To the brave go the movie rights
Today I was thinking about the old man who loved his beagle, Charger, and how one of the first things he mentioned about the dog was how brave he was. I had to compare this with Maggie’s recent grasshopper incident. We were out playing in a field… well she was playing and romping around while I was sitting on my butt, smoking a cigar and listening to the never-ending torture that is the Ayla or “The Clan of the Cave Bear” series on the iPod.
After a while, Maggie had come over and was standing about a foot away from me. She was just standing around and sniffing the air. Suddenly a grasshopper jumped in front of her about eight inches away from her face. Maggie let out a squeak, jumped about 18 inches straight up in the air, somehow managed to shift positions on the way down — bending time and space in the process — and landed in my lap. Concerned that perhaps she was still too exposed to the jumping green menace, she immediately tried to climb up my torso in an apparent attempt to stand on either my shoulders or the top of my head.
Maggie is not brave. Oh, Maggie might chase the coon, but the second that coon stopped and even looked at her funny she would be climbing up my leg and I would be glad I had worn jeans and not shorts. But we don’t care. It simply doesn’t matter to us if she is brave or not. For one thing, I’m more than brave enough for the both of us.
But on a broader scale, it made me think about how bravery is almost always considered a desirable trait in humans as well as runty puppies. Why is that? Since most things go back to the caveman days, and I am reading a “book” about the stone age, I was considering the problem in terms of evolution. For those of you who don’t believe in evolution, this post is getting ready to take a turn into the arena of logic — a turn that you probably won’t be able to follow. Why don’t you come back in a couple of days when I’ll likely be posting about how much I like Diet Coke. That will be fun, too.
Ok, so for the rest of us… why is bravery such a good thing? I mean if you think about the stone age I guess it was a good thing to be brave because you were likely to run to the front of the hunting party and therefore likely to have a better chance to make a kill for your family. On the other hand you were at the front of the hunting party and more likely to get trampled by the woolly mammoth and leave your family without a provider. So you’re brave but dead. Meanwhile the kinda wussy guy who stayed at the back of the pack still gets part of the kill and he always goes home to his hairy stinky woman at the end of the hunt. We’re assuming for the sake of this example that going home to a hairy stinky woman was a good thing back then.
Or if you were gathering food stuffs you might be more likely to try strange new foods if you were brave which could be a really good thing if you found a new staple for the tribe. If you found a completely new food that was available for the whole tribe to eat, your hairy, stinky poop-covered man might take a night off from beating you when he got back from hiding in the bushes until the last minute during the mammoth hunt. That would be a good thing. But being brave also meant you were much more likely to be the poor bruised old woman keeling over from eating the poison toadstools.
Being brave during the Crusades might allow you to become a Knight Templar and thus a guardian of the secrets, history and wealth of the Christian Empires. Of course being brave and becoming a Knight Templar would also mean you would eventually be accused of heresy and sodomy and burned at the stake by the King of France so he could steal all the cash you had earned with your swashbuckling bravery.
Much later in history if you were brave you might venture off to the new world where you would take advantage of gullible leaders, local legends and convenient cases of the pox to finish off entire nations of native peoples and claim their lands for your ruler. Or being brave during that same time period might have meant you were stranded on a ship in the middle of the Atlantic… starving, battling scurvy and trying desperately to please your big scary new boyfriend, First Mate Jones.
Today being brave might mean that you rush into the burning twin towers to save as many people as you can before they fall. If you survive, you will definitely be seen as a hero. But you’ll be a hero who has severe health complications caused by all the crap you breathed as the towers were burning. That’s not exactly a positive result of bravery for the person who is now on complete disability.
Obviously, being brave has a long history of both good and bad results for the hero. So why is it that we as a society have almost always applauded a brave person? It’s too long-lived a tradition to be the result of the fact that we need examples of bravery so that we can make better movies. I mean no one wants to go see a movie titled “Die Easy” about a guy who hides in the basement until the crisis is over. That would suck.
But maybe that really IS why we encourage and applaud bravery. It’s pretty much been the same story throughout history. When Paris stole Helen and trotted off to Troy, I’m sure not every single Greek guy headed out in the great boats to get her back. But they didn’t exactly write epic poems and plays about some guy named Juffiterzine who stayed at home and tended his olive grove while the rest of the Greeks were fighting the Trojan War. And Beowulf probably wouldn’t have gotten any press at all if he had just stayed around the castle being courtly instead of tromping through the woods with his axe and then whacking Grendel’s head off.
Has humanity’s long-held love affair with the brave simply been selfish? Do we really care if the results of our hero’s bravery are awesome or tragic? Either one makes a great story. Bottom line… do we just love the brave because they give us something to talk about around the cave camp-fire so that we have a good reason to put off heading to our sleeping rolls and our hairy stinky wife?
What do you think?
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Author’s note: Throughout this post, the words “hairy,” “stinky” and “wife” were used together several times. This is strictly a result of my imagining a cave-man type family and has no connection to anyone we might actually know or to whom we might be espoused. Stace, for example, is neither hairy nor stinky and therefore could not possibly be connected to the phrase “hairy, stinky wife” in any way. Not even subliminally.
I wish you wouldn’t have had that ‘author’s note’ section. Now all I can think is ‘hairy, stinky, wife’. I think that’s what I may very well be for Hellbilly right now due to laying around sick for a friggin’ week.
And, the bravery thing? I’ve always said it’s better to be a king-maker than to be the king. But, now that I’ve read your post, I don’t know which is more brave.
RE Author’s Note: Way to cover your ass, hun.
Hmmmmm. I think we are so into bravery because there’s so little of it. ?? I don’t know, but did enjoy this post.
Very enjoyable post, Hedon. And the jury will disregard the end note.
Why bravery? I believe that it came about when men took over the goddess/mother worship that started our culture. Maleness and their various attributes became objects of worship instead of female attributes.
Just saying.
I’m not sure I look at bravery as an exalted act. I mean, to me, it seems that some of it may just be human instinct – if you’re talking about helping an old woman fend off a purse snatcher, or standing up for a woman that’s being bullied by her asshole of a boyfriend, or even stepping in to prevent a child from being harmed. Acting in those situations just seems like the right thing to do.
I guess some people applaud bravery for the mere fact that someone is committing an act that none other would consider doing. But does that then make the other people cowards? I don’t really think so.
What I usually think when I hear people say “Oh, he’s so brave” is exactly the opposite. I’m more inclined to say, “Boy, he’s fucking stupid.”
I think “brave” back in the day was prized because they were fantastic acts. And typically, they were done to save women, children and whole villages.
Today “brave” is applied to all sorts of things, such as someone being a breast cancer survivor or leaving an emotionally absent husband or speaking up about childhood abuse. In these senses, the act seems to speak to emotional strength, showing bravery with your feelings.
But I don’t know that I would necessarily consider someone brave if they caused their own demise, health problems or family destruction by, as you said, rushing into the twin towers. I don’t know if I’d call someone brave who gave up a million dollar football contract to join the armed forces and then being killed by what was deemed “friendly fire”. And I don’t think I’d consider someone brave because they heard a noise and went outside to investigate, getting shot to death in the process. I think my first reaction would be, “Well, that was stupid.” Not brave.
And like Decorina said, are men really the ones who value bravery since it seems it is often attributed to male acts? Cause really, as a woman, I think I often see ways a scenario could have turned out better, and it rarely has anything to do with bravery.
Yes, Salena, there is an overuse of the word brave as a substitute for stupid. And for just dealing with the circumstances you find yourself dealt. I don’t think that speaking up for what you think is right is especially brave – it is just the right thing to do. I’ve been watching “What Would You Do” on NBC. They set up situations that are just wrong and watch to see what people will do. What they have found is that women are much more likely to intervene if, say, they see someone being cheated or a dog left in a hot car, than men. They get involved, they call the cops, they confront the person. But when the camera crew shows up and tells them it was an experiment and calls them brave, they disagree.
MG,
Much better to be the king maker, I agree. Like you, I’m not sure which is brave. If either of them are.
And I wouldn’t worry about being hairy or stinky. When you’re sick it doesn’t even count — I’m sure Hellbilly would back me up on that.
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Stace,
Well duh! I haven’t lived with you all these years for nothing, Missy!
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Sheila,
Glad you liked it. You may have a point about there being little bravery. We do tend to like whatever is rare.
Decorina and Salena,
I’m not sure that I see bravery as primarily a male thing. I feel like woman have every bit the capacity for it that most males do, but I will admit that it often takes a different form in women. Think of women like Anita Hill, Karen Silkwood or the women who reported the whole Tailhook scandal. They were all certainly brave.
It is hard to envision your average woman rushing to the front of the mammoth hunt simply because she would likely show more sense in my opinion. Oh wait… does that sound sexist? How can I rephrase that so it doesn’t sound like I’m calling brave men a bunch of ‘tards… nope… I got nothing so it’ll have to stand as is.
I agree that it seems to be human instinct to want to stand up for children, battered women, old ladies, etc just because it is the right thing to do. But a lot of people want to help but are afraid to get involved so they just stand by in spite of their urge to help. I do think that it’s often bravery that makes a person actually stand up and help someone in a bad situation.
Stace and I were talking about your comments and Stace expanded on an idea Salena mentioned. She said maybe society applauds the brave because society is usually the one who benefits from the act of bravery. Who cares how the hero fares as long as the reactor is shut down in time to save the town? Also, if you do a really impressive act of bravery such as saving your fellow miners from the cave-in a la “Big John” they will even write songs about you and your heroic deed. How nice.
Well said, Hedon (applause here).