Superman vs. Flash: Political Parallax

I was a huge comic book fan growing up in North Pole, Alaska. To be fair, there was little else to do. On a dark winter day with the temperature around minus 40, we had plenty of time for reading, and television was still a lame three-channel affair. Comic books in general, with their splashy graphics and hyperbolically important storylines were part of what kept me going as a reader in my youth. My favorites were the giant-size comic books. They were about the size of a newspaper, folded once.

Batman rooting against Superman = classic.

One such comic book included the Superman-Flash road race. Fellow Justice-Leaguers watched as the two heroes sped around the globe, competing in what would be a photo finish. As the “Man of Steel” competed against “The Fastest Man Alive,” as one gained a slight lead in one part of the globe, the other would make up ground somewhere else. The heroes raced across the finish line, but there was no clear winner. People standing on the side of the finish line closest to Superman thought he won, and those standing on Flash’s side believed that Flash had triumphed.

In science this is called the “parallax effect,” where an object in the foreground appears to move at different rates versus an object in the background. You might notice it, for instance, when you are driving and the sun appears to go behind a tree. Of course the sun doesn’t go behind a tree; you are moving in relation to the tree, and the sun is stationary. Astronomers use the parallax effect to help measure stellar distances. In our club-headed American political system, we use it to confirm our own beliefs.

Comic book fans would call this either a supercool handling of the stories of two heroes or a lame cop-out ending for what should be a decisive victory for either Flash or Superman. I was always in the second group. Pick a winner, DC writers, dangit!

Today we see this kind of photo-finish in our political system. If you watched MSNBC’s coverage of the fiscal cliff in 2012, it was the Republicans who were holding up the works. If you watched Fox, the fiscal cliff was another example of Democratic intransigency. Both sides, standing closest to their representatives, see the opponent in the distance, and it’s clearly our guy who crossed the tape first.

Superman-Flash races have a long history in DC comics – it’s interesting to see two titans competing. In one of the classic matchups, the two crossed the line at the same time intentionally. The heroes did this to make sure gamblers, who set up the race, couldn’t collect on their bets. How like Dumberica, where the left and the right wager heavily with their emotions as two goliaths of our political system entertain us in a zero-sum game. The media love it too – photo finishes are always more interesting than landslide victories.

Perhaps this is what we should expect from our polarized political system. After all, Superman, born on planet Krypton, would be ineligible to run for President, even if he was a naturalized American citizen. That’s right. The rules of our political system would deny Superman from the highest leadership position in the country. The guy with a singular goal to save the planet from evil, who has more ability in his pinkie than any of us have in every muscle in our body, a man with only one weakness(and it ain’t Lois Lane) isn’t good enough to be President.

Now that’s irony. Or maybe that illustrates the parody in our political system better than any true-to-life explanation could?