a new religion and the stench of corpses
this man with his
hands cut off,
with his eyes gouged
out,
wants to tell us his
plans to rule the world
let the beautiful
people fuck,
let the starving
starve,
and is this really
any different than
where we are now?
the myth of christ
vs
the myth of superman
the fact that
neither one
will save any of us
the fact that every
song
is a song about
death
that what we love
the most is
what we can lose,
is what can be taken
away, and what i
remember from the
last day i saw you
is the
sunlight
the emptiness of the
sky
20 years of my life
spent
crawling down
dead-end streets or
pinned to the rocky
soil of barren fields and,
in the end,
i
am only me
in the end, we are
always defined
by the distances
between us
we are always moving
further apart
Jesus Christ Superman --John Haldane
Though the original followers of Jesus believed he was the mashiach (messiah) prophesied in the Hebrew Bible, they referred to him as "Jesus of Nazareth" or "Jesus, son of Joseph." A bit later St. Paul, whose epistles to various churches are the earliest texts of the New Testament, often referred to him as "Christ Jesus" or just "Christ," a Greek title (Khristos), meaning "the annointed." The followers of Jesus then became known as Christians (as in Acts 11:26). Jews and Christians alike believe in the messiah as a Jewish king descended from David who will be "anointed" with holy oil as the ruler of God's terrestrial kingdom. Jews do not believe that the messiah has appeared yet, while Muslims believe Jesus (ʿIsa) was the al-Masih and that he will come again but do not accept his divinity or that he was the Son of God. Jesus was denounced for blasphemy by the Jewish religious council of Jerusalem and crucified by the Romans.
ReplyDeleteSuperman made his debut in "Action Comics" #1 in 1938. The character was created by Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, the children of European Jewish immigrants. Although the original story revealed that he had been sent to Earth as a baby before his home planet was destroyed, biographical details were only slowly revealed. The character, however, was an immediate success, and about 6 months after his debut he began appearing in a newspaper comics strip in which it was revealed that his real name was Kal-L. In a 1942 novelization by George Lowther, who scripted the Superman radio programs, the name was spelled Kal-El, a name which sounds like the Hebrew "light" or "vessel" or "voice" of God. Due to the antisemitism that was prevalent in the US, Siegel was careful not to overtly point out the many convergences between Superman and Jewish culture (including the notion from the Kabbalah that after the divine vessel was shattered Jews were called on “to repair the world” ("tikkun olam"). However, Joseph Goebbels, Reich Minister of Propaganda, was more perceptive than most American readers; in an April 1940 issue of the weekly SS newspaper "Das Schwarze Korps" he denounced Siegel as "an intellectually and physically circumcised chap who has his headquarters in New York.... The inventive Israelite named this pleasant guy with an overdeveloped body and underdeveloped mind “Superman," a “pleasant guy with an overdeveloped body and underdeveloped mind” in order among American youth.