CNN’s Supergirl

Arwa Damon: it’s a name that means “Fearless Unkillable Reporter-Warrior Demon” in ancient Sanskrit. I think about some of the reporters who have taken their lives into their hands to go cover some of the most dangerous stories of our time: Dan Rather in the back of a pickup truck worrying about his hair while reporting on the Mujahideen fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan in the 1980s; Anderson Cooper getting his hair messed up while running away from a bunch of jerks in Egypt a few weeks ago during the uprising there; Kyra Phillips reporting from the field without any make-up on, embedded with soldiers in Afghanistan in recent years: Arwa Damon eats these losers for breakfast crushed up with her shredded wheat! She sprints in with a microphone whenever the stuff that 80s Thrash Metal bands used to sing about starts happening: war, plague, famine, apocalypse. Over the years, I’ve seen her reporting nonchalantly from the most pernicious and threatening shit-holes in the smelliest armpits of the world, and it’s apparent that this woman spits in the grinning skull-face of death on a daily basis! She kicks danger in the balls and stomps on the face of fear with every breath she takes. If there was a nuclear strike, she’d be reporting on how hot it was at ground zero from right inside the blast radius, saying something like: “If you look at how the flesh is melting off of my skull, you can get kind of a ballpark estimate of how hot it is in here. Now as you watch my skull disintegrate into glowing cinders, you can get an idea of what this blast is doing to the buildings in the city around it.” And she would rise from the ashes to report on the story of the fallout, a phoenix from CNN, all aglow with neon green radiation shimmer demonstrating what it looks like to be radioactive. If bravery has a face, if imperviousness to threats and danger has blonde hair, and if unsinkable resilience in the face of certain torture and death can hold a microphone and stand in from of a camera, surely Arwa Damon embodies all these things. She is a god among men. When is somebody going to base a video game on her? It would totally kick ass! Move over Lara Croft, we’ve got a real superhero.