Time Wasting on the Interwebs
Apr. 28th, 2011 11:38 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lydamorehouseOkay, so this morning one of the articles making the rounds on the Intertubes is a spoiler for Action Comics #900 in which Superman renounces his US Citizenship.
My partner sent me the link from Boing-Boing and I saw it again on a conservative "friend" on Facebook, and then, after watching a beautiful, moving, impassioned speech by a YouTube vloger named Baratunde about his reaction to Donald Trump's response to the President. I was struck by the irony.
Superman is the ultimate illegal alien. The guy isn't even from EARTH and, though the DC Wikis all claim he's a "naturalized" citizen because the Kents adopted him -- but it's totally fraudulant, actually, since there can NOT possibly be a birth certificate there. They picked him up in a cornfield, for crying out loud!
Anyway, Clark would need a birth certificate for a social security card, passport, etc. I insisted all that would have to be faked, though my friend JPJ asked what the rules about home births, etc, were back when Supes was "born" -- He says, "Clark/Supes was a fully grown man when he first shows up in 1938. Which places his arrival here between 1905-1910. I suspect record-keeping was not too strict in the rural hinterlands where the Clark's resided. Home births were probably the rule rather than the exception on those farms."
My partner, who jumped into the discussion on FB, points added, "As JPJ says, many early 1900s birth were not officially recorded at the time of birth. But, Clark could've applied for a delayed birth certificate, which requires affadavits and submission of documents like baptism certificates and school records. Surely Clark could cook up the documentation necessary to get one of these after-the-fact certificates."
Which makes the Kents pretty good at the whole deception thing. I liked too that my friend Jon Hansen pointed out that the canon is that the Kents came up with an elaborate cover-up story invovling a home birth due to a blizzard. Shawn wondered how Martha (who is always shown as pleasantly plump, but not overly so) hid her EIGHT MONTH pregnancy from all her friends in a SMALL TOWN so small that it's actually named SMALLVILLE!!!!!
Anyway, I find it all so fascinating, because I love these kinds of intellectual debates about the "real" issues with fictional characters. And, it's quite the controversy considering all the hoopla around the president.
Also, Bryan Thoa Worra turned me on to this awesome comedy sketch called Maritress v. The Superfriends, which pretty much makes a funnier point of this issue. It's NFW, entirely, but you MUST watch it. It's laugh out loud while sitting alone in the house funny.
My partner sent me the link from Boing-Boing and I saw it again on a conservative "friend" on Facebook, and then, after watching a beautiful, moving, impassioned speech by a YouTube vloger named Baratunde about his reaction to Donald Trump's response to the President. I was struck by the irony.
Superman is the ultimate illegal alien. The guy isn't even from EARTH and, though the DC Wikis all claim he's a "naturalized" citizen because the Kents adopted him -- but it's totally fraudulant, actually, since there can NOT possibly be a birth certificate there. They picked him up in a cornfield, for crying out loud!
Anyway, Clark would need a birth certificate for a social security card, passport, etc. I insisted all that would have to be faked, though my friend JPJ asked what the rules about home births, etc, were back when Supes was "born" -- He says, "Clark/Supes was a fully grown man when he first shows up in 1938. Which places his arrival here between 1905-1910. I suspect record-keeping was not too strict in the rural hinterlands where the Clark's resided. Home births were probably the rule rather than the exception on those farms."
My partner, who jumped into the discussion on FB, points added, "As JPJ says, many early 1900s birth were not officially recorded at the time of birth. But, Clark could've applied for a delayed birth certificate, which requires affadavits and submission of documents like baptism certificates and school records. Surely Clark could cook up the documentation necessary to get one of these after-the-fact certificates."
Which makes the Kents pretty good at the whole deception thing. I liked too that my friend Jon Hansen pointed out that the canon is that the Kents came up with an elaborate cover-up story invovling a home birth due to a blizzard. Shawn wondered how Martha (who is always shown as pleasantly plump, but not overly so) hid her EIGHT MONTH pregnancy from all her friends in a SMALL TOWN so small that it's actually named SMALLVILLE!!!!!
Anyway, I find it all so fascinating, because I love these kinds of intellectual debates about the "real" issues with fictional characters. And, it's quite the controversy considering all the hoopla around the president.
Also, Bryan Thoa Worra turned me on to this awesome comedy sketch called Maritress v. The Superfriends, which pretty much makes a funnier point of this issue. It's NFW, entirely, but you MUST watch it. It's laugh out loud while sitting alone in the house funny.
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no subject
Date: 2011-04-28 04:47 pm (UTC)in the more rural areas of the US in the early 20th century, it was not unusual for these things to be pretty informal.
no subject
Date: 2011-04-28 04:49 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-04-28 05:36 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-04-28 05:36 pm (UTC)Since the Orphanage would thus be coming up with all the documentation based on "we don't know where the kid came from, he just showed up," this neatly avoided the entire issue of fraudulent identity papers. It created a headache for child protective services and the police, of course, since they had an unsolvable case of child abandonment on their hands, but that wasn't the Kents' problem.
Just another example of how the much-maligned Silver Age canon actually made more sense than the modern one.
no subject
Date: 2011-04-28 06:23 pm (UTC)Because, dammit, it's important to the safety of this country to know such things!!! ;)
no subject
Date: 2011-04-28 06:38 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-04-28 06:42 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-04-30 02:31 am (UTC)Where is my No Prize?
jpj
no subject
Date: 2011-04-30 01:43 pm (UTC)