Folks have brought up a couple points on this article that are worth addressing: • It's true that Captain America is not strictly superhuman. He just drank a serum that now lets him bench 1,100 pounds, master every fighting style known to humans, be the world's greatest combat tactitian, and fling an indestructible shield such that it deflects bullets before hitting multiple people and returning to Cap's hand. In other words, Marvel treats Cap as superhuman, and just about never lets him lose. But Superman could kick -- or possibly heat-ray -- the hell out of him in a boxing ring. • Relatedly, Superman can be kind of a dick. • On Jack Bauer, Winer writes, "The first season was written before 9/11 and one of the things that seemed compelling to me about it was that he was not a superhero. He could be manipulated by any number of people due to his human vulnerabilities. His wife and friends were killed, and one had the notion that he too could be killed if the show wanted to go in a different direction. Seven years later, the country has suffered through 9/11 and the Bush presidency, and Jack Bauer has become a torturing, unkillable cartoon. If we're making superhero/foreign policy analogies, I'd say JB started out as an America(n) aware of his vulnerability and his humanity and became and America(n) who faces fear by grasping for an exceptionalism and a right to break laws when that exceptionalism and that right don't really exist." Nbliss adds, "I always like to say that Jack Bauer's superpower is torture." Much like John Yoo. • Cyrus makes the point, "talking about America as one single entity is too reductive. America is a nation of about 300 million people, who make up at the very least two cultural and ideological factions, and probably dozens. In the months immediately following 9/11, there was near-unanimity on a Jack Bauer foreign policy, but judging by polling shortly before the war, people only supported the war on condition that it would be a Superman's war rather than a Jack Bauer's. After the war there was a "rally round the flag" effect, but that faded well before its effects manifested in elections and stuff. The faction(s) now in power in America have a Jack Bauer mentality, definitely. America as a whole, though, the hypothetical median American, had a Jack Bauer mentality in late 2001 and through 2002, but not before or since." I think that's correct. Fundamentally, the executive controls foreign policy, and the foreign policy conversation. So long as Bush wanted to sell a militaristic unilateralism, he had the ability. So long as he wants to keep us in Iraq and Democrats don't have 60 votes or the support to cut funding, he can do that, too. It's not a function of philosophy so much as sheer power.
