Don't Let the Blues Make You Bad

Times when I know
you'll be lonesome
Times when I know you'll be sad
Don't let
temptation surround
you
Don't let the blues make you bad
-From the Song "We'll be Together Again"
by Carl Fischer and Frankie Laine

I've been thinking about how sadness, grief, and depression can sometimes be expressed as anger, rage, and vengence. It seems almost justifiable to commit any sort of violent act and blame it on some tragedy in our lives. How many people have been injured or killed by some university student not happy with his grades or some employee who had just been fired? We see it expressed in our fiction and fantasy and it even seems sort of acceptable.

Bruce Wayne's parents were gunned down during a robbery. Their young son Bruce was allowed to live, but had to watch his parents be executed, right before his eyes. Over the long years between a mournful childhood and becoming an adult, vengence and justice waged a battle for Wayne's soul and the result twisted sideways to become Batman.

Peter Parker was a tortured high school student, brilliant, but shy and unathletic, the target for bullies. Having few friends, and with his parents having died years before, he was only loved by his Aunt May and Uncle Ben. When Peter was accidently gifted with extraordinary abilities from the bite of a radioactive spider, he used his newfound powers to become an entertainer for profit and to thumb his nose at the rest of the world. When he discovered that his own arrogance resulted in his Uncle's death, he changed his mission to one very similar to Wayne's, though not quite as dark. Still, he's perpetually driven by guilt and remorse, and can never put down the mantle of the spider for as long as he lives.

Frank Castle's family was also murdered, in this case, by "the mob" to eliminate their testimony as witnesses to a gangland killing in New York's Central Park. In some ways, he's the most brutal example of how personal disaster can turn someone into a terrifying vigilante. Coercion, extortion, kidnapping, and even murder are not beyond the man who became the Punisher. Need I go on?

Everybody experiences some shadow of these feelings, at least briefly. The kid who is punched by the school bully on the playground feels momentary rage at the pain before fear takes over. Secretly, he nurses fantasies of pummelling and humiliating his tormentor, but as the months and years pass, the fantasies fade away and the kid eventually finds his own competancy and validation, and no longer needs to dream of punishing those who hurt him.

It seems to hinge on the level of pain and the ability to let it go. Grief never completely vanishes, but it manages to allow itself to drift into one of the back closets of our consciousness, only making a reappearence on an anniversary or the experience of a similar event. Most people can live with that process. Some people can't...or won't, as we see in the film Batman Begins.

No, *this* is your mask. Your real face is the one that criminals now fear. The man I loved - the man who vanished - he never came back at all. But maybe he's still out there, somewhere. Maybe some day, when Gotham no longer needs Batman, I'll see him again. -Rachel Dawes

At first, Batman was an instrument of Bruce's need to retaliate against the force of evil that killed his parents. Even though (in the film version) Joe Chill had died years before, the process that created Chill and victimized the innocent still thrived. Batman was the expression of Bruce's response to that process. At least at first.

In the sequel The Dark Knight, Bruce pins all his hopes for putting down the mantle of the bat and leading a "normal" life on District Attorney Harvey Dent. Dent was the White Knight to Batman's Dark Crusader. If Dent could be as effective at quelling the tide of crime in Gotham in the courts as Batman was in the shadows, Bruce could finally give up his mask (or his "face"), and journey from darkness into light.

But when the moment came, Bruce found that he couldn't do it. He couldn't give up the Bat. It had worked its way into his soul years ago without Bruce really noticing. Of course Dent gave Bruce the "out" when he "confessed" to being Batman, but that's because both men told themselves they could never surrender to a murder's extortion plot. But was that really the truth?

It seems that once grief and pain drive our anti-heroes into the vengeful identity of a costumed warrior, there is no turning back. Many times even death doesn't stop them. In the comic book version, while Bruce Wayne wasn't actually killed, Darkseid sent him so far back into the past, that no one could reasonably believe he'd ever return. Now, we are about to see the 6 issue saga of The Return of Bruce Wayne across the long millennium, from the era of prehistoric man to Pilgrim-era to western to pulp detective, as Bruce struggles to regain the present.

The mask asks so much of all these people. There will always be one more villain to defeat. There will always be one more injustice to fight. There will always be one more victim to avenge. When is it enough? How long will rage and guilt continue to erode the soul and spirit until you can put down the costume forever, one day die at the hands of some criminal, great or small, or turn into this:

You either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villain. -Bruce Wayne

Wayne never considered that, after the night Dent died (assuming he did die and isn't being held secretly in some locked and hidden cell in Arkham), he could just give up being Batman. Let Batman be the villain Gotham needs and let Batman "die" so Bruce Wayne could finally live.

All the times Peter has tried to give up being Spider-Man, circumstances or fate dictated otherwise. Would the Punisher ever consider that his job was ultimately complete, and let others take over the role? I suppose they'd give up if all crime were ended but unlike any individual war, where your goal is to get the enemy to lose hope and surrender, there seems no end to crime, terror, and evil.

What makes one person give up hate and blind pain and another person surrender his or her soul to the abyss? The title of this article and the lyrics I quoted are from a song called We'll be Together Again. While Billie Holiday may be more associated with this song, many famous vocalists have sang it over the years. This morning, I heard a version sung by Lena Horne as rendered during a 1994 performance at New York's The Supper Club.

The final lines of the song probably make the difference:

Some day
Some way
We both have a
lifetime before us
For parting is not goodbye
We'll be together again.

If you have hope that there's something beyond the pain and loss, you can go on. If hope eludes you, or you refuse it, then you remain in the shadow of your pain, continuing to serve its dark desires. Lena Horne had a similar period but she finally came out of the shadow:

Her father, her son and Hayton all died in 1970 and 1971, and the grief-stricken singer secluded herself, refusing to perform or even see anyone but her closest friends. One of them, comedian Alan King, took months persuading her to return to the stage, with results that surprised her.

"I looked out and saw a family of brothers and sisters," she said. "It was a long time, but when it came I truly began to live."

-From Ms Horne's obituary

Ms. Horne overcame not only the shadow of death, but of racism and injustice as well. In many ways, she's a greater hero than Batman or Spider-Man, because she put away the mask and went on to walk in the sunlight.

How long you or I continue to walk in the shadows may be a matter of choice, too. Not that it's easy to overcome.

Vengeance blackens the soul, Bruce. I've always feared that you would become that which you fought against. You walk the edge of that abyss every night, but you haven't fallen in and I thank heaven for that.
-Alfred Pennyworth
Batman: Mask of the Phantasm

While Bruce, Peter, and even Frank walk the edge of the abyss and even occasionally fall in, we sometimes walk the same line. Our lives are likely not as dramatic and certainly not as adventurous or dangerous as theirs, but the damage to our souls can be just as severe if we allow it. Without hope, we are slaves to the shadow, battling for justice and for ourselves every day and night. With the hope "that we'll be together again", we can find the courage to put away the mask, and the faith to live and to trust that whatever we need to do, we can do it without hiding.

Death of a Nightingale

"I was always battling the system to try to get to be with my people. Finally, I wouldn't work for places that kept us out. ... It was a damn fight everywhere I was, every place I worked, in New York, in Hollywood, all over the world," -Lena Horne (1917-2010)

Yesterday a nightingale died in New York. She lived a long life and a rewarding one, at least from the perspective of someone on the outside looking in. I never met Ms. Horne or even saw her perform live, but like millions of others, I admired not only her talent, but her courage and determination.

What made Ms. Horne special, beyond her decades-long career as a singer and actress, was her drive to step outside the role that white America had assigned her and get in the face of those who tried to keep her and everyone who looked like her "separate but equal".

Her obituary records that in "the 1940s, she was one of the first black performers hired to sing with a major white band, the first to play the Copacabana nightclub and among a handful with a Hollywood contract." Her frustration was that while she was good enough to entertain white people, she wasn't good enough to socialize with them. I guess 1945 was an especially important year for her.

Horne was only 2 when her grandmother, a prominent member of the Urban League and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, enrolled her in the NAACP. But she avoided activism until 1945 when she was entertaining at an Army base and saw German prisoners of war sitting up front while black American soldiers were consigned to the rear. That pivotal moment channeled her anger into something useful.

I suppose most people will mourn her loss as an iconic entertainer whose career spanned over half a century, but I see her as more than a songbird, though her talents were considerable. While I can't mourn her as a person who knew her but only of someone who knew of her, I see her life as an inspiration for the rest of us. How many people would have just given up and tried to fit in, pursuing the spotlight of fame while avoiding the harsher light of controversy?

If Lena Horne's life didn't mean anything to you before, let it mean something to you now, but not just because of the color of your skin, where you were born, or anything else that separates you from other people. Let Ms. Horne's life mean something to you because she rattled the cages and knocked down the walls. Let her life mean something to you so you can rattle more cages and knock down more walls. Let her make a difference in the world by making a difference in the world yourself.

What she tried to do, along with other people of conviction and compassion, isn't over. Racism, bigotry, and prejudice aren't dead. I read stories everyday that still show how fragmented the world is over differences of color, race, and ethnicity.

The last words printed in the obit I read said this:

I wouldn't trade my life for anything," she said, "because being black made me understand.

The rest of us won't really understand until everyone has the chance to equally access resources and experiences and no one is prevented from that because of what they look like or where they were born.

One of the most famous phrases in the United States Declaration of Independence guarantees citizens of America "Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." No, we aren't promised happiness, just the opportunity to go looking for it. It's up to us to find and hold onto what we want and need. Lena Horne's life embraced that pursuit. Nobody handed her a thing. She earned everything she had, and so must we.

A nightingale died in New York yesterday. The rest of us need to live and aspire to fly upward...where her life and her passion will always sing. No more "Stormy Weather."