Happy Independence Day! In general, it’s the patriotic holiday I feel like I can really get behind; it celebrates a revolution whose vanguard included a bunch of Massachusetts liberals with a fair bit of a libertarian streak.

Today, I have been reading that there is somewhat of a huff in conservative blogs about the “… and the American Way” dropping out of the new Superman movie. This one takes umbrage at the way Hollywood has caved to commercial pressure for foreign markets. But honestly, that’s a silly argument to make; they could and probably would have done that anyway, since the “offending” phrase could easily be modified when dubbed into Greek or French or Arabic or whatever, or edited it for Canada and the UK, and no conservative blog would have bothered to find out.

I think it’s irksome, too, but it’s irksome that the writers/directors consciously did not include it, even in the American release, because it’s antiquated. Can’t we even pretend, in a movie by us and for us, a fantasy movie about a guy from another planet who can fly, that America still stands for Truth and Justice?

If we can’t even fill our heads a bunch of capitalized abstractions like Freedom and Equality and Justice and Tolerance and Liberty and Human Rights and pretend that our country stands for them, what chance do we have of making it so?

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 4th, 2006 at 8:25 pm and is filed under politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.