At the beginning of the 2000s, Chuck Norris had become a joke. His hit CBS series “Walker, Texas Ranger” was canceled in 2001, and a few years later ChuckNorrisFacts.com went online – created by Brown University student and later New York Times-Bestselling author Ian Spector. The site was a viral forerunner of social media, built on a single premise: Norris’ indestructible tough-guy image was a joke, every “fact” an absurd quip: “Chuck Norris drinks napalm for his heartburn.”
“Chuck Norris’s tears cure cancer. It’s a shame he never cries.”
And a personal favorite: “Chuck Norris doesn’t outsmart death. He beats it fair and square.”
A joke becomes a legend
I immediately thought of this internet gag, which has now become ancient, when the message popped up on my cell phone: Chuck Norris, martial arts legend and action film icon, dead at the age of 86.
If you want to understand the arc of Norris’ nearly 50-year career, you should first look for her lowest point. Then keep pushing the finger until the climax – which for me was his starring role as the fiery special forces soldier Scott McCoy in the 1986 action film “The Delta Force”, alongside a haggard but weathered and grim-looking Lee Marvin in his last film.
Aside from a memorable but small appearance in The Expendables 2, the 2012 sequel to Sylvester Stallone’s 2010 love letter to lead and brawn, the 21st century has largely forgotten Norris – save for Spector’s one-liners, which eventually spread across forums, message boards and email inboxes. Thousands of new “facts” were written and shared. This was more than an early example of meme culture; this was a silent generational revolt. Millennials ridiculed the traditional American masculinity that their boomer parents had been raised with – a masculinity that, until the turn of the millennium, consisted primarily of taciturn, muscular loners who delivered precise lines before dispatching the bad guys to the afterlife.
Not a joke, but a hero
Can be understood. But for anyone who was a kid in the late ’80s – anyone who wasn’t spared the heyday of yuppie culture – Chuck Norris wasn’t funny. At least not for me. He was a male cross between a cowboy and a ninja who single-handedly delivered a roundhouse kick to every bogeyman of the Reagan era: Middle Eastern terrorists, South American drug lords and, more generally, communists – whether Soviet or Vietnamese in character.
My own personal world of men existed in the aisles of my local video store: row upon row of colorful VHS cassettes of action films starring real blockbusters like Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sylvester Stallone and, to a slightly lesser extent, Jean-Claude Van Damme and Steven Seagal. And then there was Chuck Norris, whose reputation preceded him. He was a competitive martial artist with black belts in judo and jujutsu. He was friends with kung fu legend Bruce Lee and fought against him in 1972’s “The Way of the Dragon.” Norris was a real threat – and of all his contemporaries, he was the one who looked like a normal human being. Not as pumped up as Ah-nuld or JCVD.
Something about Norris’ neatly trimmed beard, that soft reddish moss, and his feathery mullet captivated me – especially since so many of his colleagues were mountains of hairless muscle. He was also quiet and graceful. There’s plenty to smile about about Norris, but I’d be thrilled if today’s MAGA bros showed a little respect to their forebears and were a little less hysterical.
Machine guns and videotapes
Norris’ films fascinated me primarily because they focused on things that really interested me when I was eleven – submachine guns, for example.
At some point, Norris’ films were shown on cable television, and I was able to record them, somewhat illegally, on my own VHS tapes. I studied The Gospel of Chuck after school or late at night. I was a fan of his “Missing in Action” films, which – much like Stallone’s “Rambo: First Blood Part II” – allowed America to imagine winning the Vietnam War, a decade or more after the fall of Saigon.
That terrible war is fading in collective memory, but to be part of Generation X is to be born into the cultural turmoil of the Vietnam War – a deeply unpopular and brutal conflict that tens of thousands of young men were forced to fight. I was probably a little too young for 1985’s “Invasion USA,” in which Chuck Norris is the only man standing between my nice suburban home and a surprisingly small but ambitious army of communist scoundrels.
As a boy I didn’t care about the conservative politics in Norris’ films, but – to paraphrase an old saying – the enemy of Chuck Norris is my enemy. That’s how propaganda works, I suppose. And it actually works. Being a child means longing for security and a world that makes sense. To escape into an action movie fantasy is to find comfort, to be told that there are good people who fight the bad guys and protect those they love. Today I can clearly see the cruel prejudices and simplistic nationalism that drove Republican politics then – and even more so today.
No common policy
I now know that Norris and I never shared the same political beliefs, which is probably why I found his films unappealing once I grew up and linked causes to effects. I’m sure the two of us would have had little common ground, except perhaps in the belief that his 1983 modern Western Lone Wolf McQuade was the best thing that could have happened to El Paso, the city where my parents met, fell in love, and lived before leaving Texas and raising me in one of the country’s many lesser states (Virginia, which is actually a wonderful place to grow up).
I still remember the plot of “The Delta Force” vividly. The film begins with a re-enactment of a then relatively recent national humiliation: the Carter administration’s failed 1980 mission to rescue 53 U.S. embassy employees held hostage by Iranian revolutionaries in Tehran. This mission was one of the real Delta Force’s first, and it ended in retreat – but not without a helicopter accident that killed eight soldiers.
“The Delta Force” rehabilitates this unit by portraying it as a ferocious brotherhood of well-armed hotshots who take revenge on the Iranians by giving hell to Lebanese kidnappers led by Robert Forster – complete with kohl and spray tan. It would be years before I realized that a white veteran actor had been cast as an evil terrorist with a sometimes thicker, sometimes weaker, hard-to-place Middle Eastern accent.
Past that never goes away
The geopolitics and clichés disgust me today, but they honestly reflect a time, place and culture that is as vibrant as ever. As Faulkner once remarked, “The past is never dead. It is not even past.”
The first half of the film largely revolves around the hijacking of a plane with American passengers on board – including three vacationing US sailors, a pair of nuns, a priest played by disaster movie veteran George Kennedy, and a number of Jewish Americans singled out by Forster and his fanatical henchman. Israel acts as America’s best friend in the Middle East.
The second half of “The Delta Force” is good old-fashioned anarchy: gunfire and explosions and Norris on a heavily armed motorcycle with mini-machine guns and rocket launchers — a military vehicle that the Delta Force did not use decades later in the famous raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound. In my dreams, Chuck Norris is standing on that motorcycle, racing behind a jetliner that’s thundering down the Beirut runway and about to take off, loaded with rescued hostages and Delta Force warriors bound for safety in Israel. As in the film, his brothers-in-arms open the rear cabin door and dangle a rope for him to grab before pulling him to safety.
Chuck Norris is dead. That’s a fact. His silly, entertaining, occasionally offensive films live on – at least for me. That too is a fact.
