A Miscellany for the 238th Anniversary of the Northwest Ordinance, Which Outlawed Slavery in the Early Midwest
unfortunately it was still low-key tolerated in some places
RIP to my Bro’s Bro
Please read BFF of the newsletter Adam Petty’s beautiful tribute to his brother, Tyler, lately dead of cancer.
In short, he lived the sort of life that so many members of the commemtariat claim will inevitably result in men feeling resentful, frustrated, bitter. Yet Tyler, to his great credit, never became bitter. He never blamed anyone for snapping up some portion of contentment that should have rightfully belonged to him. As he wrote in an essay about the film I Saw The TV Glow, he had come to realize that such striving never made him happy.
The reason I’ve come to feel at peace about who I am and what I want is that I’m happier when I’m not chasing things that fulfill most people, and the times when I’ve felt the most hopeless and despairing are when I was desperately trying to attain the milestones I’m supposed to want.
Notes Toward “On the Niceness of Superman”
I have published two books and am about to publish a third. They are not bad, these books. I am occasionally forced to look into them again and I emerge from them without the embarrassment that fills me every time I look again at almost everything I had written hitherto. I have also managed to get someone cool to marry me and I am told I have made a difference in a handful of students’ lives, so objectively, I should probably spend the rest of my life cultivating gratitude and working toward the extinction of all desire and ambition. Why risk the anger of the gods by asking for more? In fact, I still have goals, which range from the impossibly grandiose and probably delusional (“contribute in some small but meaningful way to the total destruction of Tom Homan and everything he represents”; “acquire reading knowledge of Classical Hebrew”) to the doable-but-somewhat-in-conflict-with-each-other (“become a triathlete”; “become at least a low-intermediate lifter”). But of the realistically attainable goals, I really only have four:
—write my novel, or a novel, and have it not suck
—do a podcast or book on the history of literature, for a broad audience
—do a podcast where I walk through the whole Bible really really slowly, working out (or more likely deepening) all my perplexities with it as I go
—write an essay called “On the Niceness of Superman,” investigating when, at what point precisely, and within what limits, Superman became the “nice” superhero
This is not that essay, which I do not have time to write at the moment. It is some scattered notes toward it. I offer them now in anticipation of that movie, which I will probably have seen by the time this note goes out, and which had better be good.
It’s well-known these days that Superman wasn’t always a boy scout. In his earliest adventures, he’s a fairly typical 1930s pulp hero — nicer than Slam Bradley, and nicer than the Nietzschean-Wellsian amoralist found in Siegel and Schuster’s two earlier attempts at creating a character by the name of “Superman,” but perfectly capable of dropping evildoers from tall buildings and catching them just-in-time. Some readers find a New Deal left-liberal slant in the Superman stories of roughly 1938-41, but to me he seems simply populist. If there’s a problem, let’s stop dithering and fix it. If the wrong person is about to be executed, as in the very first issue of Action Comics, and the governor (lazy trifler that he is) won’t get out of bed to hear the confession of the real killer (whom you have left tied up on the lawn), you just smash his bedroom door. Simple! If two small countries are about to go to war, as in a couple of early stories, you just find the one or two war profiteers who are always at the back of things and kick their asses real bad. I want to emphasize that this is not a bad theory of why people go to war (and post-WWI, it probably looked like the only rational theory), but it’s also not foolproof. Ezra Pound analyzed the causes of World War II in more or less this way, and he reached some very bad conclusions as a result.
Also, he was not afraid to kill bad guys, any more than Batman was afraid to carry a gun.
Some of the early stories are recognizably liberal-leftist in their politics, as when Superman destroys a block of slums so as to force the city to provide some juvenile delinquents with a better environment (Superman explicitly argues that their environment is to blame for their crimes, sounding a bit like Clarence Darrow as he does so), or when he tricks a crooked mine owner into getting trapped by his own mine. The spirit is sometimes “We’re all in this together,” but it is always “If there’s a problem, strip to your shirtsleeves and fix it like a man.” The parts of the stories where we are stuck at the Daily Planet, and Superman (for reasons that aren’t initially explained or even rationalized) pretends to be wimpy Clark Kent so that he can be ritually humiliated by Lois Lane — whose sexuality is basically just the Dimes Square version of female heterosexuality, a longing to be wanted by something that can kill you — cut against any public-spiritedness that we might find in the main stories. They are sopping with proto-incel ressentiment.