Superman
This week we had assistant professor Chris Gavaler from Washington and Lee University who lead us in the discussion on origin of superheroes. This was an interesting topic which I related to some of the oral traditions that our grandfather used to tell us when we were young in the evening around fire places in my home. The superhero in the context of my grandfather’s stories, were mostly of men who were able to raid neighboring communities for cattle, as my community was a cattle keeping tribe, and mostly would come home victorious with lost of cattle.
We read two chapters of Gavaler book, Origins of Superheroes, which introduced us to the connection of evolution, eugenics and superheroes. In this readings, superheroes we mostly depicted as good people who were defending the less fortunate in the society from the harm by others. This was interesting considering nation’s organization in the present, which I will handle later. The drive to have desirable heritable characteristics in the late 19th and early 20th century lead to eugenic in the United stated. This was a move by the white and rich people who thought interbreeding with non-white would dilute the white desired characteristics. This also was thought to lead to degenerating of the desired characteristics in the white people. The ideology of eugenic was that a superman would be produced after a generations of selective breeding. What was more interesting was the thought that ending crime, poverty, and undesired human behaviors was to preventing unfit parents from giving birth to unfit babies though inheritance of those unfit characteristics from their parents. Later in the early 20th century, Hitler using the same ideology, perpetrated by the US earlier, wanted to cleanse Europe of ethnic diversity with an aim of returning the greatness of the ancient Greece and Rome which lead to many people dying in the Nazi Germany.
“Making America great again,” was one of the statement that dominated President Trump’s camping and has been a common statement that he uses a lot after he was elected as the president. Contrary to greatness of people as it was in the early twentieth century, this greatness is about the country being the first in may development aspects and being seen as the leading country in the world. This brings me to my previous idea of greatness of nations. Each nation on the world today wants to be superior to one another and would want to do anything to keep itself up, where they are, or find ways of lifting itself up on the hierarchy. Each country is trying to get the perfect economy, war machinery and weapons, well trained soldiers perfect alliance among other aspects that makes a country a superior country. My big question that I have kept pondering is why we have to restrict other countries from having certain resources that might make them competitive or even superior to another country. Nuclear weapon is one of thing than countries use to rank themselves in the world. I have been questioning the idea of other countries deciding who can and can not have nuclear weapon. I do not think it is okay for some countries to have the power to decide.
This week’s readings and lecture, made me think about superiority of countries in our present time, how it manifests itself and how prevention of other countries from being superior to another is happening.