Friday 22 October 2010

Hero

We live in dark times.  Our heroes today are few and far between and those we do have are celebrated for the whiteness of their teeth, the amount of bullets they have taken in a drive-by, the size of their house in Chester and the amount of £50 notes they would use to make a papier-mâché model of their ego.  In years gone by children idolised the likes of Sir Edmund Hillary, Superman, Indiana Jones, Amelia Earhart and, for the thirstier under 14’s, George Best.  All these icons were noble, modest and brave, but who do we have in the present day? 50 Cent (bullet catching, blinged up, gangster talker), Wayne Rooney (whoring, blinged up, professional kicker), Paris Hilton (cock hungry, blinged up, jizz sponge), Dappy from N-Dubz (not a fucking clue what he does, I think it’s something to do with an earflapped bobble hat?).  These are the role models that most aspire to today. Wealth is valued over values.

Like the darkest days in Metropolis and Gotham City the citizens need a new hero to re-new their faith in human nature and serve as beacon of hope.  However, do not look to the sky for a caped avenger or scour the tops of buildings for fruity looking vigilantes in spandex and armoured cod pieces.  The next generation of superhero is likely to be nearer than you think.  He is polite.  He wears his trouser waistband at a respectable height. He does not have gold teeth. And the News Of The World are completely unable to fill any column inches with details of who he fills with the inches of his cock.  I give you; Gentle Man.

Wait, don’t go. Hear me out.

Gentle Man was created after being caught in an accidental flavoured vodka explosion in a Yates Pub as he walked past.  The blast did not leave him with any superpowers, or mutate his genes, but as he picked himself up from the debris of scorched baseball caps, burnt hair scrunchies, smoking scraps of Burberry and shattered pieces of chunky gold jewellery he knew the world had just been made a better place. From that moment on he vowed to embark on a crusade against bad manners, petty crime, ignorance and chain pub doormen.

Given that he has no superpowers Gentle Man needs to be lightly armed in order to protect the righteous.  Like any good gentleman he will have some sword skills, so carries a rapier – the only thing about him that is sharper than his wit (but only one of them will leave an oik kneeling and weeping on the pavement, holding his warm, slippery intestines in his hands after he dropped some litter). The only other weapon he bears is an umbrella which he wields with deadly force; able to decapitate a benefit fraudster with a single swipe and then open up to deflect the shower of arterial blood.

His sworn enemies are the rude, the thoughtless, the selfish and the dishonest people of this world.  A man who does not give up his seat for a pregnant lady will be barely halfway home before a lightening flash of tweed and cufflinks leaves him rolling in the gutter with an underground tube seat jammed snugly in his ringpiece.  Anyone who spits in the street will not walk another ten paces before a blur of corduroy and smart hair smashes their jaw off with a rolled up copy of the Evening Standard.  Any individual who takes it upon themselves to push into the front of a queue will find themselves at the front of the queue…….of pain, as our well heeled and courteous punisher uses their pancreas to buff up his brogues. 

Naturally if a proper Supervillain along the lines of Doc Ock, the Joker or the Abba tribute act from Superman II were to appear, Gentle Man would probably have his arse served to him on a Royal Doulton soup plate.  But thankfully Supervillains are relatively few and far between (with the exception of the Dark Lord Mandelson) and the real danger to us is not a mutant half-man half-crab running amok in Croydon, but the possibility of being mugged by a demented teenage  degenerate strung out on Sunny Delight, cheap skunk and McNuggets. 

Unfortunately our cleanly shaven, thank you letter writing, door opening champion of charm will in true superhero form never get the girl. In a cruel twist of fate the vast majority of ladies seem more attracted to Stella drinking, Joop scented, tracksuit wearing, so called ‘bad boy’ sociopaths than well scrubbed upstanding chaps who phone their mum every Sunday evening.   

So there he stands; Gentle Man.  The only polite, smartly dressed and chivalrous defender of morals that stands between us and an engulfing tide of Jeremy Kyle guests. He can be you.  He can be me.  He can be any one of us.  But he is very, very unlikely to be French.




By the way, on the off chance that a film producer is reading this and wants to use Gentle Man as a film character, I beg you not to have Tom Cruise play him.  That man is living proof that we were right to ban lead based paint in children’s toys.  I bet that fucker licked half a battalion of toy soldiers clean by the time he was 12. 

1 comment:

  1. It's a pipe dream Ed. The problem seems to me that over the last thirty years or so there has been a steadily increasing preponderance of egotists over altruists. The values that we teach in our schools needs a radical ajustment towards the right (not the political right, but the right as opposed to the wrong). That's the long term solution, of course. The problem with your solution is that the mannerless oiks you complain of tend to be better bar brawlers (and younger and therefore fitter) than do your 'Gentle Man'. But any realistic pointers towards a solution would be welcome.
    Warm regards, Mike.

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