My Left-behind Doll

I recently saw this old toy of mine at my parents house. He's been through a lot since those days when I would hold his waist and do the sound of rushing water (shhHHUUuuu...) while running around the house looking for bullets that needed to be shot at an impermeable chest.

Now in his cripplage and disuse he only reminds me of the things I used to think about him when I was 4 years old:

How can I get my hair to do that forehead curl thing? (next to Larry Hagman on I dream of genie I thought Superman had the best hair.)

Why does he need underwear both inside and outside his suit?

He's looking healthy now. he was so fat back in the 50s.

I think he's worth at least 7 million. (but the Steve Austin doll did have an eye-piece and skin that rolled off his arm and accessories like a powerup tent and the 1970s equivalent of USB cables.

Apparently at some point I also thought he'd be much more comfortable getting out of that tacky jumpsuit - I'm not sure if it's more homoerotic to like him in the suit or out of it.

Then when i saw the movie with Christopher Reeve my life gained a new quest: finding out what the "S" on his chest stands for. Because he had it when he was on Krypton and he wasn't Superman then. I refuse to admit that this was a continuity error. And it seems cheap to say that they all had letters on their chest and he just happened to get the one that would one day work well for his new name. But then it's also just as cheap to imagine that way out on Krypton they had a battery of symbols that just happened to coincide with Latinate typography. It's just like the difficulty all science fiction has with changing paradigms of communication or society. All speech sounds are English speech sounds (only the more dangerous species are allowed to use sounds different from ours [clicks and other implosives, voiced gutturals, laryngealization (or creaky voice)]) all accents of native speakers are either British or American and the more resonant voices are the more trustworthy. Perhaps the most resonant villain is Darth Vader - but his resonance is falsely produced.

But for now I'll just grant that Superman is such a hero precisely because of this nexus of appropriate characteristics. He's the guy who can help us that we want to help us. He'll do the job the way we want it done - with the style we like to see in action. With a mid-American accent wearing the two pigments on our flag.

It's the power of bigoted nationalism.

You can only sing our national anthem if you can sing it in our (unofficial) national language.