Superman: Sent from
another world to save humanity. Sound familiar?
What Superman Tells us About America ... and About Ourselves (El Mundo, Spain)
"Religion, along with individual freedom, is the clay that the country is made of. In Superman there is something of Moses and Jesus. In the boy whose parents removed him from of their planet to save him, and who arrives in another world as an orphan with a mission, there is something of Moses. In the son sent by the father to earth to incarnate as a man (Clark Kent), there is something of Jesus. ... Religion, immigration and morality, are what makes Superman a quintessentially American figure. ... The universal success of this character tells us that these values aren't unique to the United States."
It's
been 75 years since the appearance of Superman in the first issue of Action Comics, a comic book series from
a company that became Warner Bros. But it would be fairer to say that Superman has
turned 80, not 75, because it was in 1933 when Jewish students Jerry Siegel and
Jose Shuster, who later sold their rights to the company, published a
mimeographed story in which the character first appeared.
In
the mimeographed version, Superman was the bad one: a megalomaniac who wanted
to conquer the world, his powers turned out to be ephemeral. Five years later,
he emerged as the hero we all know, willing to enforce the legal and moral code
of a fictional city.
The
reason for the longevity of the character, I think, is twofold: he expresses the
essence of American society, but also a capacity to adjust to its ideological
swings.
The
second reason is more obvious. When he was born at the time of the Great
Depression, Superman was more left-wing. In the wake of Roosevelt's "New Deal," he fought for
the poor and against the capitalist exploiter. During the Second World War, he
was an enemy of the "Japanazis" (Goebbels, accusing Stiegel,
the creator, of being a propagandist, called him "intellectually
circumcised"). During the Cold War, Superman, now on the right, became
the guardian of world peace and promoter of the "American dream."
More recently it has been suggested that he has an environmental dimension.
The
key, however, is that he is neither left nor right. Superman brings together three
elements that have become embedded in the psyche of successive generations of
Americans. One is religious. Religion, along with individual freedom, is the
clay that the country is made of. In Superman there is something of Moses and
Jesus. In the boy whose parents removed him from of their planet Krypton to
save him, and who arrives in another planet as an orphan with a mission, there
is something of the Hebrew prophet. In the son sent by the father to earth to
incarnate as a man (Clark Kent), there is something of Jesus.
The very first Superman
mimeograph, 1933: It was the start
of an idea that
encapsulated the heart of the American creed.
The
second element is immigration. Superman is an immigrant. When the character was
created, one such stage had just ended: from 1870 to 1920, tens of millions of
Europeans from very different backgrounds had enriched and diversified the
composition of the country. That Jews had been the creators of Superman reinforced
this connection, as Jews from Central and Eastern Europe had made up a
substantial part of this recent immigration. The trauma of the Holocaust strengthened
Superman's immigrant dimension.
Posted By Worldmeets.US
The
third element is moral. Few societies maintain as part of their creed the antagonism
of good and evil - and of the law as its mirror. The original idea is, of course,
very different: it comes from Nietzsche
and his Übermensch, a word that means " super man." But George Bernard Shaw, who first
endorsed the term in English, translated it as "Superman." In the
German version, the "Superman" is the one who has replaced God - who
is dead as a source of values; Superman, however, doesn't replace the values of
God, but makes them his own on earth, defending the moral code of a town (the fictional
Metropolis), whose root is, although it isn't said, the Judeo-Christian
tradition, led also by the notions of liberty and law.
Yesterday's cartoon from
Britain's Telegraph demonstrates
the enduring power of the
Superman myth. Not, however,
the power of President Obama.
The
idea of devotion to something beyond the material world is redemptive. The idea
of a space in which, whatever the source, is egalitarian in the best sense of
the word. Ultimately, it is the idea of a moral code to which the law and the
actions of men, are subject. It is an idea that refers to the Thomistic
tradition of natural law, on which the evolution of Western liberal democracy
is based.
Therefore:
religion, immigration and morality are what makes Superman a quintessentially American
figure. The universal success of this character tells us that these values aren't
unique to the United States, and tacitly, that they are valid even if the
country becomes separated from its own creed.
Superman
would not be one of the most enduring American comic book heroes if ordinary people,
apart from being entertained by him, didn't intuit some of this.
