I Am Not Superman!

I am not, nor have I ever been, Superman. 

And though I may don a red cape and a blue union-suit with a big red “S” over my chest, I will never be Superman.  (OK, please find a safe place to vomit as you contemplate the mental image of me in blue tights.) 

I finally got to see “Man of Steel” last weekend, and while the slugfest at the end was too long and the wanton destruction a bit gratuitous, I do recommend the movie.  Highly.  But more about that later.

To be honest, however, when I was a child, I didn’t really want to be Superman.  It was BATMAN I wanted to grow up to be!  Faithfully, twice each week, I sat, glued to the black-and-white TV, watching the old Batman TV series (starring Adam West and Bruce Ward as the Caped Crusaders).  “Same Bat-Time!  Same Bat-Channel!”  (And if you don’t get that 60’s pop-cultural reference, all I can say is that I pity the rising generation.)  I had all the Batman toys known to mankind (or at least all those that my parents could obtain at through the Clark AFB PX in the Philippines).  I read comicbooks—yes, I know that is not the correct spelling, but Stan Lee begs to differ—with an avaricious appetite ravenously rivalling that of a swarming school of peckish piranhas.  I could not get enough of Batman.  And no, I didn’t want to be Robin.  Robin was annoying, and frankly, kind of useless, at least on TV.  It was Batman, Batman, Batman!  I had all the masks and capes and costumes that my long-suffering and saintly mother could make or get for me. 

You see, even as I child, I realized that I could never be Superman, no matter how hard I might wish for it.  Superman was from Krypton.  He was an ALIEN from outer-space, for crying out loud!  He could fly.  (And, no, at least to my recollection, I never tucked a red towel into the neck of my t-shirt, only to climb up on a roof in an attempt to jump off and fly.  Although, there was that time I tied the corners of a white bed sheet to my wrists and ankles and stood outdoors in an ACTUAL typhoon in a—thankfully—failed attempt to fly on the wind like Buster Crabbe playing Flash Gordon soaring through the skies of the distant planet Mongo.  Though the winds knocked me about and down, I did not fly on that occasion, luckily.  But I digress, as I so often do.)  So growing up to be Superman?  Not gonna happen.  And even as a child, I understood why. 

Batman, though?  He was HUMAN.  He was MORTAL.  He was just a guy like me in a mask, cape, and suit with whole bunch of really cool gadgets in his Utility Belt.  He had a really cool car, a plane, a helicopter, a jetpack, a boat, and a submarine.  There was even a Bat-Rocket.  (Don’t believe me?  Google it.)  He got to hang out in this really cool cave with a giant computer and (for some unfathomable reason) a nuclear reactor.  And he got to beat up the bad guys and save people.  So I could BE Batman (even if I did have to put up with that annoying and useless Robin).  And eventually Batgirl would come and hang out with you and help you beat up the bad guys, kicking villains in the chops while wearing yellow, high-heeled boots, but there wouldn’t be any of that mushy stuff.  No, sir!  She would just hang around with you and look pretty, but you wouldn’t have to kiss her or any sissy stuff like that!  And best part was that all of it was POSSIBLE, man!  ANY boy could grow up to be Batman! 

And all of that made sense to my seven-year-old brain. 

Then I grew up (a little) and I found out that in order to be Batman, I had to be a millionaire.  No, make that a gazillionaire.  Most of that Bat-hardware was not only technologically implausible (if not downright impossible), but extremely expensive to develop and maintain.  And I was not, nor had I ever been, wealthy, and though I might work really hard, I was unlikely to be a multi-gazillionaire by the time I was twenty. 

Another impediment to my becoming Batman was the physical stuff.  You see, I was never very athletic (putting it mildly).  Despite the fact that my father and brothers were star athletes, I have almost no arches in my feet.  (I’m not exactly flat-footed—I did pass a military physical—but running was never, shall we say, my forte.)  I was never very good, much to my father’s chagrin, at catching a ball or shooting a basket.  And I noticed that professional athletes were unable to play in their chosen sport for very long.  They were old and washed-up in their 30’s!  Even with the best medical care, the human body, I came to understand, just can’t take that kind punishment forever.  Batman’s body took a pounding night after night after night, and he just kept going.  Alfred may have been trained as a military medic in the Special Air Service during WWII, but I realized that even had he been an extremely gifted orthopedic surgeon working with the latest medical equipment and techniques (rather than an acerbic British butler with some battlefield medical experience), the odds of Bruce Wayne being permanently crippled were ridiculously high.  At the very least, he would be in constant pain.  (This is exactly how he was portrayed in “The Dark Knight Rises”, a man crippled by just a few years of serving as the Batman.  A nice touch of realism, that.)

And then there was the fighting.  I’ve never been very good at fighting.  As a child, whenever I got into fights, I usually got my butt kicked.  And on those rare occasions where I came out the victor, I still cried.  (Picture Ralphie in “A Christmas Story”, finally giving the bully the beating he—the bully—so richly deserved.)  Even as a parent, spanking a child left me physically sick to my stomach. 

The bottom line is, no matter how much I might fantasize about becoming Batman, I am not, nor have I ever been, nor shall I ever be, Batman. 

I could put on the suit.  (Stop laughing, please.  In my younger days, it didn’t look so ridiculous.)  In fact, I did dress up as Batman for my son’s birthday party.  (I’m sorry, son.  I know this comes as a shock, but Batman didn’t really come to your house for that birthday party, and I wasn’t stuck at work.  At least now you know I didn’t skip your party!)  I rented the official Batman costume from a costume shop.  (It was the Tim Burton version that Michael Keaton wore.)  When I put on the mask, I realized that I couldn’t turn my head.  How practical is that, may I ask? 

Recently, I saw pictures on the news of a woman who was so obsessed with the doll Barbie (yes, the fantastical icon of unrealistic female form and “beauty” that inspires young girls to be anorexic, bulimic, and preoccupied with fashion), that she had multiple surgeries so that she could become Barbie.  The headline read, “The Human Barbie Doll”, or something like that.  To my eye, she looked grotesque.  I was profoundly saddened to see this human being, this precious daughter of God with the celestial potential inherent in all of us and a divine heritage, so miserable, so unhappy with her physical appearance that she would suffer untold physical pain and suffering (not to mention spending enormous sums of money) to become something she could never actually become.  Perhaps she succeeded changing her body cosmetically to achieve a semblance of her ideal, but what is her life going to be like when she ages and her stretched neck causes her crippling pain, and her sculpted features, and tattooed-on makeup become a pitiful mask?  Barbie’s plastic face will not change, but the woman’s face will.  No matter how hard she tries, no matter how much money she spends or how many times she goes under the knife, eventually she will no longer have the look that she sacrificed so much to achieve. 

Over the years, I watched as Michael Jackson went from a good-looking and very talented kid, to a young man who wanted to look and sing like Diana Ross, to a hideous, and abjectly pitiful figure with a prosthetic nose.  I remember being on tour, backstage with the Tabernacle Choir just prior to a concert, when we saw on the news that Michael Jackson had died of a drug overdose.  We were saddened, not because the world had lost the self-styled “King of Pop”, but because we were witnessing the tragic death of a tortured soul (and we were only hearing about his death because he was famous).  I understand that he was in constant physical pain.  We’re going to put his doctor in prison for murdering him by providing him with too many pain-killers, but in the end, it was Michael Jackson’s emotional agony, his spiritual emptiness that killed him.  No matter how much he wished to be something other than what he was, no matter how much he changed the outside, he seemed unable to be find joy in who he was.  That’s a tragedy.  His children don’t look anything like him, because he did not sire them himself.  If he had sired them with his own DNA, they would have looked like the handsome young man—the idol of millions—that Michael had once been before he began mutilating his face and bleaching his skin. 

I am profoundly saddened see people so unhappy with who they are, with the divine potential that God has given them as His beloved sons and daughters, that they mutilate their bodies to become something they are not and can never be: a member of the opposite sex.  No matter how much they change the outside, no matter what hormones they inject, they will not resequence their DNA, they will not be someone other than who they are, the person they were before they gained the divine gift of a physical body, the person they have always been and always will be.  In the resurrection, they will be restored to their perfect frame—the one God gave them—with all imperfections, all blemishes and defects removed, not the altered form of their elective, self-inflicted mutilation.

Now back to Superman.  SPOILER ALERT: IF YOU HAVEN’T SEEN “MAN OF STEEL”, YOU MAY WANT TO SKIP THIS PARAGRAPH.  The aspect of the “Man of Steel” movie that I enjoyed the most was the fact that it wasn’t all about Superman.  Superman was NOT the only hero or heroine of the movie.  The best part of the movie was when Perry White stayed behind, facing almost certain death, to try to free a woman from the rubble callously created by the fight between Superman and General Zod.  Perry knew he was most likely going to die if he stayed and that the woman would probably die as well.  But he stayed.  Then there was the army colonel, played by Christopher Meloni, who knew he stood no chance against a warrior from Krypton, but he still faced her, armed only with a knife, a weapon he knew could not harm his opponent.  Then later, he sacrificed his own life so Superman could save the planet.  For me, this made the movie about ordinary people like me who didn’t want to be Superman, who didn’t covet his powers.  They simply stood and did the best with who they were and what they had. 

I’m never going to be Batman, but I have lived a remarkable life, even if it’s not the life I originally envisioned.  I hope to continue to live a remarkable life, even as it changes.  I have dreamed dreams and fantasized of things that will never be.  I will never be an astronaut, for example, though at one point in my life, I was convinced that only by walking on Mars could I ever be truly happy.  As my air force pilot career progressed, it became apparent that all my efforts would not make that particular dream a reality.  For one thing, nobody was going to Mars during the years of my serviceable flying career, and all the wishful thinking in the world would not make it otherwise.  And when my first precious daughter was born (my last child to be born in a military hospital), as I held her in my arms, watched her squirm, felt her new breath, looked into her squinched-up little face—so beautiful in my eyes, I realized that I would never want to leave my precious Jenny for the YEARS such a journey would take.  I would NOT abandon the precious little soul whom God had entrusted to me for the world, and not for ANOTHER world, either.  I wouldn’t be flying to Mars.  But like the Robin Williams character of Peter in “Hook”, I had found another happy thought, a better one.  

And with that thought I could fly.