(“Can you guys hurry this up? My Mom…I mean The Phoenix signal is calling.”)

If you are an MMA fan, a comic book fan, or just a really lonely guy, then you’ve probably heard the story of Phoenix Jones a.k.a Ben Fodor, the amateur MMA fighter/”superhero” that according to his Wikipedia page “is an American leader of a ten-member citizen crime-prevention patrol group who call themselves the Rain City Superhero Movement.” So basically, a bunch of dudes who never met a Friday night they couldn’t squander formed a neighborhood watch group and dressed in cosplay. Because as we all know, the best way to be taken seriously is to dress up like a bumblebee and hand out life lessons to the drunks who happen to stumble out of the bars each night.

In any case, the world’s least anonymous superhero encountered one such drunk last weekend. After informing the police of the situation, Fodor challenged the drunken fellow to “mutual combat,” which is apparently a law dictating that if two parties have expressed an equal desire to fight one another, they can do so without the threat of legal action as long as neither participant uses unreasonable force. Awesome.

I’ve watched this video five times since it was passed along to us and I still don’t know what to make of it. All I’ve taken away from it is that Washington State easily has the coolest police force I’ve ever encountered.

Although you can skip ahead to the 6:40 mark for the actual fight, I’d suggest you watch the entire video for some context. It begins with the sane member of Drunk Dude’s crew questioning Fodor on the legality of whatever he has just done, which I’m guessing involved pepper spray. Fodor responds by saying that he “can do whatever he wants,” which should raise some concerns about this man’s state of mind right away. This is when Drunk Dude steps in and completely absorbs all the negative qualities about Fodor in one fell swoop, opting to mutter racial slurs in between “Come at me, bro” poses with effortless vitriol. The police arrive around the 2:30 mark to sort things out and ultimately decide that letting these two morons throw down would probably be in humanity’s best interest. Like I said, awesome.

But it isn’t until these two decide to square off that everyone realizes how screwed Drunk Dude truly is. Fodor may be a delusional schizophrenic with a God complex, but the man can throw a freakin’ beautiful leg kick. So much so that after about three or four of said kicks, Drunk Dude is pretty much ready to call it a day. But because we know leg kicks don’t finish (street) fights, Fodor makes sure to put Drunk Dude’s lights out with a straight right, possibly after he had already called quitsies. And with that, Seattle’s wannabe dark knight retreats into the darkness.

Now to be clear, I am not taking Drunk Dude’s side in this, because he and his ghetto-speaking, take-my-shirt-off-at-the-mention-of-a-fight friend were asking for a worse ass-kicking than they actually received. But I can’t say that I appreciate the idea of some self-righteous looney tune deciding that he is the new Sheriff in town either. This isn’t Vietnam, Smokey, there are rules here. And while Ben appears to know his way around the law, he also “has a history of injecting himself in these incidents” as the SeattlePi put it when he was arrested a little over a year ago for pepper spraying a group of people involved in an alleged fight. Just watch this video of that incident and tell me that this guy doesn’t add to the problems he is supposedly trying to solve. After you stop laughing, of course.

I’m sure Fodor has been responsible for actual resolving/averting a crisis or two in his day, but does anyone else think the necessity of his antics should be called into question when he becomes responsible for more police reports than he helps thwart? Should I be ridiculed for even questioning the legitimacy of a man who dresses up in a costume to fight crime? Is this real life? Anyone?

-J. Jones