[UA] Sacrafice your friends for food

[Tim Toner]

Russell Rayburn wrote:
> On Mon, Jan 12, 2009 at 12:13 PM,  <teucer at pobox.com> wrote:
>   
>> Here's what I would do with this:
>>     
>
> <snip stuff about comic books>
>
> Look past the spandex.  Who are our heros as a society now?  What is
> our mythology?
>
> Bet you know who Jack Bauer is:
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Bauer
>
> Also bet you've never heard of Michael Murphy:
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_P._Murphy
>
> Our heros and villains are creations of media now.  Maybe it's been
> that way for a while; perhaps since someone talked about Zeus.
>
> So, why wouldn't someone try to ascend as The Joker?  Or as Dexter
> Morgan, for that matter?
>
>
>   
I think that all this does is underline just how hard it is to join the 
IC.  Sure, we can all imagine 'Batman' ascending, or 'Peter Pan', but on 
a very real, very visceral level, we KNOW they're fictions.  For a human 
being to elevate himself to that stature, where he might as well be a 
fictional character...that takes juice.  To put it another way, I like 
how Odysseus is the first true 'hero'.  Why?  Because he's us.  First, 
while he is beloved of Athena, he doesn't have a drop of divinity in 
him.  He gets himself out of scrapes using his wits alone, and then two 
seconds later, his mouth writes a check his butt can't catch, and we're 
off to the races again.  He's deeply flawed, and yet has a fantastic 
sense of style.  Of all the mythological characters, he had the hardest 
time of it, but still manages to come out on top.

To put all this another way, if any fictional character ascended, it 
would have to be Santa Claus.  I mean, all those kids BELIEVING, and as 
_Hogfather_ points out, we know what he looks like and where he lives.  
We're all agreed, even if we don't believe in him, per se.  But he 
hasn't ascended, because of the huge mass of people who, despite being 
on the same page in the 'what does he look like' department, KNOW that 
he's simply not real.  Heck, for all I know, maybe he once was.

(I was going to go off on a tangent about the Coca Cola Company being 
behind the standardization of Santa, but in checking my facts, I see 
that, sadly, it's not true.  In the course of writing Coca Cola Company, 
I noticed that, C being the third letter in the alphabet, the initials 
CCC would translate to 333.  More perplexing than this is that Coke's 
ticker symbol in the New York Stock Exchange is KO.  Que?)

tt



-- 

Steve Allen's nine rules for reasonable thinking :

   2. Understand the difference between fact and opinion