Only In America: Barack Obama, Superman, and the (De)Construction of an American Myth
Since there seems to have been enough interest among the people I talked to while writing the behemoth to post said paper. All internet-based citations are linked. Sadly, this has yet to see an editor. (In the interest of disclosure: I voted for Barack Obama and am not a very big fan of Superman.)

Only In America: Barack Obama, Superman, and the (De)Construction of an American Myth

“Contrary to the rumors you’ve heard, I was not born in a manger. I was actually born on Krypton, and sent here by my father Jor-El to save the planet Earth.”

This quote, said by then-Senator Barack Obama at the Alfred E. Smith Memorial Foundation Dinner on October 17, 2008, is just one of many references and analogies made between Obama and comic book icon Superman. For months during the campaign, a photo circulated throughout the internet of Barack Obama standing in front of the Superman statue in downtown Metropolis, IL, known as the unofficial home of Superman. Artists such as editorial cartoonist Andrew Wahl, comic book artist Alex Ross, and New York City-based graffiti artist Mr. Brainwash all created depictions of Obama-as-Superman. These different examples of the Obama-Superman analogy all rely on a Bartheian myth of Superman as the defender of such amorphous concepts as “Truth, Justice, and the American Way.” However, in drawing the parallel between superhero and apparent super-senator, the impact of Obama’s atypical life story is made acceptable to the mass culture by obscuring its atypicality within Clark Kent’s all-American ideal. Furthermore, this connection emphasizes the myth of American exceptionality, wherein certain events are uniquely possible only in America, obscuring the problems minorities continue to face around the world.

In the introduction to the collection “Superman at Fifty: The Persistence of the Legend!” editors Dooley and Engle quote Harlan Ellison saying of Superman, “He is the 20th century archetype of mankind at its finest. He is courage and humanity, steadfastness and decency, responsibility and ethic. He is our universal longing for perfection, for wisdom and power used in the service of the human race” (12). These descriptions constitute the basic concept of the idealized (as all myths are) superhero, which is then given form in Superman. Yet unlike many of the examples of cultural myth Barthes cites in Mythologies, consumers of the Superman myth are able to partially observe how the construction of Superman unfolds in the minds of his creators, Jerry Siegel and Joe Schuster. The genius of Superman was how the pair fused two myths already common to American culture. According to Dooley and Engle, Clark Kent was an awkward, unsure youth modeled after Siegel and Schuster’s high-school experiences, but with a few minutes in a phone booth he became the smiling, swashbuckling hero of pulp classics like The Mark of Zorro. Indeed, it seems Superman was too much of a ready-made mythic vessel at the outset—the concept languished in obscurity for four years and publisher of Action Comics called the first Superman cover “ridiculous” (31). Yet Superman’s fame rose meteorically once he was introduced, and within four years Superman was off fighting the good fight in Europe against Hitler and the Axis forces.

Out of these fictional battles emerges the Superman myth the world is familiar with. As with Barthes’ Negro soldier, there is the previously existing signifier, Superman, and the signified of what are seen as uniquely American values, the “American Way.” However, the signification that results from this union was not a part of Superman as he was conceived—DC Comics, who owned sole right to the character, stepped into the role of bourgeois culture, implanting “a whole new history” (119) into the myth of Superman. Thus, a large part of Superman’s mythic “meaning,” the catchphrase “Truth, Justice, and the American Way,” was not a part of Superman as Siegel and Schuster conceived him; the phrase was first briefly introduced to the Superman radio serial during World War II, but only become a part of the Man of Steel’s myth thanks to the 1950s television show, according to Eric Lunegaard.

Patrick Eagan, in his essay “Flag With A Human Face,” notes that the phrase “American Way” “transcends abstraction” and is “a theological term whose function is to stir our civic faith” which “lies at the heart of our civic creed” (89). It is on this phrase and Superman’s employment of the authority it imbues the hero with which Eagan builds his argument. According to him, Supeman’s core mission is uniquely American, to either protect a government too weak to protect itself, or “to prevent the abuses of power—whether by a government or an individual, often some evil genius or supervillain, who has usurped the powers properly accorded to a legitimate government” (90). The idea of a menacing supervillain’s abuses of power has become a reality in references to previous vice president Dick Cheney, who has characterized himself as the villain of another great American myth, Star Wars’s Darth Vader (“Interview”). In focusing his campaign on connecting opponent John McCain with the Bush presidency, Obama positioned himself in direct opposition to an embrace of unchecked executive authority. When faced with such odds, how can one look anything but heroic?

Similarly, candidate Obama was also given a mission that is “global, even galactic,” (93) repairing America’s image abroad while managing two foreign wars. According to a 2008 Pew Global Attitudes Project report, in only 8 out of 21 surveyed countries did 50 percent or more of those surveyed have a positive image of the United States. And repairing America’s image is a mission the world wishes for Obama to take on—among those surveyed who said they were following the Presidential Election very or somewhat closely, survey takers universally had more confidence in Obama than his opponent, John McCain (“Global Economic Gloom”).

Yet this is not a mission Obama will tackle alone. Though Eagan focuses on Superman’s identification with the American myth of the Wyatt Earp-esque Lone Hero, Obama’s rhetoric instead emphasizes another part of the Superman myth: Superman as representative of the American immigrant experience. Both men come from seemingly exotic and distant locations, the planet Krypton and Hawaii, “the most removed population center on the planet…farther from a major landmass than anywhere but Easter Island” (Maraniss). While Clark Kent is adopted by the older Kents, Obama was largely raised by his maternal grandparents, “she practical and determined, he impulsive, hokey, well-intentioned” (Maraniss). These figures would help form youths who found themselves struggling with their unique position as aliens within their own culture. And it is in a metropolitan city-center that Obama would remake himself into aspiring politician Barack Obama, while the ever-ready Superman was hiding just underneath a mild-mannered Metropolis reporter’s suit.

These shared formative experiences reflect a uniquely American attachment to immigration and cultural assimilation. As Engle notes in “What Makes Superman So Darned American?”, “no nation on Earth has so deeply embedded in its social consciousness the imagery of passage from one social identity to another” (80). Like Superman, Obama’s sense of self is “not dispersed by life’s migration but rather enhanced by all the universe he is able to occupy” (81). Obama can connect to the dilemma of minority youths searching for an identity, and his reformation of his own identity from high-school basketball player and B student Barry Obama into future politician Barack Obama “[addresses] directly the theme of cultural assimilation” (82). Engle describes this dilemma using the language of classic cowboy Westerns: “marry the school marm and start wearing Eastern clothes or drift further westward with the boys” (82). New immigrants to America are also faced with two choices: immerse and assimilate themselves in the new American culture and erase their heritage, or stand by their old traditions and find themselves confined to ethnic ghettos. According to Engle, there “simply was no image that presented a blending of identities in the [immigrant] assimilation process in a way that stressed pride, self-confidence, integrity and psychological well-being. None, that is, until Superman” (85). Similarly, Obama’s many layers of identity and assimilation story make him more interesting, more authentically ‘American.’ As Peter Beinart said in TIME Magazine, “[Obama] embodies a new America, more diverse, more tolerant and more open to the world.” And before Superman embodied the American Way, he used his powers ‘in the interests of truth, tolerance and justice’” (Lundegaard). It is as if Obama’s Superman story says to the minority or immigrant voter, “I’m A Superhero (And So Can You!).”

Obama does not, however, speak as clearly to those with whom he cannot be as easily identified: white voters. Vice-presidential nominee Sarah Palin cast aspersions on Obama’s very American-ness, saying “I am just so fearful that this is not a man who sees America the way that you and I see America” (Beinart). Though Palin does not clarify how she thinks Obama sees America, her meaning is implicit: Obama has the perspective of the foreign immigrant who, Beinart argues and I agree, has replaced African-Americans as the target of national hatred and anxiety. One third of Americans surveyed by the Pew Research Center “also mentioned ‘the kind of person he is’” as a reason they disliked Obama, and Hillary Clinton was urged by Democratic campaign manager Mark Penn to “exploit Obama's ‘lack of American roots’ and ‘limited’ connection to ‘basic American values and culture’” (Beinart).

If Superman, then, is an immigrant whose “visual difference from the norm is underscored by his decision to wear a costume of bright primary colors so tight as to be his very skin,” (80) Obama has wrapped himself in those same colors to highlight his moral similarities to the norm. Superman “adds a white Anglo-Saxon Protestant ingredient to the American stew” (85) of Barack Obama’s heritage. For the worried voter wondering how Obama might use or misuse presidential power, Superman acts with “the moral guidance of a Smallville upbringing” (85). Though the white voter, now become a part of Barthes’s bourgeois, cannot take part in Obama’s life experience, he or she “can at least imagine the place where he fits in” (Barthes 152). As such, attaching himself to the Superman myth allows Obama to use the Man of Steel to “abolish the complexity of human acts” and “give them the simplicity of essences” (143). Obama-as-Superman becomes a myth in and of itself which has “a clarity which is not that of an explanation but of a statement of fact” (143). Obama-Superman is natural; it goes without saying.

In the process of writing this essay, a Canadian friend said to me, “Try to imagine a Canadian Superman.” Neither of us could. Though Superman makes pretenses to a universal citizenship, he is the ideal American immigrant, “the great American hero” in a nation full of legendary figures (Engle 80). And naturally, if Superman is a uniquely American myth, Obama, as the successfully-elected President, must be too. However, the pseudo-nationalism inherent to these myths largely goes unnoticed in favor of emphasizing Obama as “the beneficiary and exemplar of American exceptionalism,” who allows them to believe in the myth-become-fact of the American Dream and the man who embodies it, Superman—whose own myth “asserts with total confidence and a childlike innocence the value of the immigrant in American culture” (81).

Such praise also goes beyond American shores. The New York Times’s Ethan Bronner noted the day after the election, many European countries “who are quick to condemn the United States for its racist past” and are now offering congratulations for Obama’s historic election “fail to acknowledge the same problem in their own societies, and so do not see how this election could offer them any lessons about themselves.” He cites Russian leaders who praise Obama but say nothing of their own issues with ethnic minorities, and a Nigerian columnist who says, “Nigerians love good things in other lands, even if they are not making any effort to reproduce the same at home.” Throughout all the reactions to Obama’s election reported in the New York Times and elsewhere, there is a distinct lack of other countries emphasizing the gains of their own minority political candidates—yet when America elects a minority candidate, there is cause for celebration around the world and American citizens say that “racism in America is dead” (Ohlemacher). These lingering problems of disenfranchisement, nationalist tendencies, and invisibility do not have a place in America, “the land of extraordinary opportunity and possibility, where miracles happen” (Bronner).

By definition, a miracle is an extraordinary event which is often related to the divine. It is no surprise, then, that American bills still carry the phrase, “In God We Trust.” At the end of his essay, Engle draws direct parallels between Superman and religious iconography, saying he “serves as a safe, nonsectarian focus for essentially religious sentiments” (86). But while Superman has superpowers should he get caught in a tight spot and risk failure, Obama has only his judgment and ability to surround himself with the most knowledgeable people available. Ultimately, Obama-as-hero is only as good as the choices he makes. For a man in whom so many mythic expectations have been invested, that’s a big load for one mere mortal to carry. Obama, then, might be better cast as another 1940s superhero success: Captain Marvel. Though Marvel lived his normal life as average teenager Billy Batson, he is able to transform himself into “The World’s Mightiest Mortal” by calling on the wisdom, strength, stamina, power, courage, and speed of various historic heroes and gods with a magic word. Obama has already called on the powers of one immortal American hero, Martin Luther King Jr., and will no doubt look to others throughout his Presidency.

Works Cited (Not Linked)

Barthes, Roland. Mythologies. New York: Hill and Wang Press, 2001.

Eagan, Patrick L. "Flag With A Human Face." Superman at Fifty!: The Persistence of a Legend. Ed. Dennis Dooley and Gary Engle. New York: Collier Books, 1987.

Engle, Gary. "What Makes Superman So Darned American?." Superman at Fifty!: The Persistence of a Legend. Ed. Dennis Dooley and Gary Engle. New York: Collier Books, 1987.

Yes, I did just do that. My geekiness, it does not know these bounds you speak of.