Superman Is A Shitlib
What is punk rock today won't be punk rock tomorrow.
A decade into this fascist groove thing and all its ugliness and depravity and its never-ending cast of loathsome characters, a decade into the lawlessness that has left us watching helplessly as the worst among us suffer exactly zero consequences for their crimes, Superman is all libbed up and ready to go.
I was on the third and final leg of my trip back to the US from Greece – an eight-hour ferry ride from Chios to Athens, a two-hour flight from Athens to Istanbul, and the final, agonizingly long flight back to Washington – when I simply could not read anymore. I was trying to finish the book I read on the beach every day in Greece (The Nature of Monsters by Clare Clark) and the pain behind my eyes told me it was time to close the thing and rest or maybe watch something on the screen directly in front of my face.
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I had already napped, silicon earplugs stuffed deep into my ears. I was tired, but not sleepy. So I scrolled through the movie options and settled on the 2025 Superman movie directed by James Gunn. While I had heard plenty of good things about it, I am a longtime super hero movie hater and refused to sit down and invest two hours in what would surely be another boring, lasers-shooting-of-out-the-hands super hero film with the same plot as every other culture-killing super hero film.
The Superman-enjoying BFT readers know by now that I was wrong, and that there was something to this Superman movie beyond lasers shooting out of various parts of people's bodies (though there was some of that).
Denny Carter
Superman has always been something of what cynical folks on the left might call an optimistic shitlib and a defender of the idea that the United States is a place where everyone can and should be free and enjoy the legal protections and a decent life. I'm no Superman aficionado but I have seen the comics in which Superman punches nazis and their collaborators. I've seen the stuff where Superman talks aspirationally about what America can be, rather than what it is in the moment. Probably that carried a lot more currency before the nation's first tyrant took charge and showed with horrifying clarity that a big old swath of Americans are fine with lazy, internet-poisoned fascism as long as the fascist promises cheaper eggs and gas.
LunchCounterPunch
Superman, from what I understand, has always represented the part of America that believes in its bones that this place can be good and fair, that love and justice have a place here, and that there is no real purpose to pretending otherwise. Superman sees the doomers and hears the doomers and sometimes gets hit with bricks by the doomers and he says, in so many words, stop being that way. Stop giving in and being the worst version of yourself – something that is exceedingly easy to do online, where anonymous bricks are easy to throw. Superman – the 2025 version, at least – is interesting without being traditionally transgressive. His transgressiveness – if one can even call it that – might be found in his refusal to give into the cynicism that surrounds him, the cynicism that drips from (almost) every word of the 2025 version of Lois Lane.
We all like shit that confirms our priors, and there's a scene in last year's Superman film that some say was ripped straight from Bad Faith Times blog posts since the 2024 election. In a terse exchange with Lane about midway through the movie, Superman tells her as politely as he can that her punk rock ethos is not, in fact, punk rock at all. It's defensive and it's pessimistic and it's deeply distrustful of other people, no matter how well intentioned, Superman suggests.
"I question everything and everyone," Lane says. "You trust everyone and think everyone you've ever met is beautiful."
"Maybe," Superman says, setting his jaw, considering Lane's words, "that's the real punk rock."
That he's right (almost) goes without saying. Earnestness and decency are good and worthy; we're going to need a lot of it in the aftermath of the Trump years. Being nice to people – even strangers, even assholes – is something for which we should strive. Shutting our mouths and not hurting someone for no reason at all should be seen as a positive characteristic, not some kind of willingness to be censored.
The chuds who backed Trump in 2024 because it made them feel edgy and triggered mom and dad think they are transgressive. They had been told from an early age by authority figures and the larger culture not to use slurs and to mock those with disabilities and to not disrespect ladies, and their response – typically, predictably – was to do just that. Freedom for these folks is using the r-slur to describe someone with an intellectual disability. Freedom is using the n-word in public. Freedom is telling women that they do not have bodily autonomy, that it is you who will gladly control their fertility. This is the libertarian dream: A political landscape in which one can tread on everyone while whining about being tread upon.
It's Superman's approach to justice and do-goodism that stands opposed to what might be called Dark Woke, a strand of left/liberal politics embraced in the early days of the second Trump term that adopted the dehumanizing language of the right wing to oppose the right wing. This, as you might recall, was most clearly seen in failed U.S. Senate candidate Jasmine Crockett dubbing wheelchair-bound Texas Governor Greg Abbott as "Governor Hotwheels." This, I'm sure, feels good to say, if only for a moment.
Mocking a man who has used his wealth and political power to torment and destroy marginalized communities in Texas for so many years – hurting that man's feelings – might feel like a blow for justice, like a win for the good guys (Rejecting the Dark Woke thing doesn't mean one must become a punching bag for the fascists; there are plenty of ways to achieve justice with stern rule-of-law politics, as Senator Ron Wyden has shown).
It is, of course, the direct opposite. Using derogatory language in which the American right delights is a concession to their hideous, anti-human worldview. You are giving up the fight for a more fair and free country when you engage in their prejudices and hatreds, and you're telling those who look to you for guidance and modeling that it's OK to use discriminatory language as long as it's directed at the right person. Who's the right person? That's the tricky part.
You've given away the whole game when you talk and act like your opponents as a means to an end. The contest is over. You've lost. And for what? A jolt of dopamine after landing a joke about a disabled Republican? For what you sold your soul?
It'll be important, as I wrote back March, not to chastise folks on the political periphery for signaling their virtues as we try to find an exit ramp off this fascist highway. They're not going to sound edgy or based, and that's OK. It has to be OK.
I'd hope that folks who want to emerge from the competitive authoritarian swamp in which we live today would learn to tolerate the virtue signalers among us. All of the above virtues, I think, are worthy and deserving of acknowledgement and even praise. Young folks especially should have their pro-social messaging reinforced. Tell them yes, that's good and you should keep saying it. It doesn't take much. I can think of worse societal trends than people – particularly young people – saying, "I approve of this good thing and I want credit and adoration for that." To care about people and institutions and to express pro-social is not cool. It won't be cool during Woke 2 just as it wasn't cool during Woke 1 or during the 2008 presidential campaign and the two years after that, before the Republican Party finished its transformation into an explicitly fascist party that has no place in a democratic republic.
The cultural zeitgeist will never stop shifting. The political pendulum will never stop swinging, no matter how hard the right tries. What is cool today, what carries cultural cachet today, won't carry it tomorrow. What is punk rock today won't be punk rock tomorrow.
It was once cool to be good: I think of the way rock stars talked about global challenges during and after 1985's Live Aid concert; they were cringe as hell and it was beautiful. Skip ahead forty years and it's cool to embrace the fascist candidate because he says things you weren't supposed to say and allowed you to be the worst version of yourself. People have since gotten a taste of what it's like when you put a man like that in charge and unleash the blackpilled monsters who adore him and see him as a means to reaching the void – the ultimate goal for every fascist movement – and they do not like it, not one bit.
Superman in all his various iterations over the generations has had the opportunity to adopt the Dark Woke approach and abuse his metahuman powers to achieve what he sees as right and good. At any moment he could maim and kill and destroy the bad guys, whoever they are, whatever they want. Superman chooses to do things the Right Way and to believe in the goodness of others and the potential of the human race not as an academic exercise, but because he must. Superman is a shitlib to the core.
Follow Denny Carter on Bluesky at @dennycarter.bsky.social.
