Way to Go, Brainiacs
Author and former Reasonoid Jeremy Lott has a hilarious take on culture-war readings of "Superman Returns" over at the Christian magazine Books & Culture.
If we wanted to construct as unreasonable a reading of the scene as possible, could we do any better than the reaction of many of America's conservative culture warriors?
They were informed–via stories in the New York Post and the Hollywood Reporter–that "the American way" had been "removed" from the normal run of things that Superman stands for, and, well, they promptly lost it:
On the blog of the Independent Women's Forum, the usually sensible Charlotte Allen called for conservatives to celebrate the Fourth of July by boycotting the film.
Carol Platt Liebau wrote in the American Spectator that "Superman no longer fights for 'the American way' because, for at least some Americans, it's nothing worth defending."
