seattleguy wrote:
Without getting too caught up in the politics involved...


dearlenbaugh wrote:
Too late. Alizarin stepped right in it. Unless we want this to be the first Time Capsule to get locked, we'd better just step back and let it be.


Schiff stepped in it first with that blatantly politicized and offensive PSA of his, my response was merely equal time. Do you honestly think that an objectionable ad like that should go unanswered? Are Jack Schiff's political views as exemplified in such propaganda pieces so sacrosanct around here they cannot be questioned? Are they so intellectually fragile and shaky that they must not be subjected to even the slightest bit of scrutiny?

In his excellent "DC Public Service Announcement" retrospective thread on this forum, commenter lelak wrote back in 2011:

I have never meant this to be the "be all, end all" discussion about these pages. All I want to do here is recognize the entire canon of PSA pages. Nothing more. There are way too many people besides myself who can evaluate the merits of each individual entry. Lord knows, I'm not qualified to do so.

That's what I just did regarding the above PSA (and by extension others like it) in this series. Look deeper than just the surface of this material and take note of what's actually happening. The very idea of Superman routinely engaging in
the unlawful seizing and carrying away of children by force without parental consent to coerce their compliance with Schiff's own political views is objectionable by any intelligent moral standard. Even worse, there's also a disturbing, unspoken, subliminal message being conveyed to both parents and impressionable young kids about what could happen if the justification for such actions are taken to their logical end point. I'll leave it to you to ponder the meaning of that in the privacy of your own thoughts without the risk of getting into an acrimonious debate on this thread.

But I will say this: it's really quite revealing how both Schiff and Weisinger portrayed Superman during this era. On the one hand, in most of the regular frivolous stuff they were obsessively earnest about presenting the "Super Boy Scout" image of him as a
law-abiding authority figure with a strong sense of justice and personal integrity who, although he was an alien, honored human moral codes and social mores. But when there were larger political issues at stake, they had no compunction at all about having Superman do whatever he damn well pleased to effect the political ends they favored.  That was true even to the point of serial felony kidnapping of children across international borders (an indoctrination tactic that Schiff seemed particularly fond of in his PSAs) or concocting a fantastic covert scheme to "wipe out crime and evil" on Earth by subjecting the entire human race to manipulative mind-control (as in Weisinger's 1963 secular-liberal utopian fantasy "The Amazing Story of Superman Red and Superman Blue").  But exploring that subject is an entire discussion in itself, which given the dynamics of this forum unfortunately won't occur.

So
I'm fine with backing away from the issue here. There's no need for prolonged argument, the point has been made.





Last Edited By: alizarin1 Oct 16 13 3:10 PM. Edited 6 times.