The Problem With Superman (Part III)
In the end, I have to boil it down to myself and him, and where we stand in regard to one another. He's a fiction, of course, but I've lived comfortably with all sorts of fictions for years. No, he's the kind of fiction that gets under my skin. He held the moon in the sky when it was falling. He wrestled an angel to a standstill in San Francisco. He boxed Muhammad Ali on an alien space station. I've done none of these things. I have a bum knee that gets sore when the weather turns cold and wrestle with writer's block in Worcester, Massachusetts. (And indeed, I found it gratifying that he had at least one story, Under A Yellow Sun, that pretty much centered on him struggling with writer's block, too. Some things you can't bend-steel-in-your-bare-hands your way out of.) No, I like some of the stories, but still, I'm not ever going to be Superman, and I don't even think I particularly want a Superman in the world.
I wish I had Dave Macpherson's poem about Superman handy, riffing on his Jewish roots. I wish I could see the world the way those two boys living in Cleveland did, the world Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster saw, if only long enough to grasp it on more than an intellectual level. We talk about the Depression and the Holocaust, the absolute totality of poverty and existential threat, as if we understand them, but most of us really don't. There are parts of the world where they do understand these things with total clarity, but not in America. We're a culture that equates minor shifts in tax policies with totalitarianism, that sends soldiers off to wars in far off places that seem so distant from most of our day-to-day realities that they may as well be video game captures on the television screen. We have our suffering -- God, yes -- but perhaps collectively lack a sense of proportion.
It takes a different kind of era to give birth to a Superman, the kind where everything is even more hard-scrabble than it is now, and yet still somehow more black and white, at least on the surface. The sort of time when you really were looking for excuses to look up in the sky. No one wants to hear that phrase, right now. It heralds something darker. Hell, even the dream of X-Ray vision's been taken from us, replaced with full-body scanners at the airports. Pop culture, particularly comic books, are filled with Superman knockoffs, but really, that's all they are -- echoes of the 20th century, still reverberating off the walls.
And maybe it's a good thing that Superman's still whispering: the best of the last century, that promise of nobility in the face of lengthening shadows. And maybe it's important that he was alien, because maybe that sort of encompassing goodness, that unfathomable perfection, is something we really need to look to an other to understand, because finding it in ourselves? That seems like a tough sell. But there he is, and here we are, and somehow, it's certain he's not going anywhere. And maybe that's OK. History's difficult to silence, and if something from yesterday needs to ghost us into the future, it might as well be him.
I wish I had Dave Macpherson's poem about Superman handy, riffing on his Jewish roots. I wish I could see the world the way those two boys living in Cleveland did, the world Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster saw, if only long enough to grasp it on more than an intellectual level. We talk about the Depression and the Holocaust, the absolute totality of poverty and existential threat, as if we understand them, but most of us really don't. There are parts of the world where they do understand these things with total clarity, but not in America. We're a culture that equates minor shifts in tax policies with totalitarianism, that sends soldiers off to wars in far off places that seem so distant from most of our day-to-day realities that they may as well be video game captures on the television screen. We have our suffering -- God, yes -- but perhaps collectively lack a sense of proportion.
It takes a different kind of era to give birth to a Superman, the kind where everything is even more hard-scrabble than it is now, and yet still somehow more black and white, at least on the surface. The sort of time when you really were looking for excuses to look up in the sky. No one wants to hear that phrase, right now. It heralds something darker. Hell, even the dream of X-Ray vision's been taken from us, replaced with full-body scanners at the airports. Pop culture, particularly comic books, are filled with Superman knockoffs, but really, that's all they are -- echoes of the 20th century, still reverberating off the walls.
And maybe it's a good thing that Superman's still whispering: the best of the last century, that promise of nobility in the face of lengthening shadows. And maybe it's important that he was alien, because maybe that sort of encompassing goodness, that unfathomable perfection, is something we really need to look to an other to understand, because finding it in ourselves? That seems like a tough sell. But there he is, and here we are, and somehow, it's certain he's not going anywhere. And maybe that's OK. History's difficult to silence, and if something from yesterday needs to ghost us into the future, it might as well be him.
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