Publication Date: March 17, 2024
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Killing Superman Excerpt for WEB
Tötung Übermensch (Killing Superman)
Superman, the Concept, confuses the issue of who we are and who we want to be. We can no longer pretend to be the golly-gee, wild-West, aw-shucks-plain-folk we aspire and perspire to be, especially in light of the super-ethos of the material pragmatist imperatives we pursue. After the “Good War,” as we were GI-Jonesing into a new labor force and building cookie cutter houses in our new, safe, white suburban enclaves, our corporate-military-industrial complex went into super gear to bring about this righteous chest-pounding and God-given claim to exceptionalism, despite the warning of President Eisenhower—an imperfect model of the modern major general, whose immutable persona was cut from the cloak of humility. But who is mightier than God? It does not surprise me that the more we ignore Ike’s super power of prescience, the more we rely on God to step into the shoes of Superman, USA. God and Superman: avatars awaiting our instructions.
Simply put, we need to give Superman something else to do, or kill him; sacrifice him to our own quest to do something different, something that restores life and power it with intrigue and invention; something that engages a universal collision that provokes such humility that we recognize that we have allowed ourselves to experience the empty spectacle of life that has lured us into a deep sleep, afraid to wake up to the nightmare we’ve allowed to metastasize into the villainy of that collision—one that possesses more bitter and divisive natures. After all, bitter, divisive natures seem to reign in all matters of life these days. And we expect Superman to rise above this bitterness for us, to point the way to achieving what even he cannot achieve: peace and love. Therefore—and I say this with a heavy heart, but a mind put upon by the terrible tenets of the tragic hero—he must die so we can awake, so we can live again. Or something like that.