Comic-book Dreams

When I was four years old, Uncle James took me to Woolworth’s and gave me ten cents to buy my first comic book, Superman. I was hooked, and for the rest of my childhood became a voracious consumer of DC’s entire line-up. My favorites were Green Lantern, Batman, and Superman. Green Lantern’s telekinetic ring was activated by the force of his indomitable will. Batman, who lived by his wits and lifetime of physical training, demonstrated how one could be heroic without possessing superhuman powers. Superman was the mightiest of them all, with super-speed, the power of flight (even to outer space), super-strength, invulnerability, super-cold breath, and heat, telescopic, and x-ray vision. I dreamt of soaring through the sky, catching bank robbers, and rescuing people from danger, all to the cheers of adoring crowds. But even as a small child I knew comic-book heroes were fictional characters and I would never be able to fly through the air like Superman. Eventually I put away (most of) my childish things and managed to carve out my own slice of paradise in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Today entire peoples still lead lives of grinding poverty. They cannot overcome their physical wretchedness by cultivating a life of the mind due to straitjackets imposed by their society and religion. But some of them believe there is a way out, a fantastical reversal of fortune in which a miserable existence can be redeemed by a praiseworthy death. The death can be made even more glorious if it causes the death of non-believers, and the more the better. A heaven of eternal sensual pleasure awaits if one straps on a belt or drives a car laden with plastic explosives and endures a split-second of pain.

The fantasy goes further: it envisions a restoration of the caliphate across the Mediterranean, the spread of fundamentalist Islam into the land of Andalusia (Spain) and revenge against the “crusaders”. It is more than a little ironic that the countries of old Europe who committed the original sins—and there were horrible sins committed on all sides from the 11th through 15th centuries--disparage America’s attempts to defend itself. The Islamo-fascist revenge fantasy has its basis in injuries suffered long before the New World was colonized by the Old. One is enormously tempted to abandon the ungrateful descendants of the French and Spanish knights to their fate, but that is a fantasy unworthy of a great people.

[Addendum: being well-educated does not necessarily make one less susceptible to fantasy ideology.] © 2004 Stephen Yuen