beyond captain america
Sep. 18th, 2008 02:43 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
intertribalSome guy writing for the University of Nebraska's student newspaper (The Daily Nebraskan), has decided that your favorite superhero is indicative of your political preferences (not only is it indicative, actually, it's "all you need to know" to figure out how to vote). Not only is this total bullshit - me and my ultra-conservative Greek Orthodox friend have pretty much the exact taste in action movies, except she likes Rocky more than I do - but he says if you prefer Batman over Superman, you're a Republican.
Yes.
I have no idea how good ol' Clint Waltman (o rly? ya rly) votes, but seeing as how he's from Nebraska and his name is CLINT WALTMAN, it seems like he's just trying to claim the only cool superhero for the GOP. Which is just wrong.
1. ORIGINS. Reading his article on face-value, some of it does make sense - Bruce Wayne is loaded and has a butler and a corporation, and Clark Kent is poor and an "illegal alien" (I know, groan). But superheroes have never reflected truth, they've reflected what we want, our precious illusions. That's why they're heroes. That's why politicians the world-over lie like mofos to get elected, and one thing they lie about the most is where they came from. An example: Indonesia's Suharto always said - and said, and said, and said, until it was accepted as fact - that he was the son of poor farmers. Singapore's Lee Kuan Yew claimed the same thing in his autobiography. Both grew up to be loaded authoritarian nepotists whose values could easily be termed "conservative". Both in all likelihood did not come from the humble beginnings they said they came from. So what? The Republican politician's dream is to have been poor. You know why? So you can say you pulled yourself up by your bootstraps without the government's help. So you can be "down home", not a "liberal elitist". So you can be seen barbecuing and watching NASCAR with all the actually poor people in the Bible belt who got convinced years ago that the government's a big ninny full of Pinkos and baby-killers and it doesn't matter if the Republicans drive them deeper into poverty, cuz they got Jesus anyway.
Clark Kent is totally the Republican politician's dream. He's a clean-cut, all-American boy from the Heartland who can lift tractors and is good to his sweet, traditional parents (the UNL anthem: "There is no place like Nebraska, dear old Nebraska U / where the girls are the fairest, the boys are the squarest/ of any old place I knew / There is no place like Nebraska, where they're all true blue / we'll all stick together in all kinds of weather, for dear old Nebraska U"). Republicans hate that they're rich. They really do. As such they hate cities, which they see as the bastions of vice, and dream of living out on a big Texan ranch, pretending to be Lone Rangers, pretending to be Joe Everyman, loving the country because, well, they own it. And they wouldn't have butlers. Ever. EVER. That's way too snotty, and if the Republicans are anything, it ain't snotty. This is a common misperception by people who have never seen Republican Country, where I am from. Trust me. The average Republican is nothing like Bruce Wayne. The average Republican is Hank Hill, who refuses to watch the Dallas Cowboys on a Japanese-made television and drives a red Ford pick-up. Okay, Clint Waltman? Just like at how the Republicans derided their own Mitt Romney, the slick urban industrialist who apparently didn't spend enough time hunting moose from his John Deere tractor. They want a tractor-hauler, a gun-cocker, a hard-worker raised on corn and cows. They want Clark Kent.
Is Bruce Wayne "totally" the Democratic politician's dream? Well, not so much. He's no politician's dream, precisely because he is such a liberal elitist and he is so wealthy. Both Democrats and Republicans (and Independents and Greens and...) would be quite frankly ashamed and horrified for Bruce Wayne to walk into one of their fundraisers with a couple society it girls on his arm, especially if he looks like Patrick Bateman. He is a public relations nightmare. But that's the thing - Batman's an anti-hero, and political parties do not tolerate anti-heroes. They can't afford to. Harvey Dent is a fine Democrat - a civil servant from a grungy city, trying to take down mob bosses. He's practically Jack McCoy, and he'd get nominated in a heartbeat. But then again he is the White Knight, and that's the only type of knight that a political party can afford to flaunt. Dark Knights are like live explosive. They don't get elected. They have too many flaws. And that of course is why Batman is the vigilante superhero, the one who makes the tough decisions other heroes can't make, the one who can get away with being hated. He's like George Clooney. It's better if he just doesn't say anything about his political preferences, because whatever party he bestows with his blessing is going to run away screaming. Yes, George Clooney is a liberal, and yes, a Democratic senator did have a cameo in The Dark Knight movie. But Bruce Wayne himself is outside and beyond politics.
2. MILIEU. Where does Clark Kent live anyway? Sunnydale? Boston? Oh right, Metropolis. So I haven't seen the new Superman movies and nobody cares about Metropolis enough to write about it, so I'm going to have to base this on the '90s tv show. Lois and Clark or something like that. Boy, I hated that show - I hate Teri Hatcher. Anyway. My impression of Metropolis is that it looks something like the Chicago of Early Edition, or the bastardized New York seen on Friends, Sex and the City, and that awful The Fifth Element. Bright, colorful, on-the-go, and bizarrely cheerful. "A Cover Girl commercial, perhaps. Exciting, but safe. Fast-paced but not stressful. Fun without consequences. Basically, it's the only city a Republican could tolerate: a city without vice or poverty. I suppose it goes with Superman's bright blue-and-red color scheme (note: that's only one color short of the American flag, and the Republicans are definitely the flag-wavers of the two). This does not, as Waltman says, imply the "the many hues and facets of liberalism - the shades of gray and the exceptions to the rule in a Democrat mentality". Grey? Metropolis isn't grey, Metropolis is fucking America the Beautiful. You know what's grey? Gotham's grey.
Gotham, again, is an anti-hero city that no one wants to live in. It seems to be eternally broken. There's a big nasty underworld, the uber-rich, the uber-poor. I remember thinking when I watched the cartoon that it was the only show I had ever watched where everyone wears black, all the time. I mean, Democrats wouldn't want it, neither would Republicans, and I don't understand why everybody doesn't just move from this hellhole, but then there wouldn't be a comic I guess. And I'm no comic aficionado but Batman and Transmetropolitan and Sin City indicate to me that Gotham isn't so much a political statement as it is the typical gritty pop-city. Too dark to be real whereas Metropolis is too happy to be real. Clint Waltman says that "the black and white palette of his Gotham City locale reflects the decidedness and clear-cut morality of the GOP mind". What? Gotham is noir is what it is, and while I'll agree that Republicans are absolutists, Gotham and Batman are practically the opposite of absolutist. Anti-heroes piss on absolutism by definition. Gotham's the place where even the good guys aren't really all that great and the bad guys have tragic beginnings or saving graces.
3. ENEMIES. Which brings me to the villains. Waltman makes another semi-convincing case here - that Batman's enemies seem to embody facets of liberal politics (the Joker's an anarchist and Poison Ivy's environmentalist, Cat Woman's PETA, etc.) whereas Superman's enemies are ultra-powerful, corrupt politicians and monopolizing businessmen and far-off, possibly alien tyrants. But he's wrong here too, basically for all the reasons of #1 above. Just listen to the McCain/Palin ads - Washington is broken and only a maverick like John McCain can fix it; Sarah Palin fights big oil. All lies, yes. But look who they hold up as the enemy? Politicians (especially those in Washington, which around campaign season suddenly morphs into another Hollywood of the East Coast filled with corrupt do-nothings, a la Mr. Smith Goes to Washington), businessmen (yes, they give tax breaks to corporations, but they never say they do, and because it's hot to hate on big oil, they'll hate on big oil, and they'll also hate on any corporation that "outsources American jobs"), and "tyrants" (Saddam Hussein, anyone? Ahmadinejad? Kim Jong-Il? These are not the villains of the Democratic Party). Here's the truth of the matter: Americans like to play Persecuted. Conservative Americans, no matter how strong they are, will always claim to be fighting some insurmountable ultra-evil that cannot be redeemed. Case in point: if you bring up racism in Nebraska, the Republican's automatic comeback is: "Affirmative action is reverse racism! White people (or true American culture, or Western civilization, or normal folks, or what have you) are being oppressed by multiculturalism!" And thus, white middle-class Christians living in Nebraska spend their lives perfectly positive that they are the ones suffering in the United States. If they've made it all the way to the White House, or if they need an even bigger enemy than the local high school teacher who assigns Toni Morrison or teaches sex ed, they turn to "foreign despots". NEVER MIND that the U.S. owns more nuclear weapons than anybody else - THEY are the ones hell-bent on destroying us! And so it goes. On and on and on. Republicans never, ever admit to having power. They are forever Davids. They need their Goliaths.
Democrats don't. And this is the one area where I think Batman actually is the Democrat's choice. Most Batman villains are not people of ultimate power. They are of a much less threatening caliber than General Zod, and Waltman concludes that this means that Batman thinks "the greatest problems in society are made by the lower criminals: the mob, the thugs and the gangs which may populate our streets". This is so, so wrong. What it means is that Batman's enemies are not irredeemable villains who are evil because they were born bad. They are very much a product of their surroundings, and that's exactly the Democrat's approach to crime. Watch Law & Order if you don't believe me. Democrats are the ones guaranteed to be more sympathetic to criminals, to oppose the death penalty, to encourage rehabilitation, and to, yes, try to understand why terrorists hate America. The Democratic villain can be reasoned with through diplomacy or economy. Democrats believe in love much more than they believe in evil, and Republicans mock the hell out of them for it. Two-Face is the best example of the otherwise normal or even good guy turned to evil because of other people's actions and bad luck, of course. More often than not the combative relationship between Batman and the villains is like that of the Democratic Party and the more radical liberal groups. Take the environmental movement, for instance. Democrats are sympathetic to green groups and try to promote legislation that would help them, but they can't come too close to Green Peace because they can't exactly promote the lawlessness that some of these groups use to achieve their ends, sympathetic as the Dems might be with Green Peace's underlying complaints and principles. Due to this lack of support, sometimes the environmentalists end up disillusioned and disappointed and throw their lots in with outsiders without a chance like Nader, hurting the Democrats and forcing the party to disown the environmentalists.
Yes, I know that Superman's creators were more liberal than conservative, that they made him in the context of FDR's New Deal, and so Superman reflected '30s Democrats, at least at first. But the '30s Democrats, God love 'em, got fucked up by World War II. Then Truman, a Democrat, decided to use nuclear weapons on a country that was all but surrendered. And let me tell you, as a modern Democrat who nevertheless respects the New Deal and FDR, I hate Truman and I hate Kennedy. I don't think Kennedy deserves the mantle of the Democratic Party - not for Marilyn Monroe, but for the Missile Crisis. What a royal dumbass. And anyway, it doesn't really matter how Superman's creators intended him to be read in the '40s. What matters is how he's read now, how he's interpreted now, and what Democrats and Republicans are like today. Besides, maybe Siegel and Shuster suck trying to push their politics on people, because I would never read Superman as a liberal icon, immigrant or no. But then again, I'm a by-product of the '90s.
Similarly, Waltman's main problem is that he compares Bruce Wayne to Barry Goldwater and Clark Kent to Harry Truman. Aside from the fact that Barry Goldwater is NOTHING like Bruce Wayne and championed the 1950s Stepford Lifestyle (I can see Clark Kent's similarity to Harry Truman, with the H-bomb and all), these are politicians of yesteryear, not the Republicans and Democrats of today. And the Republicans and Democrats of yesteryear are dead. They are not voting. If he wanted any hope of being vaguely relevant, his column is 50 years too late.
Yes.
I have no idea how good ol' Clint Waltman (o rly? ya rly) votes, but seeing as how he's from Nebraska and his name is CLINT WALTMAN, it seems like he's just trying to claim the only cool superhero for the GOP. Which is just wrong.
1. ORIGINS. Reading his article on face-value, some of it does make sense - Bruce Wayne is loaded and has a butler and a corporation, and Clark Kent is poor and an "illegal alien" (I know, groan). But superheroes have never reflected truth, they've reflected what we want, our precious illusions. That's why they're heroes. That's why politicians the world-over lie like mofos to get elected, and one thing they lie about the most is where they came from. An example: Indonesia's Suharto always said - and said, and said, and said, until it was accepted as fact - that he was the son of poor farmers. Singapore's Lee Kuan Yew claimed the same thing in his autobiography. Both grew up to be loaded authoritarian nepotists whose values could easily be termed "conservative". Both in all likelihood did not come from the humble beginnings they said they came from. So what? The Republican politician's dream is to have been poor. You know why? So you can say you pulled yourself up by your bootstraps without the government's help. So you can be "down home", not a "liberal elitist". So you can be seen barbecuing and watching NASCAR with all the actually poor people in the Bible belt who got convinced years ago that the government's a big ninny full of Pinkos and baby-killers and it doesn't matter if the Republicans drive them deeper into poverty, cuz they got Jesus anyway.
Clark Kent is totally the Republican politician's dream. He's a clean-cut, all-American boy from the Heartland who can lift tractors and is good to his sweet, traditional parents (the UNL anthem: "There is no place like Nebraska, dear old Nebraska U / where the girls are the fairest, the boys are the squarest/ of any old place I knew / There is no place like Nebraska, where they're all true blue / we'll all stick together in all kinds of weather, for dear old Nebraska U"). Republicans hate that they're rich. They really do. As such they hate cities, which they see as the bastions of vice, and dream of living out on a big Texan ranch, pretending to be Lone Rangers, pretending to be Joe Everyman, loving the country because, well, they own it. And they wouldn't have butlers. Ever. EVER. That's way too snotty, and if the Republicans are anything, it ain't snotty. This is a common misperception by people who have never seen Republican Country, where I am from. Trust me. The average Republican is nothing like Bruce Wayne. The average Republican is Hank Hill, who refuses to watch the Dallas Cowboys on a Japanese-made television and drives a red Ford pick-up. Okay, Clint Waltman? Just like at how the Republicans derided their own Mitt Romney, the slick urban industrialist who apparently didn't spend enough time hunting moose from his John Deere tractor. They want a tractor-hauler, a gun-cocker, a hard-worker raised on corn and cows. They want Clark Kent.
Is Bruce Wayne "totally" the Democratic politician's dream? Well, not so much. He's no politician's dream, precisely because he is such a liberal elitist and he is so wealthy. Both Democrats and Republicans (and Independents and Greens and...) would be quite frankly ashamed and horrified for Bruce Wayne to walk into one of their fundraisers with a couple society it girls on his arm, especially if he looks like Patrick Bateman. He is a public relations nightmare. But that's the thing - Batman's an anti-hero, and political parties do not tolerate anti-heroes. They can't afford to. Harvey Dent is a fine Democrat - a civil servant from a grungy city, trying to take down mob bosses. He's practically Jack McCoy, and he'd get nominated in a heartbeat. But then again he is the White Knight, and that's the only type of knight that a political party can afford to flaunt. Dark Knights are like live explosive. They don't get elected. They have too many flaws. And that of course is why Batman is the vigilante superhero, the one who makes the tough decisions other heroes can't make, the one who can get away with being hated. He's like George Clooney. It's better if he just doesn't say anything about his political preferences, because whatever party he bestows with his blessing is going to run away screaming. Yes, George Clooney is a liberal, and yes, a Democratic senator did have a cameo in The Dark Knight movie. But Bruce Wayne himself is outside and beyond politics.
2. MILIEU. Where does Clark Kent live anyway? Sunnydale? Boston? Oh right, Metropolis. So I haven't seen the new Superman movies and nobody cares about Metropolis enough to write about it, so I'm going to have to base this on the '90s tv show. Lois and Clark or something like that. Boy, I hated that show - I hate Teri Hatcher. Anyway. My impression of Metropolis is that it looks something like the Chicago of Early Edition, or the bastardized New York seen on Friends, Sex and the City, and that awful The Fifth Element. Bright, colorful, on-the-go, and bizarrely cheerful. "A Cover Girl commercial, perhaps. Exciting, but safe. Fast-paced but not stressful. Fun without consequences. Basically, it's the only city a Republican could tolerate: a city without vice or poverty. I suppose it goes with Superman's bright blue-and-red color scheme (note: that's only one color short of the American flag, and the Republicans are definitely the flag-wavers of the two). This does not, as Waltman says, imply the "the many hues and facets of liberalism - the shades of gray and the exceptions to the rule in a Democrat mentality". Grey? Metropolis isn't grey, Metropolis is fucking America the Beautiful. You know what's grey? Gotham's grey.
Gotham, again, is an anti-hero city that no one wants to live in. It seems to be eternally broken. There's a big nasty underworld, the uber-rich, the uber-poor. I remember thinking when I watched the cartoon that it was the only show I had ever watched where everyone wears black, all the time. I mean, Democrats wouldn't want it, neither would Republicans, and I don't understand why everybody doesn't just move from this hellhole, but then there wouldn't be a comic I guess. And I'm no comic aficionado but Batman and Transmetropolitan and Sin City indicate to me that Gotham isn't so much a political statement as it is the typical gritty pop-city. Too dark to be real whereas Metropolis is too happy to be real. Clint Waltman says that "the black and white palette of his Gotham City locale reflects the decidedness and clear-cut morality of the GOP mind". What? Gotham is noir is what it is, and while I'll agree that Republicans are absolutists, Gotham and Batman are practically the opposite of absolutist. Anti-heroes piss on absolutism by definition. Gotham's the place where even the good guys aren't really all that great and the bad guys have tragic beginnings or saving graces.
3. ENEMIES. Which brings me to the villains. Waltman makes another semi-convincing case here - that Batman's enemies seem to embody facets of liberal politics (the Joker's an anarchist and Poison Ivy's environmentalist, Cat Woman's PETA, etc.) whereas Superman's enemies are ultra-powerful, corrupt politicians and monopolizing businessmen and far-off, possibly alien tyrants. But he's wrong here too, basically for all the reasons of #1 above. Just listen to the McCain/Palin ads - Washington is broken and only a maverick like John McCain can fix it; Sarah Palin fights big oil. All lies, yes. But look who they hold up as the enemy? Politicians (especially those in Washington, which around campaign season suddenly morphs into another Hollywood of the East Coast filled with corrupt do-nothings, a la Mr. Smith Goes to Washington), businessmen (yes, they give tax breaks to corporations, but they never say they do, and because it's hot to hate on big oil, they'll hate on big oil, and they'll also hate on any corporation that "outsources American jobs"), and "tyrants" (Saddam Hussein, anyone? Ahmadinejad? Kim Jong-Il? These are not the villains of the Democratic Party). Here's the truth of the matter: Americans like to play Persecuted. Conservative Americans, no matter how strong they are, will always claim to be fighting some insurmountable ultra-evil that cannot be redeemed. Case in point: if you bring up racism in Nebraska, the Republican's automatic comeback is: "Affirmative action is reverse racism! White people (or true American culture, or Western civilization, or normal folks, or what have you) are being oppressed by multiculturalism!" And thus, white middle-class Christians living in Nebraska spend their lives perfectly positive that they are the ones suffering in the United States. If they've made it all the way to the White House, or if they need an even bigger enemy than the local high school teacher who assigns Toni Morrison or teaches sex ed, they turn to "foreign despots". NEVER MIND that the U.S. owns more nuclear weapons than anybody else - THEY are the ones hell-bent on destroying us! And so it goes. On and on and on. Republicans never, ever admit to having power. They are forever Davids. They need their Goliaths.
Democrats don't. And this is the one area where I think Batman actually is the Democrat's choice. Most Batman villains are not people of ultimate power. They are of a much less threatening caliber than General Zod, and Waltman concludes that this means that Batman thinks "the greatest problems in society are made by the lower criminals: the mob, the thugs and the gangs which may populate our streets". This is so, so wrong. What it means is that Batman's enemies are not irredeemable villains who are evil because they were born bad. They are very much a product of their surroundings, and that's exactly the Democrat's approach to crime. Watch Law & Order if you don't believe me. Democrats are the ones guaranteed to be more sympathetic to criminals, to oppose the death penalty, to encourage rehabilitation, and to, yes, try to understand why terrorists hate America. The Democratic villain can be reasoned with through diplomacy or economy. Democrats believe in love much more than they believe in evil, and Republicans mock the hell out of them for it. Two-Face is the best example of the otherwise normal or even good guy turned to evil because of other people's actions and bad luck, of course. More often than not the combative relationship between Batman and the villains is like that of the Democratic Party and the more radical liberal groups. Take the environmental movement, for instance. Democrats are sympathetic to green groups and try to promote legislation that would help them, but they can't come too close to Green Peace because they can't exactly promote the lawlessness that some of these groups use to achieve their ends, sympathetic as the Dems might be with Green Peace's underlying complaints and principles. Due to this lack of support, sometimes the environmentalists end up disillusioned and disappointed and throw their lots in with outsiders without a chance like Nader, hurting the Democrats and forcing the party to disown the environmentalists.
Yes, I know that Superman's creators were more liberal than conservative, that they made him in the context of FDR's New Deal, and so Superman reflected '30s Democrats, at least at first. But the '30s Democrats, God love 'em, got fucked up by World War II. Then Truman, a Democrat, decided to use nuclear weapons on a country that was all but surrendered. And let me tell you, as a modern Democrat who nevertheless respects the New Deal and FDR, I hate Truman and I hate Kennedy. I don't think Kennedy deserves the mantle of the Democratic Party - not for Marilyn Monroe, but for the Missile Crisis. What a royal dumbass. And anyway, it doesn't really matter how Superman's creators intended him to be read in the '40s. What matters is how he's read now, how he's interpreted now, and what Democrats and Republicans are like today. Besides, maybe Siegel and Shuster suck trying to push their politics on people, because I would never read Superman as a liberal icon, immigrant or no. But then again, I'm a by-product of the '90s.
Similarly, Waltman's main problem is that he compares Bruce Wayne to Barry Goldwater and Clark Kent to Harry Truman. Aside from the fact that Barry Goldwater is NOTHING like Bruce Wayne and championed the 1950s Stepford Lifestyle (I can see Clark Kent's similarity to Harry Truman, with the H-bomb and all), these are politicians of yesteryear, not the Republicans and Democrats of today. And the Republicans and Democrats of yesteryear are dead. They are not voting. If he wanted any hope of being vaguely relevant, his column is 50 years too late.
