draw artist.

Defining Moment: Lone Ranger TV Series, 1949-57

“A firey horse with the speed of light, a cloud of dust, and a hearty, ‘Hi-yo Silver!’—the Lone Ranger!”

Yes, return with us now to those thrilling days of yesteryear! I grew up with a few Lone Ranger episodes on VHS (yes, I will tell my children tales of VHS the way my father talks of 8-tracks) as well as Roy Rogers and Hopalong Cassidy. And they taught me a few truths that many of my compatriots missed out on. Keep your word. Help the underdog. Thinking and planning ahead will beat pure force nine times out of ten. And lastly, the good guys always win. Some of the storytellers of our day in Hollywood and New York could stand to relearn that last one.

Here rode a man who stood for justice, who needed no reward, notoriety, or frequently even thanks. He never shot to kill, because “if a man must die, it’s up to the law to decide that, not the person behind a six-shooter.” While I am neither fast or accurate enough to live up to that rule, it’s a great sentiment. Not to mention his bullets were made of silver, meaning he had to count the cost every time he pulled the trigger. He made enemies forgive each other; defended old men, women, and children; and generally worked to grow the West up into the kind of civilization that wouldn’t need him. Today’s government workers could take note.

The actor who portrayed him on TV, Clayton Moore, took his role as a children’s icon very seriously, striving to communicate in his personal life the same values he lived by on screen.  He remains the only actor with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame that also has the name of his character.

Hi-yo, Silver, away!

Heroes

Behold, the fit is on me. Bystanders beware, for I must write.

My intention is over the next few weeks to do a series of posts on my heroes. These may come from fiction, history, or acquaintances, and will be ranked in no particular order. My guess is that you, dear reader, may learn a little bit about me. Perhaps I may as well. We become like what we worship, and in this case, I believe we become like what we respect (or spend time with) as well.

My hope is that I choose to become like those who are worth following. A fellow whose hero is Josef Stalin is going to turn out different from one who idolizes FDR or Lincoln, who again is going to be different from one who loves John Adams. What you chase determines often where you wind up. And with the pervasive influence of media in our culture, a fictional role model can be just as important as a historical.

This seems worthy of a post in itself. But for now… on to our first hero.

Optimus Prime

Stats

Classification: Hero of Fiction (TV)

Appearance: 18-wheeler truck cab/giant red and blue robot

Origin: First in Transformers, 1984.
Skills: Leadership, wisdom, tactics, history, hand-to-hand combat, and a mean driver to boot.

Defining Moment: “Orion Pax, Part 3” “Alpha/Omega” (Transformers: Prime S2)

He’s first because he inspired this series of posts, and also because he is probably the biggest. He is, after all, an 18-wheeler truck a large part of the time. Hailing from 1984, born of the desire of some American and Japanese businessmen to sell toys, he has since become THE face of a hugely popular franchise. Multiple cartoon series, big budget hours-long explosions… I mean, Michael Bay films, and yes, toys. The version of Optimus that inspires me, though, comes from one of my two favorite cartoons of all time—Transformers Prime. And if you’re one of those people that think cartoons are for little kids, think again. This series is amazing—and often more adult than you’re expecting.

Optimus is the ultimate selfless leader—wise, patient, brave, and trusting to a fault. And millennia of combat have made him one of the few warriors that can stand a chance one-on-one with the big bad himself, Megatron. He won’t fight unless all the other options are exhausted, but if he does, run—the Big Guy packs quite a punch. He puts himself, and his team, on the line for humanity when they cannot do so themselves, and is content with anonymity—a robot in disguise. Sound familiar?

Great Moment: Optimus Prime is probably best encapsulated in the episode “Alpha/Omega,” where he and his nemesis battle wielding weapons that could destroy cities with ease. Megatron, ever the egocentric motormouth, pointedly observes that “At last we take our rightful places, Optimus—as gods!” He calmly replies, “I am but a humble soldier, Megatron, and you are the victim of your own twisted delusions!”

And of course, much credit goes to one of the great masters of voice acting, Peter Cullen, who can make anything sound cool, from the famed command “Autobots, roll out!” to great epic usages of epimone like this:

“I am Optimus Prime, and I send this message: Though we did not choose to be of Earth, it would seem that we are here to stay. If you approach this planet with hostile intent, know this: we will defend ourselves. We will defend humanity. We will defend—our home.”

Okay, and this picture just 'cause I'm proud of it and it's cool...