I am...Iron Man

By Bobby Neal Winters

The character Tony Stark is introduced to us in the movie Iron Man.  He is a billionaire, philanthropist, genius, and playboy.  And he is also a narcissist.  He is kidnapped and has to create his Iron Man suit in order to escape. These few sentences summarize the first two acts.  In the third act, he comes home and does some superhero stuff.

When he does the superhero stuff, he is doing it as Iron Man, and no one knows it's Tony Stark.  The folks at his company and the folks in the super-secret organization SHIELD want to keep his identity secret.  At the end of the movie he is doing a press conference from a script, when he impulsively decides to simply say it, “I am Iron Man.”

He’s still a billionaire, genius, playboy, narcissist at that point, but something else is born. Tony Stark begins the process of growing into Iron Man, but his uttering the sentence claiming the name was the act of creation.

Those of us who follow the MCU (the Marvel Cinematic Universe) know there are many interwoven stories with many villains, but the prime villain these stories are working toward is Thanos. (This is the Greek word for Death, so it’s all there in the name.) 

At the climax of this part of the saga, Thanos gathered together the so-called Infinity Stones and embedded them in a gauntlet.  Doing so gives him the power to rid the universe of intelligent life with the snap of his fingers.  Those who’ve seen the movies will realize I am leaving a lot of details out for the sake of brevity.

After a huge battle, Thanos, wearing the gauntlet, with all appearances of victory, snaps his fingers while uttering the line, “I am inevitable.”

However, Stark has taken the stones by subterfuge and has embedded them in his own gauntlet. The use of the gauntlet releases gamma rays which are fatal to normal human beings, and Tony in spite of being a billionaire, genius, etc. is a normal human being and knows that using it will be the end of him. 

Nonetheless, Stark snaps his fingers to defeat Thanos’ alien army and save the world while answering Thanos with the phrase, “I am Iron Man.”  

The world is saved, but not for him. He dies a billionaire, philanthropist, genius, but not a narcissist or playboy.

The process begun when he first uttered that phrase has come to completion.  He’s become the ideal set forward in the words.

There is power in the word.

God spoke the universe into existence.

In his epistle, James warns us that the tongue is like the rudder of a ship; Jesus warns us that we are made unclean by what comes out of us.  The things we say affect us. Can we even create ourselves out of our own utterances?

Being who I am, when I hear Stark say, “I am Iron Man,” I also hear, “I am that I am,”; “I am the Way, the Truth, and the Light”; “I am the Vine and you are the branches.” Is that something real or is it just philosophical tinnitus?

I listened to a long YouTube video the other day explaining that chairs don’t exist.  As I was sitting in a chair as I listened, I wasn’t too worried about it; maybe I should’ve been.  It did highlight the difficulty of capturing concrete objects in words.  At a certain level, a thing is a chair because I say it is, because a human says it is. That introductory phrase “At a certain level” is probably carrying a lot of weight, but let's let that go. 

But there is also a process involved.  One day some caveman was tired of sitting on the ground, cobbled some rocks together, and said, “This is a chair.”  The folks around him were confused because they’d never heard of such a thing, but as time passed people figured it out. Now I can put a box up against the wall and call it a chair and people will get it.  The idea of “chair” has propagated itself through the collective conscience. But a human calling it a chair was what got it started. While chairs might be made out of wood, plastic, or naugahyde, they were created with a word.

If we declare an identity and hold ourselves accountable, we will grow toward that identity.

Bobby Winters, a native of Harden City, Oklahoma, blogs at redneckmath.blogspot.com and okieinexile.blogspot.com. He invites you to “like'' the National Association of Lawn Mowers on Facebook. Search for him by name on YouTube. )