In memorium: Superman

October 13, 2004

I was quite disappointed to see that Christopher Reeve died this past weekend. Superman is probably the first superhero movie I can ever remember seeing, even though my memories of the second and third are probably stronger since I saw them later. But given how I turned out in life–that is, a movie fan with more than a hint of geekiness and a small love of comic books–Reeve’s death was very sad for me. Very seldomly does an actor play a role and be completely spot on and just nail the part. They aren’t the actor then, but they’re the character in the flesh. Mark Hamill will always be Luke Skywalker, Sean Connery will always be James Bond, Harrison Ford will always be Indiana Jones (and Han Solo, of course), and Christopher Reeve will always be Superman. Playing the same role over and over isn’t what did it for Reeve, but it was his performance, and how well he became the greatest superhero to ever live. The Man of Steel. When you talk about comic books with someone, most people have only a passing interest or knowledge about them. It’s only been in the last five years that the general public discovered the X-Men, Daredevil, Spider-Man, Hellboy, and a few other of the more popular (or cultish) comic book heroes, but ask anyone on the streets for the better part of the past century, and Superman would be a recognized name. Everyone knows that Superman is faster than a speeding bullet, more powerful than a locomotive, and able to jump tall buildings in a single bound. “Up in the sky! It’s a bird! It’s a plane! No, it’s ________!” Ask anyone (well, over the age of 5 or 6, maybe) to finish that sentence, and I’d be willing to bet that 75% of people would say “Superman!”

Now Superman is dead. The character will always live on, but in my mind, as well as the minds of probably millions of others, the person we picture when we think of Superman is now gone. No one’s ever been able to successfully become the other best-known superhero, Batman, as Reeve did Superman, though I suspect that when Adam West passes on there will be some amount of mourning for his role in that mythos. Yes, Reeve had other accomplishments in life, and he certainly played other roles, but this was his legacy in the film world for better or for worse. He knew what he was signing up for when he donned those tights and cape, and he should have expected to be carried into the next couple of decades as the Man of Steel. When he had his accident ten years ago, I remember thinking of the bitter irony of Superman being confined to a wheelchair, but I’m glad that he wasn’t killed and was able to go on and touch so many other people’s lives as a champion of the disabled and stem cell research. I genuinely thought that one day he would be able to walk again, and I’m just sad that he never lived to see the day in which that was possible.

Before I continue, I wanted to give two tributes to Superman and Christopher Reeve. The first are the lyrics to the woefully poetic “Superman Song” as sung by the Crash Test Dummies. After I heard this song for the first time, I always felt kind of bad for Superman.

Superman’s Song

Tarzan wasn’t a ladies’ man
He’d just come along and scoop ‘em up under his arm
Like that, quick as a cat in the jungle
But Clark Kent, now there was a real gent
He would not be caught sittin’ around in no
Junglescape, dumb as an ape doing nothing

[CHORUS]
Superman never made any money
For saving the world from Solomon Grundy
And sometimes I despair the world will never see
Another man like him

Hey Bob, Supe had a straight job
Even though he could have smashed through any bank
In the United States, he had the strength, but he would not
Folks said his family were all dead
Their planet crumbled but Superman, he forced himself
To carry on, forget Krypton, and keep going

Tarzan was king of the jungle and Lord over all the apes
But he could hardly string together four words: “I Tarzan, You Jane.”

Sometimes when Supe was stopping crimes
I’ll bet that he was tempted to just quit and turn his back
On man, join Tarzan in the forest
But he stayed in the city, and kept on changing clothes
In dirty old phonebooths till his work was through
And nothing to do but go on home

[CHORUS]

Lastly, I wanted to post this picture as drawn by Scott Kurtz, author and artist of the webcomic PvP that I read daily.

If only Superman could fly around the world backwards at supersonic speeds and make the planet spin backwards and take us back in time so we could all say goodbye to Christopher Reeve. Goodbye, Superman, we’ll miss you. You’ve been the protector of the world longer than most of us can remember.

Monday afternoon I logged into my game City of Heroes to create a new character that I’d be mulling over, and there was a lot of hullaballo going on in the game over Reeve’s death, as I expected. There were a couple of dozen of heroes standing at attention in the game saluting a towering statue of the hero Atlas in the center of the city. In the game’s mythos, Atlas was a hero who gave his life to save the city just after World War II broke out, and I guess the players figured he was an appropriate hero to honor in Reeve’s memory. The statue stands perhaps 100 or 200 feet tall in the game, with the hero bent over and the whole world on his back, nearly crushing him. But there he stands forever, carrying the whole world much like his “real world” mythological inspiration. Much like Superman always did. There were always other superheroes in Superman’s world, but Superman was always the one they all turned to to save the world at the end of the day. There was a flyby scheduled with all heroes who could take to the sky participating. All in all, it seemed an appropriate way to mourn Reeve’s death. There’s been talk of a permanent memorial in the game to his death, which I think would perfectly fit the game environment. After all, it’s IS a game about being a superhero, and when the Superman both from the movies and real life dies, well, there should be some sort of memory to him. Nothing like the towering statue of Atlas and the other heros that are in the city, maybe something as simple as renaming a hospital in the city after Reeve, which I think would honor both his memory as Superman and his memory as a champion for the disabled.

Well, all that aside, things are going OK here in P-Town. I signed up today to take the day after Thanksgiving off from work as one of my “floating” holidays where I can choose one of several days to take off during the year. I don’t get docked from my FTO time, but I DO get paid. Since Christmas and New Year’s are both on Saturdays this year, we get the following Monday off instead, so three-day weekends for both. I figured that instead of having two three day weekends and a Thursday off, I’d take the three day weekends and a four day weekend. Works for me.

I can’t believe it’s only a little over a month away from Thanksgiving, though. Where the hell did my year go? Seems like it was only yesterday that I was laid up with abum knee watching the baseball playoffs, but that was a year ago. If you’ll remember, it was a year ago I was laughing at the antics of the Cubs in my entries. Well the Cubs aren’t in the playoffs this year, though the Red Sox are once again threatening to overturn decades of tradition. As much as I dislike the idea of the Yankees winning the World Series…again…someone has to put a stop to those Red Sox. They can’t be allowed to win the Series! The Curse of Bambino will stop them, hopefully. Oh well. At least it’s not like last year when the possibility of a Cubs-Red Sox reared its head, threatening to end all life as we know it and create a void of nothingness by pitting two perrenial losers against each other. Just how many innings CAN a baseball game go? I think 22 innings is the record, but with those two teams, after 50 innings of a 0-0 score, they’d probably just give up. I kid, I kid! Sort of.

Yesterday I spent literally all day reading and posting in a thread on Fark.com concerning the Supreme Court’s decision to hear a case about the posting of the Ten Commandments by the state. I was amazed at how many emotional people there were on each side of the issue, and like politics, I’m so amazed when things like that turn violent in words. Being a Political Science scholar and a former ConLaw student, I have a pretty good idea of what the decision will be, and I also have a pretty good idea of how the decision will be written. My guess: 6-3 in favor of removing the monuments from state-owned property and most of the decision is spent talking about the monument as a work opf art rather than religion. In the end, the establishment clause of the 1st amendment will be used to justify the removal as usual.

I have no doubts in my mind that this case would not have made it to the Supreme Court if the monument had been to the pillars of Islam. In fact, I’d be willing to bet that such a monument would never have been allowed to have been built. The real test is if you’d allow the Ten Commandments but disallow such an Islamic monument. Most people in the thread who supported the monument being kept where it currently is tended to say things like the Ten Commandments have significance as the basis of laws in this country, but that’s not exactly true. Not only are there multiple version of the Ten Commandments floating around among different works of the Bible, but even if you break them down into their simplest forms from the King James Bible, only three out of the ten have legal basis: killing, stealing, and bearing false witness, which could be covered by libel, slander, and perjury, but even then only under specific circumstances. As a matter of fact, several of the other Commandments in fact violate the First Amendment because they’re significant only to Christianity and fall under establishment, which the first amendment prohibits.

It’s the people who accuse the government of being anti-religion that get me all riled up. As if the government hasn’t been separating Church and State for decades! Jefferson turned down a national day of prayer as early as 1803, citing the need to keep religion and state sepaarte. The Founding Fathers were deeply religious men for the most part, but they specifically avoided tying religion and state together because they’d seen the carnage in Europe occuring for the previous…oh…how far back does written history in Europe go? Religion’s not a bad thing, not at all. Religion and state dictating behavior to each other is a bad thing. Does posting a monument to the Ten Commandments mean that’s the case? No, but you can’t make exceptions to the Constitution. Not unless you legislate one in the form of a new Amendment, at least, and that’s not easy to do, nor is it prudent.

Anyway, those are my thoughts on that matter. I’m not a religious man in any sense of the word, but I deeply believe in the Constitution of the United States. I believe in what it stands for, and I believe in the freedoms that it dictates to every one of us. When I see people wanting to push through a Constitutional amendment prohibiting same sex marriages, it makes me furious. Not because I disagree, but because people are trying to use the Constitution to dictate social policy of the day. Anyone remember Prohibition? Great idea. Times change, so do opinions. I was happy that the Amendment failed even the first step, and while I still disagree with the idea of prohibiting same sex marriages, I’m glad that it’s being handled at the state level instead of federal. There’s a measure on the ballot here in November to prohibit same sex marriages, and I plan on voting against it. It made me mad at first that it had crept onto the ballot in the first place, but eh, then I remembered that’s what I had WANTED to happen. In general, I mean, instead of at a federal level. Given that the anti-homosexual bills that made it onto the Oregon ballots in the past failed miserably, I’m minorly concerned about whether this will fail or not, but I have confidence in Oregonians.

But all that’s a story for another day.

I finally got to move on to a new project here at work after my boss laid down the law with one of our clients who was pestering us and making us make constant revisions to the product they’d contracted for. My boss needed me to move on to other things, so not only are we getting more money, but the guy we’re working for/with is not sending as many bug reports our way, now. Thank goodness. So now I’m on to something else for the time being, splitting my time between the old project and this new one. My boss had me take a look at some testing documents and estimate how much time it would take me to complete a gambit of tests for the next thing down the pipeline, and it came out to be about two weeks worth of time. Combined with programming time, we’re sending a very large bill to a company that makes a very well-known PIM so we can do their in-house testing for them. Fun. They’re already about a month behind, though, so I don’t start all that for awhile.

I brought my iPod to work today, which is something that’s frowned upon, but I needed a distraction from the humdrum of installing and uninstalling all day. SInce I’m not taking tech calls, I don’t need to be listening for the phone, and as long as I keep up my workload, I should be OK. I think my boss is pretty distarct by a trade show he’s going to be at for the next couple of days, anyway.

I have more to write, but I should get to work. Maybe I’ll even remember to write later this week instead of spacing my entries out over a week! Anyway, I’m still here. See ya.

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