Eccentric Flower:200912/Prelude

Somewhere around the mid-Eighties it became okay to admit that, in order to be the kind of person who would put on a costume and go around risking your life to make the world a better place, you'd need to be somewhat crazy.

Not all of the people in this Boston Phoenix article are crazy. And I appreciate the Phoenix trying to make that explicit. Unfortunately, elsewhere in the article I think the Phoenix goes badly astray with its causality:

I think this is confusing an effect with a cause. I think the popularity of the MMORPGs (and why on earth someone wouldn't namecheck the City of Heroes/City of Villains franchise in an article about superheroes baffles me) and so forth are because they are feeding a need for this superhero-dom, not creating it. Responding to market demand, as it were.

To my mind, the real cause is bigger and darker: I think that, right now, we are at an especially low ebb for feeling powerless to change the corrupt, decaying nature of society - and its attendant problems - in any meaningful way. I think there are a whole lot of us who look out our window and see a world gone to hell and not a damned thing we can do about it. Under the circumstances, the insane response of going out and becoming, essentially, a vigilante starts to look a lot more rational all of a sudden.

(Ancillary evidence which, while not on all fours, is still germane: Please see Goetz, Bernhard.)

But I would be the first to admit that there is another trend at work here, which is that of the distancing effect.

I was thinking about this, before I sat down at lunch to read the Phoenix, while deciding whether to write the entry which will follow this one. I get my ideas mostly in the mornings, before I eat (I rarely eat any food before about 12:30 or 1:00 in the afternoon), or very late at night, when I can't sleep. At the time those ideas seem reasonably brilliant, or at least compelling enough or worthwhile enough to execute. But once I've had food or sleep, sanity prevails and I see the ideas for what they actually are: Not worth the candle.

Usually, once I've reached this conclusion instead, I go play a game. Often it is an online game. It's not just escapism, it's detachment. It's "I don't want to think about these things I really cannot affect," so I go off and play at being a superhero. (Ironically, I don't touch actual long-underwear superhero games with an eleven-foot pole, but the rest of them are all about being a superhero as well, just in one degree or another of disguise.)

I don't think I am the only one who goes into retreat in these artificial worlds to escape the real world that cannot be changed for the better by mere mortals. I'm too cynical to believe that I can accomplish something by putting on a costume and being a public crusader; but I can understand the drive. One should respect these urban "superheroes," crazy though they may be; they're as disillusioned as I am, but unlike me, they have not yet given up hope. Their methods are odd, and probably ineffective, but at least they're trying to do something.

Furthermore, in trying to engage face-to-face with the real world, they are attempting to counter the strangely counterintuitive effects of our modern distributed communications - about which more (much, much more) in the next entry.

Eccentric Flower talk:200912/Prelude