I once heard a story about a martial arts master who would tour high school auditoriums (auditoria?) & provide demonstrations to the students of the arts of self-defense &, if the audience were perhaps older, in meditation & the Eastern philosophies which provided the underlying reasons for entering into the discipline in the first place. The sinister secret was that the reason this martial arts master did what he did, going to elementary, middle, & high schools to throw children around, was because he was a convicted pedophile, & in fact (this was in the days before sex-offender databases), most of the time he was around the children it was quite illegal & could have gotten him thrown back into jail, if the authorities knew he was embracing children to "teach" them how to defend themselves. The fact was, this man was not trying to help the children at all; he would use the process to select his next victim, & in fact gain their trust so he could abuse them later.
I heard another story about him in which he travelled & taught not because he was a pervert, but because he had had a child who had been attacked & killed by a mugger or a bully & he regretted not teaching his child how to fight off such an attack because, you know, he wanted his child to study & become a doctor or lawyer or something "better" than he was. This story ends with the martial arts master by sheer coincidence teaching the selfsame bully who had killed his child &, recognizing him, breaking his neck on the spot. He goes to jail, maybe even gets the death penalty, but he has his revenge.
Both versions of the story appear to satisfy some lurid desire in the teller (&, the teller hopes, the listener) to either reiterate how vulnerable our children are or to satisfy our sense of revenge &/or irony. In both cases, though, the story is most definitively false, based on some banal backstory, embellished to have a point, be it shock value or a storyline. I happen to know that backstory, which goes like this:
There was a martial arts master in a medium-sized suburb who had a small strip mall "academy" & who would occasionally visit nearby middle schools & do a canned, dull demonstration, which mainly consisted on him throwing around his assistant. The long-suffering assistant was also his mistress, who had somehow fallen for him & his corny charisma, & on whom he took out his frustrations, & for whom he promised he'd leave his wife but never would. At one school, a teacher who had been reading contemporary accounts of child abuse & devil worship in child care centers, fueled by the false-memory-syndrome debacle, became convinced that the martial arts master, who, as I said, would occasionally talk about the Tao or perhaps Zen, was a Satanist & imagined that he was "collecting" children for devious rituals, & began to enlist parents in her concern. The martial arts master, unable to prove that he wasn't a Satanist, lost his school gigs, & eventually his students at his "academy" disappeared. He was fortunate to avoid criminal charges & jail time, but of course his marriage was broken & even his assistant left him, both women in his life unsure whether this man whom they thought they knew was really a pedophile. He began to drink & spent the rest of his lonely life working in a convenience store in a part of town nowhere near a school.
Okay, I confess I don't know if that's the real story, but I like it better than the first two.
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