A Chuck Norris Smile & 2nd Amendment Iranian Lessons
ONCE I HAD THE NEATEST CONVERSATION WITH CHUCK NORRIS. You know. Karate guy? Movie and TV star? One of Earth’s toughest people? I was sports editor at the local Newhall Signal newspaper then and it couldn’t have been a summer 50 years ago because, frankly, I’m still cute and personable. My home village was a small Southern California town in the mid-1970’s and there was zero-nada of anything to cover. Local athletics were so dead in the high desert dog days of August, Editor Ruth Newhall allowed me to run a full-page photo spread of empty tennis courts, vacant gyms, swimming pools with nary a ripple and softball fields collecting spider webs.
Collecting Spider Webs.
I believe that’s this month’s three-hour luncheon slide presentation at Live Nude Zonta.
Anywho. Mrs. Newhall enforced a strict edict that all Signal Sports must carry a local angle. I convinced the formidable and deadly newsroom godmother that Chuck Norris was local because I was from Newhall and would have to drive to L.A. to his dojo to chat with him. Either that, or we could rerun the previous week’s photo spread of the dead fields of jockstraps, which, I pointed out, would help me immensely because it’d only take seconds to change the date at the top of the page.
Ruth gave me one of her fatigued and practiced, You’re So Young, Tedious And Unfunny stares. But, she gave me the go-ahead.
That’s Bruce Lee on the left, Chuck Norris on the right. Not their actual sizes. (:- )
I had the most enjoyable interview and conversation with Chuck. He was between lessons and sat comfortably in his thick, off-white cotton karategi, or, the commonly accepted, “gi.” I’d say he’s more like his Walker, Texas Ranger TV persona in real life — extremely funny, big-hearted, all America. He had just made essentially his major motion picture debut as the heavy in the Bruce Lee flick, Way Of The Dragon. The two martial arts legends squared off in that famous fight scene at Rome’s Coliseum and that would launch a skyrocketing film career where Chuck became an international action star on the big screen.
It always bothered me. I wished I had a chance to call back years later to ask a follow-up question. Chuck Norris was so effortlessly personable, his laugh and good humor contagious. And yet, later, he’d portray heroes who were often cardboard and one-dimensioned. In that summer interview so long ago, I asked him if being a world champion martial artist, did he have a problem with louts and idiots coming up to him in restaurants or bars to pick a fight. The question amused him and he had to think about it.
“Geez. No,” he said, chuckling. “Isn’t that funny. It’s never happened. I guess if it did, I’d just walk or run away.”
I suspect his answer is both parable and parallel as to why we have the 2nd Amendment. He was so Superman tough, just being Chuck Norris was a lifelong deterrent to anyone fatally self-destructive enough to pick a fight with him.
Over the years, I’ve been blessed with many interesting conversations. One was with a local and liberal politician who wanted to know why I felt the need, in then-present climes, to have a gun. She threw out the tedious, cliched and I Am Woman Hear Me Roar insulting macho accusations. The Democrat didn’t like my answer.
“I need to own a gun to protect myself from people like you,” I said.
Few, in 2nd grade, yearns to grow up to be a bureaucrat and tyrant.
As I write, I am terribly saddened. Again? It’s the world. I read that Iranian doctors estimated that 16,500 people have been murdered so far in the protests of Tehran’s psycho religious dictatorship, with another 330,000 injured. Those stats are now a week old. Plans to execute hundreds, if not thousands, of Iranian protesters were halted after President Trump vowed to open a 256-ounce jar of Miracle Whip Asterisk on the flea-bitten mullahs and their Islamic goon squads should they follow through with their murderous plans. The Iranians have no 2nd Amendment. They cannot defend themselves from the very gangster-theocracy they, themselves, created.
An example of when you only have a scarf and poster to defend your right to protest the government. / abc/au
We humans are such complicated, contradictory creatures, clumsy, oafish and saint-like, often at the same time. I grew up here in Newhall and shake my head at a statistic that I’m probably the only one who knows. In the early 1960s, at the peak of their popularity, 9-out-of-the-top-10 TV shows were Westerns. Every episode ended with a fast-draw duel. Life imitates art and you know what was the number one major injury at our little Newhall Hospital on 6th Street? The self-inflicted gunshot wound. About one person per week, in a berg so small, was admitted for accidentally shooting themselves, either via fast-draw practice in a lonely canyon or while out hunting. Guns do, carry consequences.
Insanity is my first language. Speak it fluently. I assure you, we are living in both the most abundant paradise while navigating through the most perverse insane asylum. I personally don’t care if you’re Catholic, Kiwanis or Muslim. You don’t machete to death those of another faith. You don’t rape. You don’t put babies in ovens ala October 7th. You don’t leave the stench of death so pungent in a home that it must be burned.
Isn’t it strange? Here, in America, we live simultaneously in cacophony and paradise.
The devil walks amongst us, sometimes whispering, sometimes screaming. In this human realm of opposites, we must learn, for each and every encounter, which solution is called for. Each, like the most polite Chuck Norris, requires strength.
And then what?
Is it a confident smile and prayer for the devil’s salvation, followed by a smart retreat?
A good, swift, threat-ending punch in the nose?
Or, as a last resort, is it the calm reassurance you are strong, armed and will defend yourself and yours?
