The way former Mexican bullfighter Christian Hernandez explained himself – recalling the moment earlier this week, when, faced with a charging bull, he ran away from it, dropped his cape and jumped out of the ring – is that he did it because he "felt a deep fear."
"I decided that was it. I didn't have the ability," he said after he officially ended his bullfighting career.
And for saying that, he is my new hero.
Culture watchers may note that there's been no subsequent statement from Mr. Hernandez's spokesman stating that Mr. Hernandez sufferers from "running-away-from-angry-bull addiction." Nor did he hold a press conference in which he tearfully apologized to bullfight supporters for letting them down, alluding to a troubled childhood. Mr. Hernandez hasn't explained that he and the bull have been through a difficult time lately. I have not been asked to pray for him.
It's almost as if the man just really didn't want to get gored by a bull.
Mr. Hernandez didn't blame the events organizers, or pull a matador-Tonya-Harding and blame his cape. Some, watching the video of the 22-year-old Mr. Hernandez getting the hell out of that ring, might wonder whether a more attentive guidance councillor then the one who may have assisted Mr. Hernandez might've listened longer to a child seeking a career involving tight, bubble-gum-pink pants. Yet no blame's been placed there either.
Although arrested for breach of contract, Mr. Hernandez has said that he hopes to return to the ring as a spectator.
"Let somebody else who has the ability and the courage take the opportunity," he said. So there's been no attempt to frame this as a rejection of bullfighting itself. (Except, of course, by PETA, who've yet to find a news story that doesn't prove their point somehow. Ignoring everything Mr. Hernandez said about his love of bullfighting, PETA has reimbursed him for the fine he had to pay and congratulated all the " 'real men' out there who save animals rather than stab them," with a condescending "Olé!" on a post on their website.)
Mr. Hernandez now plans to pursue a career in architecture. But he hasn't framed his exit from the ring as a realization about the glory of architecture. There's been no false epiphany here.
Of course the video has made the rounds and many have ridiculed Mr. Hernandez's actions as unmanly. Yet I found his behaviour to be the opposite. We're moving towards a more self-aware matador, that's all.
I'm not saying that I want to see all the cars at NASCAR sputter to a halt at the turns, but despite the cries of "they don't make them like they used to" over this story, Mr. Hernandez's behaviour was old-fashioned. It was masculine in the best sense – it may seem counterintuitive, but Mr. Hernandez's retreat did less to undermine a revered tradition than it did to offend a distinctly modern sensibility.
Andrew Potter is the author of The Authenticity Hoax: How We Got Lost Finding Ourselves, an examination of our pursuit of what we consider to be authentic and how that quest exacerbates the very artificiality of the contemporary life we condemn. He explored for me the source of our unease with Mr. Hernandez.
"One of the hidden assumptions of the modern search for the authentic self is that, once we strip away all of the accretions of culture – the status seeking, the masks and the false consciousness of consumer society – we'll discover a true self that is almost godlike in its innocence and creative power. Once you properly know yourself, you can do anything," he wrote to me, in one of those emails one is always happy to receive.
"But that's an assumption we're not entitled to make. What we find is that while some of us do have hearts of gold, many of have hearts of darkness. In countless ways we're scared, weak, flawed and frail. Hernandez looked inside himself and found a limit. To his great credit and courage, he admitted it to the world."
Watching that video of Mr. Hernandez fleeing amid derisive whistles from his fellow Mexicans, I felt that facing the bull would've been the easier choice for Mr. Hernandez. Instead he ran.
"You must know a few things about yourself, like I can't do this...this is not my cup of tea," he said.
This is the very opposite of effete.