Salvation by Pop Culture

There was more human drama in those books than the usual costumed morons doing silly nonsense. Chris Claremont performed an exploration, for about 25 issues, of what it means to be a human with human problems – and this is just what I needed at the ages of 13 and 14, living a life rife with similar questions.

The book also stressed what it was like to live as an outsider, feared and disliked by the larger community, and yet choose to live a principled life: For a boy-too-fast-becoming-an-adult without proper adult supervision, artistic, with uncommon tastes, in a small rural community where “different” equaled “evil” (by the age of 14 I was accused of witchcraft at high school by an assistant principle because of some of my other reading habits), these books provided role models of a sort. They were part of my education that intolerance should be met by decency and a proper sort of pride in one’s differences and talents. They taught me to be slow in making judgments of others simply on the basis that they were not like me.

All for pennies a month.

Long story short: eventually I became a philosopher and have taught the subject. I read the classics. I received a fair university education and use it to continue educating myself, filling in the gaps in what I learned. Such is part of my life.

I also became an adult and had to choose how to live, which values to put into effect and instantiate in my actions – just as everyone else has to. I had to learn how to exercise my own judgment, to agonize over my choices, to care about others, to struggle to forgive when possible and attempt to show that fine mix of mercy and justice a person must to live in this world. I also had to learn how to admit when I’m wrong or have done badly, ask for forgiveness and try to make some sort of repair when I can.

I had to learn the value of being creative in all aspects of existence while savoring the same in the lives of others.

Yes, I had to grow up.

I had to learn to try to live with meaning – and how to get up in the morning and start over when I blow it. My life’s no model of goodness by any stretch of the imagination; that’s not the point of all this. The writer’s no saint and has no illusion he could be. 

The point: The foundations were not laid in a school. They did not arrive with the diplomas. They were absorbed over time, as a child and young person, paying attention to the characters in stories on television and in comics, learning to interpret texts in many ways, paying attention to the attitudes of the writers and the artists, learning to see the world from a variety of cultural perspectives, and learning that my own individual perspective, though odd and out of step with my surroundings, was at least as valid and valuable as that of others.

Pop culture helped me learn to go my own way, helped me learn it was good to be my own person.

Perhaps that isn’t the only value of pop culture – certainly it isn’t. But for a boy in the backwards backwaters of America, it was a godsend. Maybe I found more in it than is, in fact, often there objectively. Maybe my imagination and mind used those things as a sort of Rorschach Test that invoked all sorts of thoughts and ideas that have little specifically to do with “what is there.” Maybe. But perhaps that in itself is of tremendous value and shows pop culture can have a level of significance and a use beyond simple entertainment, just as all works of art can feed the soul regardless of origin.

There is always more to human creations, no matter how common, than meets the eye.