Chuck Norris: The Man, the Myth, the Meme
Chuck Norris, who didn't win the Iraq war, has died
Chuck Norris, the action movie and later television star has died. He was 86. If you’re of a certain age, you knew Norris less as an actor and more as a meme. Chuck Norris counted to infinity--twice. Chuck Norris once won a game of Connect Four in 3 moves. Once a cobra bit Chuck Norris’ leg. After five days of excruciating pain, the cobra died.
‘Chuck Norris Facts’ which exaggerated the actors abilities to the point of absurdity, are the kind of ‘random’ internet humour that dominated the 2000s. KnowYourMeme credits the Something Awful forums with its origin (interestingly, it was originally Vin Diesel was credited with these amazing abilities) and dates it to 2005. It was that same year that the (now defunct) website chucknorrisfacts.com was launched, and Newgrounds released ‘The Ultimate Showdown’ an animated music video about a glorious battle fought by various pop culture characters, where at one point the high tempo music slows as Norris descends from the heavens accompanied by an ‘immaculate chorus’ of Angels before crushing the skull of Batman with his thighs. Random.
The internet at that time was still, largely, a place populated by nerds ,still transitioning into something mainstream. ‘Chuck Norris Facts’ was a meme that spread largely offline, in a warzone. In 2008 a Reuters journalist wrote “comments lauding the manliness and virility of the actor have been left on toilet walls across Iraq and even in neighbouring Kuwait, soldiers say.” A U.S. military helicopter hub in Baghdad featured a cardboard ‘shrine’ to the actor. In Falluja, soldiers would ask for photos with the ‘Iraqi Chuck Norris’, police trainer Mohammed Rasheed, whose moustache made him something of a Norris lookalike. “Truthfully, I didn’t know who he was.” Rasheed told Reuters. “I asked the Americans, and they said he was a great fighter, and that’s why they named me after him. They showed me a video, and it’s true, he’s a great fighter”
Another police trainer, Khaled Hussein, was more familiar with him “I’ve seen his videos, he’s a hero. He saves the city, he protects women and children and he fights crime wherever it is. We should all be like Chuck Norris,” Those videos were of course, works of fiction. Norris was however a martial arts expert off screen, and a former member of the US air force who had served in Korea. This, along with his Christian faith and his support for Republican party politicians, also made him popular with American servicemen, as did the model of masculinity he portrayed, an “antidote to the preening and moisturised metrosexual male” according to Reuters.
The characters Norris played were very deliberate. “I wanted to project a certain image on the screen of a hero.” He said in 1982. “I had seen a lot of anti-hero movies in which the lead was neither good nor bad. There was no one to root for,”. When he began acting, movies were already different from when he was a kid. Born in 1940, Norris’ childhood was an era of cinema shaped by the Hayes Code and the Hollywood blacklist, a time when—at least on screen— right and wrong was a simple binary, and the good guys always won. He had described western screen legend John Wayne and Jimmy Stewart (the first American movie star to enlist to fight in World War 2) as “surrogate fathers.”
Norris’ early films came out during the Vietnam War, a time when in contrast to WW2 American military adventures overseas were questioned as much—if not more— than they were praised. Norris, whose military service ended in 1962, would never have the impact on the armed forces that Jimmy Stewart did with his role in the allied propaganda film ‘Winning Your Wings’ which is credited with bringing 150,000 new recruits to the air force, but his action films appealed, according to his obituary in the New York Times, to “millions who enjoyed seeing America win — for a change, some would say — whether that meant rescuing captive G.I.s in Vietnam, saving the country from terrorists in “Invasion U.S.A.” or defeating skyjackers and drug kingpins in the “Delta Force” series.”
In his late 60s, he was lending his celebrity to the war on terror, at a time when others in entertainment were speaking out. In a famous (or infamous) 2003 Oscars speech, documentary film maker Michael Moore invited other documentary directors on stage with him. “They are here in solidarity because we like non-fiction.” He told the audience “We like non-fiction because we live in fictitious times. We live in a time where fictitious election results give us a fictitious president. We are now fighting a war for fictitious reasons.”
In 2005, a System of a Down track that screamed “why don’t presidents fight the war, why do they always send the poor?” and satiated the American adventures in Afghanistan and Iraq with the lyrics “dancing in the desert, blowing up the sunshine” topped the charts, enjoyed no doubt by many of the same young people laughing at ‘Chuck Norris Facts’ and the animated Norris in that ridiculous Newgrounds Flash cartoon.
The real Chuck Norris toured Iraq on multiple occasions, a visitor from a different, and, some would argue, better, time. A time before Oscars were given out to liberal documentary directors, before anti-war Nu-Metal bands and “preening metrosexuals”. The official website of the United States marines describes Norris’ appearance at Fallujah Surgical, where he gave a Marine Corps Martial Arts Program demonstration at the chapel alongside fellow actor Marshall Teague, with over the top reverence.
“The service members who attended the assembly at the chapel looked ecstatic when Norris and Teague arrived there, chanting “Chuck, Chuck, Chuck …” and the troops broke into an uproar when the living-legends entered the building.”
The military publication Stars and Stripes headlined a 2007 article with ‘Chuck Norris Fact: He’s in Iraq’ noting that he drew a bigger crowd of soldiers than a troop of professional cheerleaders. “I came over to let the troops know that the folks back home appreciate and love them and pray for them every day to come home safe,” Norris said. While there was no doubt truth to this statement, the war was by that time increasingly unpopular. A poll published just a few months prior had found 61% of Americans believed the country “should have stayed out” of Iraq.
Despite jokes that now Norris was in the country they could stop fighting, the aging actor was never going to roundhouse kick Saddam Hussein and end the quagmire that saw the deaths of thousands of American soldiers (and countless more Iraqis). No soldier ever really believed that was the case, just as they didn’t really believe he could do a wheelie on a unicycle, but it provided something of a morale boost to turn this man into a meme about strength and power, at a time when those qualities were fleeting. With Chuck Norris departing this world just weeks into the latest American excursion into the middle east, perhaps the world is going to have to find a new meme.