The Field via Narco News
In 1967, I was seven, and my parents granted me a weekly
“allowance” of a whopping 25 cents. Other kids I knew received as much
as a dollar per week, but I was thrilled to enter the ranks of consumers
even with limited purchasing power. My chums and I would go together to
the candy store to spend these riches on on packets of cards with our
favorite baseball, football and basketball players, each containing a
stick of chewing gum.
At the store, there was a rack of magazines and comic books, and I
noticed some titles with the names of super heroes I had seen on TV
cartoons. After school, on weekdays, on the black and white television,
there were five such programs. On Mondays, there would be a half-hour
adventure of Captain America, the World War II everyman who had been
converted into a super-soldier by an experimental serum. On Tuesdays,
the millionaire playboy and arms-dealer Tony Stark would suit up as Iron
Man. On Wednesdays, the Hulk would fly into fits of rage and smash the
same kinds of tanks that Cap rode and that Stark manufactured. In very
Catholic form, there was fish on Fridays, as Prince Namor, the
Submariner, would rule and protect the seven seas, harassed by humans
and their governments whose stupidity was destroying the oceans.
Thursday was “Thor’s Day,” a different kind of hero, because he was
a god from another realm, named Asgard, straight out of ancient Norse
mythology, and his story reflected the generation gap that was raging
throughout society in the 1960s. I found the Thor myth irresistible.
Thor had long, flowing blond hair and an authoritarian father who
forbade him his love for an earthling, Jane Foster (a metaphor for the
struggle for racial integration that defined those times). Thor rebelled
from his dad, King Odin, adopting the humans of earth and protecting
them from super-villains, intergalactic monsters, and even from rival
gods. When not saving the world, he disguised himself as a handicapped
doctor, Donald Blake, who needed a cane to walk, and at times when his
vengeful father stripped him of his powers he would be stuck in that
limping body. When danger appeared, Blake would strike his cane into the
ground, it would transform into the mighty hammer Mjolnir, and the
longhaired God of Thunder would jump into action.
The suggestion that there were many “gods,” and not just the one I
was dragged off to church on Sundays and Catholic school on Wednesdays
to be instructed in how to worship, presented an extremely liberating
idea. Kids naturally identify with and want to be heroes. But Thor
suggested an entirely new heresy: that we could aspire to be as gods,
even if, like him, we had personal problems, societal taboos, and family
expectations to disobey in order to do so.
No comments:
Post a Comment