In the latest issue of ‘Action Comics’ a white supremacist with a machine gun tries to kill the undocumented workers he blames for losing his job. It looks like it’s all over for the immigrants until Superman zooms in at the last moment to shield them from the hail of bullets. Hurray !
So innocents protected, mass murder prevented, bad guy brought to justice. Surely the cue for cheering and wild applause ? Well no. These are apparently ‘bad things’ in the bizarro-world of Fox News where the Man of Steel is currently being attacked for being a “propaganda tool for the defenders of illegal aliens.” The column, from host of Fox News & Commentary Todd Starnes, concludes by saying “It’s unfortunate that DC Comics is turning its stable of iconic heroes into political pawns – hell-bent on indoctrinating our kids.”
Fox do have a point, though, in saying that Clark Kent (Superman) is technically an ‘illegal’ alien, although their use of the word ‘illegal’ rather than the more correct ‘undocumented’ is typically problematic. One of America’s greatest fictional heroes was indeed an undocumented immigrant. He entered the USA covertly from the planet Krypton as a baby, bypassing legal border controls. The kindly Kents took him in and raised him as their own but the circumstances of his entry to the USA weren’t reported to the authorities.
Superman grew up leading a double life, keeping his secret by wearing a cunning disguise (a pair of glasses) and hiding his true identity from officialdom in a way that today would have made Homeland Security very twitchy and might even have resulted in him ending up wrongly on some terrorist watch list as many innocent people do. Put bluntly, from the point of view of our modern surveillance state, Superman behaved very suspiciously.
Of course the option to repatriate Superman never really existed because his home planet of Krypton had exploded so questions of his ‘dreamer’ status would be largely academic. Which is just as well because there’s certainly no shortage of evil-doers and criminals for him to fight these days in America, although unfortunately many of the worst ones seem to be employed in Washington as politicians or at right-wing propaganda machines like Fox ‘News’ or Breitbart peddling fake news and fomenting discord.
Way back in the 1950′s Superman was advising kids, “If you hear anybody talk against a schoolmate or anyone else because of his religion, race or national origin don’t wait: tell him that kind of talk is un-American.” And it is, of course. Time the racists and white-supremacists who have hijacked parts of the Republican Party and American politics were made to understand that.
