Heroes

The real Batman!

A guy in a cape and a skullcap with bendy horns and a half mask. And cotton tights. That bunch up. Heavens. Bruce Wayne looks tougher. And he's driving an off-the-lot Chrysler. 

And Bruce Wayne lives in Beaver Cleaver's house.

Ah well. A lot can change in 60 years.

And here's Bruce Lee, as you may not remember him:

You can pursue it on your own if you have the time and inclination. But there's Bruce Lee, playing a houseboy in a mask. Who can kick. Of course, kicking in those days was really gay. We didn't have the word "gay" then, but you know what it means.

The story is old. You must know it. Lee worked on the development of the show Kung Fu, and was slated to star in it. Then David Carradine, sodden-faced and droopy, gets the role, playing Asian by speaking haltingly and sometimes veeerrrrrry sssllllloooowwwlly. Cuz that's how Chinese talk, y'see, all humble and lowly and shit. All that slow-motion kung fu, because David didn't know kung fu. No, he got the role on the merits of his great acting skill. Oh. Well, he looked Asian, what with that brachycephaly and the jet black hair and all. Oh. Ok, well, he was white. There, I said it. So?

Kato was supposed to fight Robin, there, and lose. Bruce Lee gets whooped by Burt Ward. Yep. Lee just wasn't having it. He was, after all, a real fighter. Not a pretend one. Just wasn't gonna have it, is all. So it was a draw. 

I guess he won by not losing. After all, he wasn't, oh, how shall I put it ... he wasn't, uh, quite one of us, don't you know.

Well, we're so over that by now. We have a black president, see, and even if he isn't an authentic black men, what with his being half white, and not actually African American, in the sense it's really meant to convey, of slave-ancestry, even so, he's black. Just like Tiger Wood, even if he's only a quarter African. Oh, the rest of the math? A quarter white and half asian. But he's black, cuz that's just the way it is, as a young black fella explained to me once. "That's just how it is," he explained. But even so, we're over it, all this race stuff. Ahh. I feel so liberated.

My point? My point? Well you might ask what my point is. I just wanted you to see Batman, and Robin. Because heroes wear masks.


J