Our Superheroes

None of us likes to be pushed around. None of us likes to be called, “weak.” Everybody likes to have power, likes to have control. The problem is that most of us, the ones with working cerebellums, realize that we can never have complete control. We realize that we can’t have much control at all. Some things are just beyond our sphere of influence. Those are the things that scare us the most.

Shrinks call it “insecurity.” I’d rather call it “human.”  

This is no revelation. But I think it’s now become particularly relevant because of two things that are dominating our attention. One is bright and new, and the other is everlastingly sad. The new one is the Superman movie. The sad one, of course, is Donald (“Orange Julius”) Trump. 

Both of these phenomena are political fantasies (nightmares in Trump’s case), and both of them send very much the same message. They tell us that we can forget about our anxieties, about the world we can’t control. There is a power that can overcome all evil. We don’t have to worry. A super-power will take care of it all. 

That the Superman character serves this purpose is pretty obvious. And Superman is hardly the only character that’s been created to do that. Throughout history, these characters have been plentiful. And I don’t mean just in the Marvel Universe. Think polytheism. What were the Greek Gods but a cadre of superheroes, each assigned to their own specialty. Don’t worry about your crops, Demeter, the god of agriculture will provide. Don’t fear the enemy, Ares, the god of war will lead us to victory. And don’t worry about getting laid, Ares, the god of love will fix you up. 

Superheroes save us from more than just dragons and Nazis (if there is a difference). They allow us to perpetuate that comforting notion that a hero will someday come and take all the world’s problems away. No need for anxiety. The “X” in “X-Men” might as well stand for Xanax. 

In the movie, when Lex is plotting to kill Superman, our threatened Last Son of Krypton gets over on his evil foe once again and saves the world from pillage and destruction. In Trump World, when the Libs are plotting to destroy us with their wokeness, Orange Julius arrives and wrenches the nation away from same sex bathrooms and DEI.

Superman and Trump have the same appeal. They save us from our fears. 

Some of us enjoy the comfort this give us while we watch the movie in our theater seats, but for most of us, that feeling goes away by the time we reach the car. For others, it does not. For others, the idea of a super-hero who can make everything better is too alluring to abandon. It is addictive. Those people need it, and they now feed their habit with another vanquisher. He is the one that they have elected President of the United States. He is the one in which they have placed their trust. He is the one who can leap tall Constitutions with a single law and return us to “The American Way.” 

Is it any wonder that the White House this week actually put out a meme of Trump as The Man of Steel?

We have to get through to those who think this way and somehow convince them that the Trump they believe in, just like Superman, is nothing but fiction.