Race Pride, Heroes, and Batpoop

An unlikely reader would not have to read many of my earlier posts in this weblog before deciding that I have a noticeably short supply of racial pride.

The fact is that quite possibly I have none at all.

That also goes for the wedding partners of a condition like racial pride, heroes. These deficiencies can be uncomfortable, but only at widely spaced intervals, and that's because I am seldom if ever around people who feel prompted to remind me of my sin.

Last night HBO proudly unveiled a documentary that gave me a powerful clue as to where those essentials all went. They were beaten out of me by the likes of Joe Louis.

This shows how topsy-turvy things are for me, because for just about everybody else who was lumped into my "racial" category, the situation was the exact opposite..

I didn't want to look at "Joe Louis, Betrayed," but I ended up sitting through the whole thing. At first, afterward, I wasn't depressed, though I had expected to be, but after two good nights of sleeping for a full 8 hours each, which had been unheard of for me lately, this morning I popped up fully awake at 4, because of a vividly bad dream. That may have been helped along by also seeing, right after "Joe Louis," another documentary on the NGC Channel, about two heroes who went into a bat-ceilinged, guano-floored cave in Indonesia, looking for reticulated pythons. After a few yards water started liquifying the guano, and soon they were intrepidly struggling thigh deep through it, and they had to put on respirators because of all the ammonia generated by the pools of batpoop. Finally they found what they were looking for, and for their labors one was given four severe gashes in his upper thigh by the teeth of the huge snake.

I had felt that I didn't need to see the Joe Louis movie, because his story is so familiar to me, and the title didn't have to tell me that it would end sadly and badly. The years of his successes coincided almost exactly with my first 20 years or so, and actually, like everyone, because of him and other things I had plenty of race pride and so forth, until around the time that I entered college, which was in 1949. But then my natural aversion to fist-fighting and pugnacity in general, which extended even to chess, coupled with becoming convinced that if a huge number of people fervently believed in a thing, something must be wrong, soon spread and infected all my ways of thinking.

Briefly put, it started making no sense to me that the worth of a whole group of people should be gauged by the ability of some men to hammer the brain cages of other men with their fists with a view to knocking them unconscious or even dead, and I no longer understood why that group should take so much pride in such a thing, and yet they did, profusely and totally. And it had been that same boxing-type "kick-ass" factor that had led me to abandon organized religion a few years earlier. You know, the threat that "you will believe as I do, or as I profess to do, or else I will see to it that your ass gets kicked," which is implicit in Christianity and in most of the other religions as well.

In the same vein I thought, and still think, that it is the fate of heroes sooner or later to betray us, and to be betrayed. Joe Louis should have saved a dollar or two while asking somebody what was this thing called taxes, instead of emptying his wallet on wine, women, and song. But he was fatally helped along in all that by all those who saw in him the ultimate hero, simply because he could combine being a genuinely nice guy while also being highly adept at punching people into more than their ordinary states of senselessness, and he bought, whole hog, their song and dance around his altar.