A Cup of Conversation – September 2015

I watched ESPN’s Arthur Ashe Courage Award presentation honoring Bruce Jenner. The Arthur Ashe Award is named after the iconic tennis star, a man of color in a once traditionally white sport. Arthur was a magnificent athlete and like Bruce found his identity on the courts of fierce competition and public opinion. Arthur used his high-profile to battle apartheid in South Africa, defend human-rights of Haitian refugees and pioneer awareness of the AIDS epidemic. After the presentation, I found a video of Arthur’s last public address before he succumbed to an AIDS related pneumonia in 1993. Arthur was 49.

One doesn’t have to keep up with the Kardashians to know Bruce is a touchy subject. The drama is deeply personal and highly sensitive for Jenner’s six adult children, mother, sister, ex-wives, and close friends but also uncomfortable for everyone watching which is pretty much…everyone (except business hucksters making a killing). Like everyone I have an opinion…but nothing apt to change anybody’s mind in six hundred words. Plainly, there’s a misery in Bruce so deep it takes my breath away. No amount of great publicity, hormone therapy, or expensive makeup can cover up that kind of pain and there’s no question about the steely nerve required for a man like Jenner to stand in front of the world metaphorically naked…but a national hero? This is where my silence ends because sooner or later someone in the hypnotic, standing ovation crowd has to point out the emperor has no clothes. I look at Jenner without scorn, only weary numbness from the incessant haranguing of a politically-engineered tent collapsing under its own weight.

Courage is sacrificial like the warrior returning from battle without limbs or light in his eyes. The men and women answering the call of duty then learning again to walk, think, speak and live in the most basic of ways are the truly courageous and deserving heroes. The daily struggle to rebuild life within the walls of a modest home is the real reality show that doesn’t sell. I ask myself how many people know the suicide rates of returning veterans because they receive not one millionth of the collective empathy Jenner is getting for cross-dressing in public. The fact we are even having this inane conversation is a late-stage symptom of systemic cultural meltdown.

I don’t think the relatively few ring-masters who greatly profit from poor souls paraded in cable circus sideshows want to engage in honest conversation about courage and virtue. They would look clownish standing next to the flag-draped coffins rolling in at Dover Air Base, or marching alongside Dr. King in the 1960’s, or logging time with family caregivers of severely wounded veterans.

For Jenner, at sixty-something, beloved, healthy, wealthy, and over-privileged, sacrificing the final decade of his secret life for the sake of family was clearly out of the question. Certainly it is not in goosestep with the ‘deny oneself nothing’ twenty-first century adaption of vanity fair; not the magazine but the three-hundred thirty-seven year-old namesake (look it up). When the tent stakes of reason get this loose, the big top historically comes crashing down and the Bank of Reality calls the debt on the whole show. We can’t pay it and that’s called cultural bankruptcy. What comes next is always severely unpleasant.

Most are willing to call Bruce, a man of my generation, Caitlyn. Many are willing to show compassion for a brand of pain not easily understood. More than we think are willing to withhold judgement on a thread of society tugging hard at the entire fabric of a universal tapestry. However, I’m not willing to call Caitlyn a hero…by any narcissistic stretch of the word. It greatly insults those who have earned our respect, gratitude and support. The greatest irony is something tells me Arthur Ashe would be the first to agree.