Taki's Mag

There were two huge stories last week in American mythmaking: The United States has slain Public Enemy Number One, and Superman is renouncing his American citizenship. Barack Obama may exult in the first, but he should beware the second. The Man of Steel’s renunciation of his adopted homeland may represent more in American mythology than the extrajudicial execution of a terrorist in Pakistan. Osama bin Laden, for all his pretensions, was a mere mortal. Superman is the stuff of dreams—primarily the American dream. The dream was a vision of the immigrant making good and embracing the country more meaningfully than those born there and taking it for granted. Now he is turning away. It is as if our first immigrants, the Pilgrims, were boarding the Mayflower to sail back to England.

For those who have been busy following White House pronouncements and news from Pakistan, here is what happened in the latest issue of Action Comics: Superman returns from observing popular demonstrations in Iran, and the National Security Advisor upbraids him for giving the appearance of representing the president. Superman answers,

I realize that, and you’re right, of course. Which is why I intend to speak before the United Nations tomorrow and inform them that I am renouncing my US citizenship. I’m tired of having my actions construed as instruments of US policy.

The advisor asks, “What?”

‘Truth, justice and the American way’—it’s not enough anymore.

When Joe Shuster and Jerry Siegel created Superman in 1932, the caped hero fought for “truth and justice.” This was later changed to “truth, tolerance, and justice.” (Anyone remember “tolerance”?) The “American way” part replaced “tolerance” during the McCarthy years, around when the phrase “under God” was added to the Pledge of Allegiance. Loyalty and oaths were the order of the day, and Superman adapted. Most of us did if we wanted to keep our jobs.

Shuster and Siegel were two Jewish kids living in Cleveland and struggling with their immigrant parents to survive the Depression and achieve acceptance in a sometimes-hostile American culture. Blair Kramer wrote on the Jewish Virtual Library website:

Despite his superhuman powers, Superman shared some characteristic traits with a majority of American Jews in the 1940s. Like them, he had arrived in America from a foreign world. His entire family—in fact his entire race—had been wiped out in a holocaust-like disaster on his home planet, Krypton.…Superman’s parents launched him to Earth in hopes that he would survive.

It resonated among many Americans, Jewish and Gentile alike, during the Depression and Second World War. Superman’s first foes were slumlords, corrupt businessmen, extortionists, wife-beaters, and the politicians who protected them. Super-villains such as Brainiac and Galactic Golem came later, replacing the villainous slumlords and corrupt businessmen who maybe were not so bad after all.

Superman, unlike the super guy in the White House, believed in the law. His pursuit of criminals usually ended not with him beating them to death (which he had more than enough power to do), but in turning them over to the police and the courts. Those who favor vengeance over justice, whatever the crime, might have preferred Superman to be a freelance executioner.

I have just visited the High Vosges in eastern France, where the American Army fought some of its hardest battles against the Nazis. A veteran of the 36th Infantry Division, which advanced from the Riviera in the summer of 1944 to the Rhine in 1945, showed me over the ground. He lost many friends and could not control his emotions when he saw one of their graves in the American cemetery at Epinal: “He was only twenty-one,” he said. The 36th captured Hermann Göring, the Luftwaffe chief. They did not beat him to death. They turned him over for trial, and he escaped hanging only by taking poison just before his execution. Other Nazis were hanged and others went to prison. This was to be the new order enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Genocide, preemptive war, and torture were outlawed. The young men who fought and lost lives or limbs in the Vosges represented the best of an ideal, what used to be called the American way. It was justice, not vengeance. It was the courtroom, not the death squad. The law may be inconvenient at times, but it protects us when the powerful seek to take our liberty, our property, or our lives.

The Scottish author Allan Massie wrote on May 4 in The Scotsman:

The Nuremberg trials of the leading Nazis were deeply flawed, but they were nevertheless better than putting the captured Nazi leaders up against a wall and shooting them. One consequence of the trials is that there never have been, and almost certainly never will be, Nazi martyrs. Judicial process is better than summary execution.

The Department of Justice has been preparing a case against Osama bin Laden for murder and other crimes since 1998, which it is now asking the Manhattan Federal District court to dismiss because of bin Laden’s demise. Former US attorney Mary Jo White told The New York Times, “There was no question from our perspective that at the time of the June 1998 indictment, the objective was to bring Bin Laden back for trial.” Daniel J. Coleman, the retired FBI agent who had been tracking Osama since 1996, said, “There was a lack of political will to do anything.”

In Western movies that are as much a part of the American myth as Superman, the hero is never the leader of the lynch mob. He is the sheriff, who risks his life to protect the murderer until the judge arrives. Where is the sheriff now?

The Action Comics authors ended their last issue with Superman saying he was going to renounce his citizenship. He hasn’t done it yet. There may be time to talk him out of it. It will take a commitment to truth and justice. Are we capable of turning our backs forever on government assassination, torture, and arbitrary imprisonment?

I cannot shed a tear for Osama bin Laden, but there are times when weeping for my country is not a bad idea.