[This is
part 2. Read part 1!]
 |
| Discipline, fitness, confidence, blood-thirst. Enroll at the Cobra Kai Dojo today! |
So, Danny
doesn’t go to his mother, or the police, about the violent gang of high school
kids that want to wreck him severely. Neither does Mr. Miyagi. It doesn’t even
occur to this grown man to contact the authorities in this matter. Rather, he
helps Daniel strike deals with crazed Vietnam vets, one of the terms of which
is that if Danny doesn’t come to the tournament, then both the old man and the
school kid will be hunted down and have the crap kicked out of them.
Why?
Simply put,
because healthy young men want to
solve their own problems; want to be strong enough to endure and accomplish
things. Competence and strength are good things, and people desire them. Not
even the advocates of the “no bullying” thing going around now think that
weakness is good. Actually, the only idea they seem to have is to use someone else’s strength, rather than that of the
kid being bullied, to solve their problem.
That
strength and the ability to accomplish things are good (although they can be
misused) is fairly obvious. To deny this principle would be to deny that it is
good to be alive, to do, to be, or to have anything. If someone has arrived at
that point, we have very little to talk about until they are (at least) willing
to suspend judgment.
That healthy
young people want to solve their own problems might be less obvious to
experience, but we can still see it. In fact, the landscape of popular culture
itself is strewn with pieces of evidence (The Karate Kid itself being an
example). It may be that some (or many) children and adults have broken and
given up hope that they can be the
competent hero, but they still love competence and heroism. A kid who shrinks
before bullies and thinks of himself as no good still wants to watch Superman defeat the unjust and
John McClane beat up the bad dudes. And not because they want to be saved, but
because they think it’s good to be able to do the saving. Little kids pretend
to be the Power Rangers, not members of the general populace being defended by
them. On Halloween and at Comic conventions people dress up like heroes, in
video games they take on the roles of heroes.
The Karate
Kid presents a world that is meant to be thought of as the real one. We might
think it is unrealistic (in that campy sort of ‘80’s way) but that unrealistic
quality is in the service of depicting a kid with the chance to be competent;
not something passive to be manipulated, or a victim to be coddled.
It is
probably true that we can’t all have friends who are old, wise men with a whole
parking lot of vintage cars to give away (though I think we should work at it),
and it is a practical certainty that a few months of learning is not enough to
win first place at a Karate tournament. But The Karate Kid expresses a
wholesome desire, and aspirations are always a little vague and abbreviated at
the beginning.
Maybe its
unselfconscious, 80’s exuberance should inspire us to encourage a lot less victim-hood and a lot more manliness, lest we fill the world with nothing but Kobra Kais
and miserable, defeated Danny Larussos of one sort or another.
© 2013 John Hiner III
Tweet
ZGD62BCJCUP9
It's interesting that you point out that people play power rangers as the heroes rather than random passerby's because that seems to be an integral part of acting freely for what's right.
ReplyDelete