Thank you, as always, in advance.
10/11/04
The Very Brave Man
By calimary
I wasn’t going to do this. I’d already sent in my assessment of the third-of-four big debates on Saturday morning and figured I’d leave it at that until the final round, midweek. But I cannot let the passing of Christopher Reeve go unmentioned.
I’m not going to belabor the finer points of the stem cell research issue, or how many accessable portals there are to someone who believes a nice, faith-based, ostrich-like, pre-Gallileo attitude toward the sciences should govern our ability to do research in the 21st Century. The fine points of that argument can be considered on another day.
All I know is – Christopher Reeve is dead.
All I know is – a ferociously courageous light is shining up in the heavens now, rather than down here on earth where we all need it.
There will be many people eulogizing Christopher Reeve in the days ahead, and it’s completely fitting and proper. But you should also know that his life-altering accident nine years ago wasn’t what motivated him to become an activist. Long ago, Reeve had put his money and his fame where his mouth was, while he was still fit and completely able. He was a founding member of the Creative Coalition – a group of actors and other artists, based in New York, who felt committed to progressive issues about which they cared deeply. Their manifesto, in part, reads as follows:
“As members of the arts and entertainment community, many of us believe that our obligations as citizens are particularly strong. Because of our role in shaping American culture – and because of our visibility – political activity and issue advocacy take on special meaning for we actors, directors, writers, artists, executives, and others who work in the creative professions. The Creative Coalition was created by us and for us to ensure that our involvement in the political and policy-making process is well informed and constructively channeled.”
“The Creative Coalition believes that those of us who help create American culture have an obligation to be involved in the political process that governs it. We are eager to explore the issues and ideas that are at the forefront of national discourse. And we are willing to seek a greater understanding of those issues before we seek to affect them.”
http://www.thecreativecoalition.org/about/presidents_letter.htm Reeve and other celebrities took their fame and their positions of influence seriously. They believed the role they should be playing outside the studios and off the sets and stages and rehearsal halls should be undertaken with the greatest sense of obligation and responsibility. They knew they had a pulpit. They resolved not to make it a bully pulpit. They knew their power, their names, their money, and everything else their talents brought them gave them the chance to create more than just films, TV shows, plays, music, art, and literature. They could create positive change. And not just because they could get and hold an audience merely for the sake of having an audience. They always strove to study and fully understand an issue before throwing their tremendous weight behind it. Reeve was into that, bigtime. His cofounders, the dreaded Susan Sarandon (one of the wrong-wing’s favorite liberal punching bags), and Ron Silver (sincere, nice-enough fellow who’s unfortunately been lured over to the Dark Side), shared that belief. Their star power, they believed, could be turned to guiding lights. That description certainly fit Christopher Reeve.
I had the great privilege of interviewing him a few times during and after his Superman heyday. Staggeringly handsome he was, and that was the least of it. His quick mind, his deep sense of commitment, his wish to be able to help others, to improve others’ lives, and to rectify social wrongs, was immediately apparent after you began talking to him. He was a total gentleman, charming, intelligent, articulate, well-informed, and despite his MANY blessings, extremely humble. He was sweet and friendly to everyone, even a zonk-eyed reporter he hardly knew, with her heart pounding and her breath quickened at the proximity to him. The Superman character you saw in the movies was not so far removed from him as a man. He had the mild manner of a Clark Kent, and the inner power of the Man of Steel. And after his accident, we ALL assumed that if ANYONE could beat the imprisonment of almost total paralysis, it’d be him.
Toward the end, he faced even greater adversities. Besides just the physical limitations his accident clamped upon him and his family, he was forced to push uphill against an increasingly strident enemy even more powerful and insidious than his disability: the resolutely narrow mind. Scientific research should help us all leap forward, not mire us in a tar pit of pre-Gallileo “thinking.” Faith-based belief systems should be a force for liberation, allowing us to embrace our dreams and strive to make them possible, to reach for the stars rather than to stifle the creative flow and shackle us to the dirt. The most poignant aspect of Christopher Reeve’s passing, other than the realization that he never reached his goal of walking again, is the reminder that faith need not be an intellectual tourniquet.
As long as those forces remain preeminent, we’re all stuck in Christopher Reeve’s wheelchair. As long as stem cell research is discouraged and ham-strung by the panicky, near-irrational hysteria that it somehow is guaranteed to lead directly to more abortions (probably the same way Saddam led straight to the inner circle of al Qaeda and 9/11), we will remain paralyzed. Because the same mindset that condemned and demonized our greatest thinkers, centuries ago, still drags its knuckles across our land today.
This is a time, in our country, when it’s considered okay, and necessary, by far too many of our fellow Americans for at least 1050 of our troops to have died in vain (along with countless thousands of innocent Iraqis). It will be another senseless tragedy if Christopher Reeve’s death is reduced to just another one of those. He gave people hope. Our government, at present, seems more intent on taking that hope away, or snuffing it out. This administration and its loudest advocates have made a lot of hay, gained a lot of ground, and fomented a lot of misery, discord, and divisiveness, while claiming it’s closer to God. Christopher Reeve was, and now literally is, a lot closer to God than the White House and its pals will ever be.
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