Chuck Norris Won the Eighties Fair and Square

By the early 2000s, Chuck Norris had become a punchline. The star’s hit CBS TV show, Walker, Texas Ranger, was cancelled in 2001, and a few years later, ChuckNorrisFacts.com went live, launched by Brown University student and future New York Times bestselling author Ian Spector. The site was a pre-social media viral sensation based on a single premise: Norris’ indestructible tough-guy act was a joke, each “fact” an absurd bon mot: “Chuck Norris drinks napalm to fight his heartburn.”

“Chuck Norris’ tears cure cancer. Too bad he never cries.”

Here’s a personal favorite: “Chuck Norris doesn’t cheat death. He wins fair and square.”

I thought about that now-ancient internet zinger the moment I got the notification that Chuck Norris, martial-arts legend and action-movie icon, was dead at 86.

To understand the arc of Norris’ nearly 50-year career, first, look to its lowest point. Then, trace your finger to its peak, which, to me, was his starring role as smoldering special forces operative Scott McCoy in the 1986 action movie The Delta Force, co-starring a frail-looking but grizzled and unsmiling Lee Marvin in his last movie.

While he did score a memorable but small role in The Expendables 2, the 2012 sequel to Sylvester Stallone’s 2010 love letter to bullets and brawn, The Expendables, the 21st century has almost forgotten Norris, save for Spector’s one-liners, which eventually spread to 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 soft generational revolt. It was millennials making fun of the traditional American masculinity that their Baby Boomer parents consumed, which, up until the turn of the century, was largely populated by tight-lipped, muscular, lone wolves capable of delivering perfectly timed quips before dispatching bad guys to hell.

Fair enough. But to anyone who was a child during the late Eighties — anyone who had no choice but to endure peak yuppie culture — Chuck Norris was not funny. At least, not to me. He was a manly cross between a cowboy and a ninja, singlehandedly roundhouse kicking every right-wing bogeyman of the Reagan era: Middle Eastern terrorists, South American drug lords, and, generally speaking, communists, both Soviet and Vietnam flavors.

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My manosphere existed in the aisles of my local video store: rows and rows of colorful VHS tapes announcing action movies starring legitimate box-office behemoths like Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sylvester Stallone, and, to a lesser degree, Jean-Claude Van Damme and Steven Seagal. But then there was Chuck Norris, whose bona fides preceded him. He was a competitive martial artist with black belts in judo and ju-jitsu. He was friends with kung-fu legend Bruce Lee and fought him in 1972’s The Way of the Dragon. Norris was formidable, and of all his peers, he was the one who looked like a normal person. He wasn’t jacked like Ah-nuld or JCVD.

There was something about Norris’ tightly-trimmed beard, a soft reddish moss, and his feathery mullet that drew me in, especially since so many of his peers were hairless hulks. He was soft-spoken and graceful, too. There is plenty about Norris to make fun of, but I’d be thrilled if today’s MAGA bros honored their forbears and were slightly less histrionic.

Norris’ movies especially mesmerized me with their focus on things I cared about when I was 11, like submachine guns.

Eventually, Norris’ movies made their way to cable, and I was able to record them, quite illegally, onto my own VHS tapes. I would study the Gospel of Chuck after school or late at night. I was a fan of his Missing in Action movies, which, like Stallone’s Rambo: First Blood Part II, allowed America to fantasize about winning the Vietnam War, a decade or more after the Fall of Saigon. That terrible war dims in the national memory, but to be Gen X is to be born into the cultural tumult of the Vietnam War, a deeply unpopular and brutal conflict fought by tens of thousands of young men forced into service. I was probably a little too young to watch Invasion U.S.A. in 1985, which stars Chuck Norris as the only man standing between my nice suburban house and a surprisingly small but ambitious army of communist bastards.
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The conservative politics of Norris’ movies escaped me when I was a boy, but, to crudely rewrite the ancient proverb, the enemy of Chuck Norris is my enemy. This is how propaganda works, I suppose, and it does. To be a child is to yearn for safety and a world that makes sense. To escape into an action-movie fantasy is to be soothed, to be told that there are good people who will fight bad people and protect those they love. I can look back and clearly see the cruel prejudices and simple-minded jingoism that fueled Republican policies then, and, even more so, now.

I know today that I never shared the same politics as Norris, which is probably why I found his movies charmless once I grew up and connected actions and consequences. I am certain he and I would probably have found no common ground, except maybe in thinking that his 1983 modern-day Western Lone Wolf McQuade was the best thing to happen at the time 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 a lovely place to grow up).

I vividly recall the plot of The Delta Force, which opens on a recreation of what was then a relatively recent traumatic national humiliation: the failed 1980 mission by the Carter administration to rescue 53 U.S. embassy workers held hostage in Tehran by Iranian revolutionaries. The mission was one of the real Delta Force’s first, and it ended with a withdrawal, but not before a helicopter accident resulted in the deaths of eight servicemen. The Delta Force redeems that unit by imagining it as a ragtag fraternity of well-armed hotshots who get their revenge on the Iranians by kicking the asses of Lebanese hijackers, led by Robert Forster, wearing eyeliner and a spray-on tan. It would take me years to realize that a veteran white actor had been cast as an evil terrorist with an on-again, off-again, hard-to-pin-down Middle Eastern accent.

The geopolitics and stereotypes are repellent to me, but they are an honest reflection of a time and a place and a culture that is as alive as ever. As Faulkner once observed, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”

The first half of the movie is primarily concerned with the hijacking of an airplane carrying Americans, including a trio of vacationing U.S. sailors, a pair of nuns, a priest played by disaster-movie veteran George Kennedy, and a number of Jewish Americans who are singled out by Forster and his wild-eyed henchman. Israel serves as America’s best friend in the Middle East.
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The second half of The Delta Force is good old-fashioned mayhem: bullets and explosions and Norris riding a heavily armed motorbike outfitted with mini machine guns and rocket launchers, a military vehicle Delta Force did not use decades later during its famed raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound. In my dreams, Chuck Norris is standing on that motorbike speeding behind a jet plane barreling down a Beirut runway, about to take off with a payload of rescued hostages and Delta Force warriors to the safety of Israel. Like the movie, his brothers-in-arms open the back cabin door and dangle a rope for him to grab, and then pull him to safety.

Chuck Norris is dead. That’s a fact. His silly, entertaining, occasionally offensive movies live on, at least to me. That’s also a fact.