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October
Caped Crusaders
My five-year-old son has three black and one blue
Batman outfits, which he wears
everywhere—including our periodic visits to
Gotham, where the security guard at LaGuardia
whispered into his walkie-talkie, "Batman is in the
building" without a trace of irony. Cole has Batman
toys that he has classified by their color and
accessories, from Batcopter to Batcave to Batpod At
preschool, he has recruited all the other boys to
play a complex version of Batman that includes
Robin, the Joker, the Riddler and various other
characters from the comic book character that
originally appeared decades before his birth.
I long ago concluded that peeling off my son's
Batman t-shirt before school is a losing battle,
but I am left pondering where the obsession came
from and what it means about manhood when otherwise
gruff-looking garbagemen hanging off the back of a
truck see my boy and shout "Batman!" at the top of
their lungs. Maybe my son has seen that the
superpower isn't about rope and masks at all, but
the mythology of the Batman himself.
But the more I thought about it, the more Batman
came to symbolize a much bigger problem than
outsmarting Mr. Freeze. As guys we have a ton of
real-world challenges, from work to war to intimacy
and fathering. Batman doesn't help with any of
that. He's a dodge from reality.
As men (and women, I might add), we hold up the
myth of the superhero as the ideal man. He doesn't
talk—he just whips out his batarang to deal
with his problems. One of the enduring issues we
face, with warning signs everywhere from athletes
to investment bankers, is to put flesh and bones on
the male form.
I do not have superpowers and neither does my
five-year-old. I like to think I am a decent guy,
but I have made serious mistakes in my life. I read
books, talk to other guys and spend a lot of time
trying to sort out what is right. Most of the men I
know are like me. They live complex, nuanced lives
that can't be reduced to the ultimate good and evil
of the Batman vocabulary.
The societal alternative for guys—at least
when it comes to Madison Avenue and popular
culture—is to be a moron. Think Bud Light
commercials or Two and a Half Men. Maybe we get a
bit more depth but no less silence and duplicity
with Don Draper. Of all the great male athletes
doing the right thing in this world, what gets 99
percent of the ink? The guys whose lives have
turned upside down by making horrible mistakes.
It’s comfortable, because it fits the concept
that polar extremes are part and parcel of the male
condition—something both women and men have
somehow talked themselves into believing.
But I am neither idiotic nor mythic. I am human.
So are the guys I have sought out to get beneath
the myth to find the reality of manliness in
America.
I have been in regular contact with Michael
Kamber, the NewYorkTimes photojournalist on the
ground in Iraq and Afghanistan. I've spent time
with 14 guys locked up for life inside Sing Sing.
I've watched scores of guys I know try to turn
their sudden unemployment into a chance to start
over. I've hung out on playgrounds with
stay-at-home dads and interviewed teenage boys with
no fathers about to become dads themselves. I've
had lunch with a friend who is the number two at
what used to be Merrill Lynch, and edited the story
of a member of the 82nd Airborne who survived the
Gulf War but had to bear watching his toddler die
in his arms from a rare birth defect.
None of these guys have superhuman powers. But
they all told me the story of their lives,
man-to-man, with unflinching honesty. And here's
the thing: In so doing, each one of them became
heroes to me in their own unique way.
My five-year-old son isn't old enough to
graduate from Batman, but my 14-year-old son Seamus
is. He knows about Michael Kamber and former Sing
Sing inmate Julio Medina. And he knows that truth
isn't stranger than fiction. When it comes to
manhood, truth is way more powerful than any comic
book character. He knows that because I have told
him about these men. Just like my father told me
about men who fought in Vietnam, who went to
Mississippi in the name of Civil Rights, men lived
lives of heroism not because of their celebrity but
because of their courage.
I wonder if that garbage man shouting from his
truck as it rumbled down 5th Avenue saw something
in Cole’s batman uniform that reminded him not
of superpowers but his own human power, of the fact
that all of us guys have a story to tell and we all
can be heroes even if we will never be the caped
crusader.
©2011, Tom
Matlack
* * *
While all complain of our ignorance and
error,
everyone exempts himself. - John Glanville
Tom Matlack,
"I am a sucker for real-life heroes, particularly
the ones that get overlooked. My profile work grew
from my first published piece, THE RACE, which
describes my own life altering experience in an
athletic event barely worthy of the local paper.
Coaches and athletes in the sport of rowing were my
initial focus before expanding to mainstream sports
like professional basketball. Music, film, and
television have proven fertile ground for heroic
journeys of a different, but related, kind.
Finally, I have continued to write bits and pieces
of my own story in an attempt to inspire and
enlighten."
Thomas Matlack was Chief
Financial Officer of The Providence Journal until
1997. He was the lead investor in Art Technology
Group, which reached $5 billion in market
capitalization in 2001. He founded and ran his own
venture firm, started companies like American
Profile (sold to Disney for $260 million) and
Telephia (sold to Neilson for $560 million), before
turning to writing. His work has appeared in
Rowing News, Boston Common, Boston
Magazine, Boston Globe Magazine and
Newspaper, Wesleyan, Yale,
Tango, and Pop Matters.
In 2008, Matlack founded
www.TheGoodManProject.org,
with his venture capital partner James Houghton. He
has appeared on national and local television and
radio as well as print across the country. The fall
of 2009, Matlack led a non-conventional book tour
for The
Good Men Project that
started inside Sing Sing and ended in Hollywood
with a screening of THE GOOD MEN PROJECT
documentary film followed by a panel discussion
including Matt Weiner and Shepard
Fairey.
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