Well! Strangely enough I've been tagged twice in regards to this 'superpower meme' that's going around. My sincere thanks to Jessica and C for tagging me regarding it.
Superpowers, suerpowers.......? Was it not the Jew who invented the superhero to make-up for his shortcomings and the failings of a nation? The ‘Super-Man’, the ‘Über-Mensch’? Not Nietzsche’s Übermensch, but a man endowed with physical prowess alone, based, of course, on mythologies and legends of gods and men capable of extraordinary things, dating back to the most ancient civilizations.
Yet can it really be said that this superhero is totally divorced from the Übermensch? They are obviously not the same, but both, I feel, share a similar core idea; for the concept of the Greek god too, as with the Nietzschean hero, came from the premise that in this world some are naturally stronger than others, and it is up to them to usurp the power from the meek in order to properly govern society (like Batman’s relationship with the police). From Gilgamesh to Samson to Hercules to Zorro to Batman, the superhero is the manifestation of the male ego, which feels that it is singlehandedly capable of setting the world straight….
But enough of empty concepts! Let us talk ‘tachlis’! My personal favorite super-hero when I was a kid was Nightcrwaler of the Excalibur spin-off of the X-Men comic-book. It wasn’t really his power I was interested in (teleportation) but his personality; he was a cool, laid-back bourgeois type of German dude. He just never fretted about anything. ..he refused to. .(Oh yeah, him and Pete Wisdom! Memories!)
Aaaaanyway, I noticed most of the people who responded to this chose some form of mind-reading (I guess x-ray vision went out of style pretty quickly when guys realized that it wasn’t just girls’ clothes they were able to see through, but skin and ligaments as well). Personally, I like the mind-reading idea (since people are the key to power, and understanding them and how they think of you is they key to people), but as long as you're reading the mind, you might as well be able to manipulate it as well. ….though mind-manipulation is not something specific to superpowers…
In truth though, one of the responsibilities of this meme is to tag seven others (which is partly responsible for my being tagged), the only problem is that by the time this kind of thing gets around to me pretty much everyone else who I might have tagged has already been! So…
2 comments:
Definitely an answer like no other!
Ha! Thank you.
Post a Comment