CSotD: Of role models, tragedy and progress
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A pair of "Prickly City" strips — yesterday's and today's — with an interestingly timed comment on role models and heroes.
The issue of athletes as role models has been around for a very long time, and longer than that if you include people like Perseus, who unintentionally fulfilled a prophecy when, at a competition on the slopes of Olympus, his disk veered into the crowd and killed an old man who turned out to be his father.
The agonizing over hubris and fate and suchlike made him a great subject for the first collaboration Christopher Baldwin and I did, though I'll admit I also liked the fact that his quest for the head of the Medusa was so nicely divided into discrete episodes. Made it easy to tell the tale in 14 exciting chapters.
Other athletic role models aren't so easy to adapt. Theseus turned out to be such an unmitigated, self-serving jerk that, when Marina Tay and I adapted that story for a serial, the focus was on Ariadne instead. Not the first time for that necessary shift, either.
And I was never able to find a way to make King Arthur and his lot palatable, though Parsival has some promise. For the most part, however, problem-solving in Arthurian legend mostly consists of cleaving helmets.
Which brings us to the essential fallacy: Some "heroes" are heroes overall, while others are simply cleavers of helmets. There is a difference between being famous and being a role model.
Charles Barkley — one of basketball's first "bad boys" — famously denied being a role model:
But Karl Malone, an NBA player who did, in fact, provide a good example, challenged the idea in a Sports Illustrated op-ed, in which he pointed out that famous athletes are role models whether they want to be or not, and that, if nothing else, you wouldn't be signed up to sell sneakers if kids weren't watching you and imitating the things you do.
Stantis notes Lance Armstrong's fall from grace, and I'm not sure how much fodder for Greek tragedy is in that story. It wasn't that we found out Armstrong cheated. It was that he rigged an elaborate system of cheating that roped in others and made cheating central to his success rather than something that inflated his figures a bit.
Add the fact that he wasn't just persuading kids to get in shape and "believe in their dreams," but was inspiring cancer patients, and doing so actively and purposefully rather than simply by his own example, and you've got a tragedy, though not necessarily a useable one.
That is, Oedipus didn't know he had married his mother, and, once he found out, he fessed up and gouged out his eyes. Lance blamed the witnesses, the experts, the organizing committee, everyone but himself.
There are plenty of famous athletes who turn out to be jerks. Others would break our hearts were they to reveal feet of clay. Then again, Tolstoy observed that, if a primitive people were to find out that they had been worshipping a wooden statue, it wouldn't prove there was no god, simply that god isn't made of wood.
What drew me to today's cartoon was its unintentional timing, coming less than a week after the murder/suicide of a Kansas City Chiefs football player and his significant other.
The game that weekend did go on. They talked about cancellation, as an organization and as a team, and decided to move forward, for which they've caught some flak.
Well, if you were there, if you are part of the team, you had your chance to express a different opinion. Then again, if you'd been there, if you were part of the team, maybe you'd know more about it than you think you do from the outside.
This much is certainly true: Telling other people how to mourn is not okay.
And calling them insensitive because they made a particular decision is pretty insensitive itself. Here's what quarterback Brady Quinn had to say in a press conference, and it doesn't sound like the attitude of an insensitive person:
"I was … thinking what I
could have done differently. When you ask
someone how they are doing, do you really mean it? When you answer
someone back how you are doing, are you really telling the truth? … We live in a society of social networks, with Twitter pages and
Facebook, and that’s fine, but we have contact with our work associates,
our family, our friends, and it seems like half the time we are more
preoccupied with our phone and other things going on instead of the
actual relationships that we have right in front of us. Hopefully, people can learn from this and try to actually help if
someone is battling something deeper on the inside than what they are
revealing on a day-to-day basis."
Should we be angry that those close to the situation are treating it as a tragedy rather than an outrage? Should we be upset that they are treating it as the result of severe emotional illness rather than one-dimensional evil?
Most of all, should we feel that this attitude of grief and this searching for reasons means it's being glossed over because he was "famous" and thus a "role model"?
Consider this:
Before famous role model Rock Hudson died of AIDS, the disease was called "the gay cancer" and treated as a disgusting secret. Hudson's death was a milestone in bringing sensible approaches to HIV.
Famous role model Betty Ford brought both breast cancer and prescription drug dependency out of the closet and made it possible to discuss these issues and work to provide solutions.
There are other examples; those two will do.
Who knows what will come of this moment? I doubt it will be the game-changer for domestic violence that Hudson's death or Ford's candor brought about in their cases.
But it could be something, if we let it.
In any case, heroes and villains are for the comics. Real life is full of real people.
That's what makes it so difficult.
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