I'm not much of a Bill O'Reilly fan but this column (apparantly he's now part of the Town Hall posse) is a perceptive one. It concerns the new Superman flick and how it reveals how strangely different is today's America than the one in which the super-hero first began.
The culture war has tugged on Superman's cape, and it is not pretty. In the new film "Superman Returns," Daily Planet editor Perry White responds this way after being told the Man of Steel has come back after a five-year absence: "Does he still stand for truth, justice and all that stuff?"
And all that stuff?
The original line in the television series and movie, of course, was "truth, justice and the American way." But no way the "American way" gets in the film.
That's because Warner Brothers, the studio distributing the movie, doesn't want to tee off any foreign viewers with pro-U.S. sentiment. It's bad enough Superman was raised in the Midwest, we can't have the hero actually stand for the American way now, can we? Some jihadist in Pakistan might throw popcorn at the screen...
