Anyone Can Be Super
This essay was originally posted to Twitter between March 1, 2022 and March 9, 2022. In its original version, it was composed of 876 words across 18 tweets. See postscript for further remarks.
This is it. The last thread, which will take us to March 9th, 2022, and to the end of this little project, begun nearly a year and over 45,000 words ago.
"Look at us... hey, look at us, look at us! Huh? Who woulda thought? Not me!" as Paul Rudd said to Sean Evans.
I sometimes think about the way we live. How our TVs and computers help us to see and hear across long distances, how our great machines enable us to lift steel girders and put out raging infernos, how air travel--more inexpensive than ever--lets us see the world from high above.
How Internet makes it possible to teach ourselves things that would have been out of reach just a few generations prior. How games and stories fill our hearts with heroic empathy and grand destinies. How our spice cupboards let us sample the cuisines of people half a world away.
We are, for all intents and purposes, a civilization of supermen (and superwomen, and superthem), with augmented abilities that allow us to bend steel and change the course of mighty rivers.
Which raises the question: Just what the hell do we think we're doing?
We are made superhuman by our technology, but it's our Lex Luthors who hold the keys to that technology. The lure of power warps their view of humanity. Their undue influence upon the world grows more unjust by the day, their ideology more divisive. And we put them in charge!
The Kryptonians might have been an advanced civilization, but what happened to them? They rushed headlong towards an environmental apocalypse and they ignored every warning. With all their power, all their technology, all their mastery of the world, they did nothing.
We, too, face an environmental apocalypse, but we face other existential crises as well. My generation is the first since the Great Depression to inherit a worse economy than the generation before it. The generation after mine will inherit a worse economy yet, and so on.
In the 1960s, the struggle for racial justice seemed to reach a point of reckoning. Strides were made for the equality of Black Americans. Now, half a century later, the gains of the Civil Rights Movement have been rolled back, and the police act with greater impunity than ever.
Transgender people are the latest LGBTQ+ minority to be centered in the right wing's affected obsession with social decay. Few seem to notice how today's anti-trans rhetoric is an almost note-for-note copy of the rhetoric used previously against other LGBTQ+ groups. But I digress.
The point is, the metaphor of the doomed planet and the ignored scientist stands for more than just our environmental crisis. (Though it certainly stands for that!) The folly of our current activities is plain for all to see, except for those with an interest in not seeing.
Lex Luthor is such a resonant villain because, despite not having any special abilities of his own, he represents greed, arrogance, and ambition--all the things that hinder us, superbeings in our own right, in using our power to build bonds of affection and make a better world.
Luthor may not have existed on Krypton, but he didn't have to. Greed, arrogance, and ambition were all decisive factors in Krypton's demise. Jor-El spoke the truth to a council of his peers, some of the most powerful people of their world. They simply chose not to hear it.
Our greatest power, one that can overcome the Lex Luthors of the world, is that there's a lot of us. More of us, in fact, than there are of them. We're the ones who speak for humanity. Not them.
There are so many people doing so much good work that trying to join in can be a little daunting. Most places have a nearby Industrial Workers of the World chapter, a Food Not Bombs, or some other mutual aid project, big or small. They can be a light to show the way.
As far as this little project of mine, I didn't start it to save the world--though maybe it got me thinking about it more than usual.
No, I started it because SUPERMAN is an old favorite. If there's any movie I can contribute original thoughts about, at length, it's this one.
Writing all this stuff has changed my relationship with this movie--in some ways, I'm sure I'll yet discover. I've had to think about it in increasingly abstract ways, to free-associate from it, in order to gin up material. Maybe my connection with it will be forever damaged.
I hope that isn't the case. I hope that this can stand as a loving tribute to a movie that, despite its success, never quite got its due. Not in the way of its sci-fi/adventure contemporaries, nor in the way of its fellow superhero adaptations, nor as just a damn good movie.
This is dedicated to all the people in the credits who are no longer with us. Thank you for making SUPERMAN.
One thing's for sure, and you can hold me to this from now until the end of time: I am never doing anything like this ever again.
- Ken, morning, 3/9/2022
This piece is lightly revised from the version originally published on this date in 2022. Given its purpose as a retrospective, I wanted it to accurately reflect my current attitudes. Plus, I did not keep a record of the timestamp of the final tweet. Oh well. Maybe next time!
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Published 3/9/2024
"365 Days of SUPERMAN"
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