Superman! Ultimate Hero of the Great American Dream (or Scream?)

One again screens across America will be displaying that ultimate hero of true American ethics, moral values, virility and down home decency – Superman.

superman, superdog
Superman’s little known assistant.

Reborn again on the 75 anniversary of his birth in D.C. Comics, the Superhero to end all superheroes is coming once again to save the world and to show it that America is truly the greatest country on the earth. Superman, the protector of the weak, the defender of the American Dream, the inspiration of the young…

Hold it!

Stop the article! Stop the article!

I can’t go on with this…

This is horse manure! The United States hasn’t been a moral country since well before Nixon’s time. Acting moral and high on your horse, yes, but being truly moral- nope, sorry, no award for that one.

We are so in need of heroes that we can only get them out of fantasy.

Superman is a fantasy people! He is not real!

So is our strength!

We get attacked on 911 and what does our President tell us to do to keep the country strong?

GO SHOPPING!!! Yes, he did!

We are no longer a ‘superman’ nation. What we think is muscle is flab from eating all that junk food. It is no wonder we have to look to someone from another planet for our heroliness.

What we think of as patriotism is taking our hostilities and our desires for superiority and inflicting them on other countries.

The American Dream is gone. It got blown away with Hurricane Katrina and the 2008 economic collapse and it ain’t coming back.

We sold out our birthright for a handful of cheap baubles from China, now they are using the money we sent them to buy the land out from under our feet and to build a navy that can blow the rest of us off the land they haven’t got yet.

There is no down home place any more like the one Superman was raised on. The bank foreclosed on it and the Clarks are living underneath their tractor now. They had to give junior up for adoption to a family in Romania.

Morals are taught by televangelists who declare war on sin and then get caught with really ugly prostitutes on camera by the revenge seeking evangelists they themselves exposed the week before.

People scream patriotism but it is only because they feel they must to accomplish any one or several of the following: get you on their bandwagon, convince you to vote for them, keep from endangering their pension that they got after only 20 years of half-baked government service, want to be able to carry lethal weapons capable of murdering half your home town single-handedly because they want to feel superior to you by intimidation, and there are many other examples I am sure.

The Fortress of Solitude in the Arctic has melted and drowned the entire population of Maui.

Lex Luther is the glint in the Republicans eye for the 2016 Presidential campaign.

Lois Lane is a single mother with another on the way who is sneaking over the border to Illinois to get a legal abortion.

Jimmy Olsen is selling meth in the men’s room of the Daily Planet.

Need I say that Perry White sold the Daily Planet to Rupert Murdoch and it is now a money losing scandal rag?

Nobody protects the weak, we walk all over them or use them as a target to ridicule so that we can impress our buddies. We humiliate them with covert smart phone videos that we then post on YouTube. The old we make work until they fall dead at their cashier stations. The young are so tuned in to their Iphones and MP3 players to even notice that reality has gotten up and walked out on them.

We say we are freeing the oppressed people of the world whose countries we march into and force democracy upon. We drone their parties of 100 people even if there is only one Al Queda guy there. We blast acid rock into the ears of suspect Afghanis at mind ripping decibels and strap them to chairs with vicious dogs at a noses distance away to break them down and also because we think it is cool and righteous.

The world has changed in 75 years. And so have we.

Someone else will have to carry the mantle of freedom and justice. We have lost it.

But, maybe, just maybe, Superman is a necessary thing. Perhaps we can look at him and remember all the things he inspired us to be as kids growing up reading his comics and to be more like him in both strength and character.

And maybe we still can.

Roger Freed
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