Flash Gordon: Growing up and growing weak
“Flash, I love you, but we only have 14 hours to save the earth!” With that line of dialogue from the 1980 film Flash Gordon I knew what I wanted to be when I grew up. When Dale Arden said those words to Flash Gordon, Flash was battling a rival on a floating circular platform in a bullwhip fight to the death as metal spikes came up out of the floor to puncture the fighters. If the fighters fell off the platform they would fall from the sky for miles to their death. The movie was cheesy, and unrealistic as viewed by my adult eyes, but there is a swagger to it that I love to this day which is exhibited so clearly in the theme song done by the rock band Queen, which can be seen in the music video from that long ago time in a film forgotten to modern ingenuity.
It was Flash Gordon and the old Zorro films from the 40s and 50s Republic serials that captured my interest in learning to use bullwhips. After watching the 1980 version of Flash Gordon at least 10 times at the theater I set up a mock platform in my back yard to learn how to fight with bullwhips on a similar platform so I’d have the skills to save the earth the way Flash Gordon did in that famous movie. I was in the sixth grade at the time and my career choice was made for me after watching that movie. I didn’t want to grow up to be a doctor, a dentist, or a mechanic. I wanted to be a superhero who would save the world with my own two hands and a bull whip.
For three decades now I have played that Queen song from my car stereo and blasted it from my home theater system incessantly. At times I have played the song over and over for hours never growing tired of it—because I always identified with the message. As the rest of our modern world looks to the conspiracies of our day with anxiety, I am excited. I look for the black helicopters to circle the sky, and for the hummers to storm my neighborhood releasing me from the social shackles of order for which we all live day by day. I am eager for the day I can defeat the Ming’s of Merciless tyrants I hated as a youth, and still hate as an adult with more than fiction and metaphors, but with action brought from imagination to grim reality.
I have more than a few political enemies who contact me regularly perplexed as to why I seem so eager to fight all the time. What they don’t understand is that peace is boring. There is no glory in fragility or lacking valor. There is no honor in yielding to death. The goal of every breath we human beings breath is to “defy death,” not cower to it. In addition to Flash Gordon saving the universe with his heroics I also admired Evil Knievel when I was young. In fact, the biography of Evil Knievel was the very first book I read once I learned to between the first and second grade. I jumped my bicycle over virtually everything I could build a ramp over and I did some spectacularly crazy things on my bicycle which would translate over to my first car. Some of those experiences would end up in my novel The Tail of the Dragon. But the bottom line was that at no point in my life was a normal life an option. I never wanted to do anything less than save the world against impossible odds.
In that regard, I can report that I am in a blissful existence. The world is corrupt with evils beyond imagining, and they are obvious. The villains are as obvious as the sun in a cloudless sky at noon in the desert. And those villains require valor to defeat, and souls willing to meet them on the battlefield of life. It is in that spirit that I wait patiently with yearning at the first moves of the real life Ming’s of Merciless to advance their plots in a way that defies the law and provides license for action to extend beyond the realm of thought, to actual existence. I still practice on a type of “disk of death” in my back yard so that the skills are present when they are needed.
Most people supposedly grow up and away from these kinds of thoughts, the hero fantasies young people have of saving the world. Sadly, almost every living, breathing human being in the entire world stops growing physically and mentally by the age of 15. The typical 50-year-old wants the same things that the typical 15-year-old wants food, sex, and social status. Our current society considers this—maturity. But the higher needs and desires come from the youth of a mind uncorrupted by age and cynicism, which has not yet hit puberty and developed a desire for the opposite sex. In this phase, a young mind sees the big picture without interruption. It is during this phase that young people think that saving the world is realistic, and they endeavor to do so all by themselves.
However, once young people start submitting themselves to hazing rituals to belong to a sports team, or surrender themselves to a classroom bully, they start making concessions for which there is no return. Once they’ve kissed the feat of the Ming’s of Merciless’ in their life they turn their attention to their social status, sex and food once they’ve learned their place in the social peaking order. I have always felt sorry for these terribly lost fools. They have lost the magic of youth, the knowledge in their own minds that they are ruled by nobody but their own imaginations. Once they are broken—socially—they stay that way for the rest of their years nearly 100% of the time.
What I always loved about Flash Gordon—especially the cheesy 1980 version of the classic character was that he wasn’t afraid of anything. He also survived everything the bad guys threw at him and had to peel the girls off him with a pry bar. Flash Gordon was fearless, and he never felt he needed to apologize otherwise.
Years ago I worked for a conveyor manufacturer who had a big contract with Amazon.com. I was clearly one of the best assemblers out of the 400 person work force. It was a union shop, but due to a recent strike, they had allowed Right-to-Work provisions. I was one of the first after the agreement to take the job without accepting union representation. Because of my work ethic, I was put on the big sorter job, which was the most complicated conveyor segment this particular company built. They were big and had a lot of moving parts which had to be precisely measured. The very aggressive building hours on those units was 16 hours, which required two 8 hour shifts of a union employee building them at 100% efficiency to complete. However, most of the time, the union employees performed at a 40% to 60% efficiency, so even with two assemblers, the job still took two days. When the shop foramen put me on the job he warned me that if I worked too fast, that it would cause trouble. But he admitted to me that he was putting me on those units to expose the poor performance of the much more experienced assemblers. I gladly went to the cell and set up. Within one week of working on the very technical job, I was building those units every 7.5 hours. Within a month, I had the time down to 6 hours. When I worked double shifts, which was unheard of at this manufacturing facility I could build two per day by myself and have the next unit for set up for first shift construction. This earned me the nick-name, “SUPERMAN.” It’s a name that has traveled with me everywhere I’ve ever worked and people do not mean it in a complementary way. Quite the opposite, they mean it as an insult. The union employees believed that by signaling me out with such a name, I would feel self-conscious and stop trying to “be so good.” So in response to their “insult” I would start my shift every day with the theme song to Superman on my personal boom box sitting on top of my tool box. I put together a mix tape back then, and right after Superman, the Queen song “Flash” would come on to drive my point home. My co-workers would scratch their heads and try to turn up their radios onto classic rock to attempt to drown out my movie classics.
After a while of these music wars, they decided to step up their harassment by threatening to fight me in the break room, bathroom, and parking lot. Different groups of individuals attempted the deed until the whole plant had stacked up massive collective failure. When that didn’t work they tried to rally the whole plant against me with a giant fight in the parking lot imagining that the threat of a mob would put me in my place. But it never did, instead they learned the same lessons that many have had to learn about themselves under such circumstances—that they were cowards in their adult lives discovering that valor had left their lives. Those same adults tell their sons to “grow up,” not out of a desire for their children to have better lives than they had, but to prevent their children from stepping beyond them in social stature. Those adults tell their daughters “don’t hold out for a hero, because there are none.” The truth is not that society lacks heroes anymore, but that the hope is that those heroes will be suppressed so that guilt doesn’t riddle the minds of all the 15-year-olds who have stopped dreaming of honor, and traded in their ambition for social security as 40-year-old slobs whose new idea of success is to save the world by schmooze politically on the golf courses of life.
The plot of Flash Gordon would have been boring if Flash just did what he was told, and kissed the ring of Ming the Merciless. But he didn’t, and that’s why Flash Gordon is such a great and honorable character. The same holds true in real life—it is easy to kiss the rings of those who wish to rule us. But there is also opportunity for honor and adventure when such rings are offered and the ring is spit on instead of kissed. That is why I look at our current world and have a hard time containing my excitement. There are a lot of modern spiked platforms that contain a million perils upon them. The danger is what I yearn for—with the same ambition that a 7 to 8 year-old kid looks upon a fantasy film with wide-eyes declaring that when he grows up, he will also be fearless and heroic. For me the biggest difference between the adult and the child is that the child at such a young age has no choice but to dream and ascertain images which they find attractive, so they can set personal goals to live up to. The adult has to take the responsibility to live those dreams, and to have the bravery to stand on their own ideals even if the world or universe stands against them. It is in such moments that I hear the theme song to Flash Gordon, from Queen, and relish that I have fought on many dangerous platforms and heard in my mind the words of many metaphorical Dale Ardens without turning away from the danger. But I never get tired of hearing it, and yearn for more of it every day of my life.
When I was a child, I simply bought another movie ticket and watched the same movie over and over again. But as a man, I simply get out of bed and face the day with a smile on my face for the danger which awaits me. It’s a wonderful time to be alive!
Rich Hoffman
“If they attack first………..blast em’!”
