Hilarious ‘Man of Steel’ Review by The Washington Post: The exact reason that American society is failing

One of the reasons I like movies so much, especially ones like Man of Steel is that they challenge social beliefs and the standards of our day.  Prior to the release of Man of Steel, progressive statist lovers who relish themselves in the entertainment industry like maggots on spoiled food had written poor reviews about the new Superman movie basically saying that Kal-El, as he was portrayed in the film, was too good to be believable.  This is a remarkable statement and if one takes the time to let it sink in just a bit, is it any wonder that our society is so broken, so crime ridden, so morally and financially bankrupt?  In spite of the critics, Man of Steel has soared to extraordinary box office success which for me is a social vote against the attempt of progressives to steer our society into more statist philosophy.  When as many people show up to see a movie like Man of Steel in such a short period of time, it is a flat our rejection of the kind of statist culture that is being offered by modern-day intelligentsia.   But the king of negative reviews that I found absolutely intriguing is the one below from Alexandra Petri from The Washington Post.  Apparently the Man of Steel hit a really raw nerve with her, which is good because it shows what these types of people really believe in their hearts.  If I had to guess based on the review by Alexandra, I would say she came from a broken home, found herself passed out and drunk at a party more than once not able to find her cloths, and is having a hard time maintaining a stable relationship with a man.  She is a product of the progressive era, and the public schools that raise millions of children to believe in the same types of diabolical behavior patterns.  Because she thinks in such a way is why the Washington Post hired her to begin with, as she can write articles in a way that the masses can understand—or at least thinks they understand until something like Man of Steel comes along and shows society how far they have fallen from the tree of goodness.  For some, they yearn to take steps in their life to be closer to the ideal of Superman.  For others like Alexandra Petri, they find the idea of Superman to be utterly perplexing, out-dated, and an image that fills them with guilt, instead of hope.  Read her article for yourself.  I put the whole article up with a link at the end.

Man of Steel — have we outgrown Superman?

By Alexandra Petri, Published: June 20, 2013 The Washington Post

I dislike Superman.

Let me rephrase that.

I don’t like Superman.

I understand that he is America, or Jesus, or both at the same time, with Maximum Levels of Allegory and slightly better hair.

But who is he? A concatenation of catchphrases with perfect teeth and rippling muscles.

He’s perfect, and like anything perfect, he’s bland.

And here I thought it was just Brandon Routh that was the problem.

No, even in the gritty reboot “Man of Steel” currently In Theaters near you, he’s a problem. I saw the movie feeling a sense of obligation. It’s Superman. We love Superman. Of course we’re seeing Man of Steel.

But he feels dated. Everyone else these days is custom — flawed, just like you and me. Superman is one-size-fits-all perfection.

It’s not that he possesses so many virtues. As W. H. Auden said, “A vice in common can be the ground of a friendship but not a virtue in common. X and Y may be friends because they are both drunkards or womanizers but, if they are both sober and chaste, they are friends for some other reason.”

Superman lacks vices. At a critical moment in this summer’s “Man of Steel,” trying to sap his fighting spirit, someone yells, “OH YEAH? Well, you have a MORAL COMPASS and I DON’T!” As taunts go, this is only marginally more menacing than yelling, “OH YEAH? WELL, YOU HAVE REALLY NICE TEETH!” There’s nothing to insult.

Superman is your friend with a truck.

You cultivate his acquaintance in case you ever need help moving or a ride to a wine tasting in the country or defense against alien attack. But you wouldn’t want to sit next to him at dinner. You invite him to your wedding on the off-chance he will turn some of the water into wine. But what do you say to him?

Superman is genetically gifted to the point that he has never actually been required to make conversation. Late in the film, he whips a drone out of the sky, and an officer smiles blandly at him. “He’s kinda hot,” she says. What else can you say?

Let me insert the caveat that I am a fair-weather comics fan. I am the sunshine patriot and summer filmgoer. I didn’t grow up reading the issues or even watching Smallville; maybe there is an iteration of the hero that answers these questions satisfactorily.

At least in the film, his back story is depressing because it turns out he’s not just special for Earth — he’s special for his home planet Krypton, too. “The first natural birth in centuries!” his Space Dad, Russell Crowe, proclaims. Apparently he contains the lives of all future Kryptonians encoded in his body somewhere. It is a pity they forgot to include any personality with that.

But what personality could you fit?

Personality is something you are forced to develop to make people like you in spite of your inherent deficiencies. This is why when people say, “He has a wonderful personality,” it is usually shorthand for “He resembles a fat stoat.” If you are attractive and flawless, like Superman, what personality do you need? This is why Cyrano de Bergerac, with his giant hideous nose, has a rapier wit and is the life of the party, and Christian de Neuvillette, so handsome that people fall in love with him spontaneously across rooms, cannot complete a sentence to save his life. Adversity builds character. If you’re a diamond living among pumice, good luck being shaped into anything. No wonder Superman’s bland. When he gets bullied as a kid, his greatest struggle is not melting the bullies with his eyes. Forget first-world problems; he’s in a category by himself.

Of course, being in a category by yourself is its own kind of pain. He is the last of a species, alone, isolated, orphaned — but we don’t see that in the movie, except in brief flashbacks. If anything, he has too many living family members to be a high-functioning superhero. There’s nothing to latch onto in this Clark Kent, just a flying grin and a lot of explosions.

My understanding of myth structure, from Joseph Campbell, is that the essence of most hero stories is as follows: the hero Goes To The Father To Seek The Boon (getting help from a variety of archetypal figures and overcoming a variety of obstacles on the way), the hero obtains the boon, the hero returns and uses the boon to Save the People.

The trouble with Superman is that he already has the boon. He’s faster than a speeding bullet, capable of — yadda, yadda, yadda. As a consequence, the movie consists of numerous people delivering inspirational speeches to Superman about his unique capacity to save the world, and then he goes and does it. He doesn’t have to struggle to get where he is. But hey, there are a lot of explosions.

Still, is that enough?

What do we need from our myths?

Superman has always been a decently heavy-handed allegory: somebody’s only son sent to dedicate his life to save the human race? Gee. Who might this be?

Everyone else these days is so flawed. Iron Man has something resembling PTSD. Poor Captain America has come unstuck in time. Batman — don’t get me started on Batman. “Hey guys,” Superman says, sitting down at the bar next to them. “Rough day. I’m completely invulnerable to all earth substances, but also, I can fly!”

“Please leave,” Bruce Banner says, turning a little green.

The other superheroes filling our screens this summer have had a process of becoming. Superman doesn’t become. He just lands. He’s just super. He’s all the fun of playing Make Believe with a 6-year-old who keeps changing the rules on you so that he’s invulnerable and always wins.

Superman is the hero we don’t deserve but need right now. Here he comes now with that truck of his, just in time to help.

But that doesn’t mean I have to like him.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/compost/wp/2013/06/20/man-of-steel-have-we-outgrown-superman/

You can see more about her on Twitter at the following link:

https://twitter.com/petridishes

It is because of people like Alexandra Petri that we have Barack Obama as president, more scandals in Washington in just a couple of years than all of them combined during the last century, and the moral compass of America that is faltering under rudderless leadership by beta men who eat out of the hand of alpha women, who secretly are always on the lookout for the alpha male—who using Petri’s metaphor–is always the guy with the truck.  It not that she’s a bad person, or even a devious progressive.  In her article, she was honest, so I won’t rip her to shreds over what she wrote.  But she represents a great sickness that is destroying entire generations and is what people like me see as philosophically worse than catching the bubonic plague.

Of course people like Alexandra Petri have to live in their bodies and the minds that have molded them, so they have no other point of reference but to look at a film like Man of Steel and find reasons to make fun of it, because she can’t relate.  It isn’t her opinion that is the problem, but the fact that she cannot relate to a person who does not have vices, or rather that she believes that vices are what built relationships in the first place.  Her statements are as ridiculous as two businessmen who are nurturing a deal, who go out drinking to become intoxicated so both can see weaknesses in each other so that trust between the two can be shared with a common secret.  Any relationship built upon such foundations is doomed to fail, just as a society built on vices, and personal failures will collapse on itself.

I blame the creation of people like Alexandra Petri not on a disagreement over social philosophy, but of the origin of her thoughts to begin with, to the parents who obviously instructed her wrong, to the life situations that shaped her mind to believe that virtue is inferior to vice.  To each and every teacher in her public school that helped mold her mind to believe that having a “moral compass” is an out-dated ideal, and that it is appropriate to be nice to someone just so you can use them to help deliver something with their truck.

Alexandra Petri from The Washington Post represents the common demographic of 20 to 35 year olds in 2013 America—a lost generation that is hopelessly misplaced, and teetering on the precipice of disaster.  The only thing that keeps these rudderless beings afloat is the socialist mechanisms of the previous generation who gave them the New Deal and the Great Society, which are not sustainable financially.   Alexandra Petri is a child of those two progressive concepts and for her Superman is not about hope, but an unrealized ideal of what mankind is supposed to be.  Man is not supposed to be perfect, they are to be flawed, scandalous, and judged not by the merit of their work or quality of life, but by their vices.

Ironically lost to Alexandra is the metaphor that the type of qualities she found important and lacking in Kal-El, are the kind of values that General Zod proposed in the film.  An America led by people like Alexandra Petri are doomed to live out in real life what the fictional fate of Krypton turned out to be.  Yet she didn’t see that parallel.  She just saw her anxiety over the kind of perfection that was presented by Superman with a concept that was so foreign to her that the magic was lost.  For her, she needs people with fault to feel they have a personality, and she is far from alone.  If I had to put a number on the amount of people in society who think the same way she does, I’d say that it’s as high as 85%.  Many of them most likely left the Man of Steel movie feeling the same way, like they know they are supposed to like Superman, in the same way that people are supposed to like church—with a rebellious reverence to the idea of goodness that can be pushed back against with rejection, even though their bodies go through the motions of attending.

Alexandra Petri is allowed to think whatever she wants.  But she is forbidden to make decisions on my behalf, and that includes burdening me with goof-ball presidents like Barack Obama, unmanaged public education costs, government scandals, NSA spying, and more socialism in our current government with more entitlement programs.  Because she can vote, and does, and supports a democratic mode of government, then Alexandra’s bad ideas are in direct competition with my ideas, and those thoughts about reality are not compatible.  When she complains that she wants to see a flawed Superman, she speaks to a desire to create a flawed society—and she votes accordingly.  I on the other hand expect Superman to be flawless, and I live my life in a way to represent that idea.  When Alexandra Petri makes fun of the virtuous perfection that Superman represents, she is stating that my expectations human beings should strive to be all that they can be, and still push for more is too difficult, and unrealistic since such people lack personality, which is more important than value.

When it is wondered why the world is so screwed up, just read the article above and imagine millions of people like Alexandra Petri living their lives looking to hire, befriend, and interact socially not with the best that the human race has to offer, but the worst, because vices, imperfection, and perilous human weaknesses are endearing personality traits that people like Alexandra can relate to—which makes them good.    It should come as no surprise then when our society fails, because it is led in a mob-like democracy by people like Alexandra Petri who have been taught that all the things that are valuable are the things that make human beings the most disgusting.

Read my review of the same movie here to see how completely different kinds of thinking people can see the same thing and come away with opposite opinion.  CLICK HERE.

Rich Hoffman

“Justice Comes with the Crack of a Whip’!”

www.tailofthedragonbook.com