Jonathan Todd

My wife tells me that when she first moved to the UK in the early years of the presidency of George W Bush her European friends would introduce her by saying: “This is Monica. She is American … But she’s not mental.” Obviously, this was impolite and unnecessary; as if 300 million citizens of a democratic state could be made mad purely by statehood.

At that time, however, as Charlie Brooker noted, “watching America at work was like watching the scenes in Superman III where Superman, under the influence of red kryptonite, goes ‘bad’”. It was thought, presumably, that people needed to be reassured that Monica wasn’t similarly bad, mad or dangerous to know. Then came President Obama and Americans were welcomed back into polite European society, without caveats or health-warnings.

However, recently Massachusetts – a supposed bedrock of liberal sanity in a continent of madness – voted to have one of the most dedicated campaigners for universal health care (Ted Kennedy) succeeded as Senator by someone whose opposition to the best ever chance for universal health care seriously threatens, due to Senate maths, to extinguish this chance. The first action of this new Senator, Scott Brown, was to telephone President Obama and inform him:

“Would you like me to drive the truck down to Washington so you can see it?”

I’d have thought that if Obama – Europe’s dream President – burst into laughter upon being told this then we’d have heard about this by now. Many Europeans would have done. And then they would have worried that “evil Superman” was roaring back into life at the wheel of a truck.

It was always daft to presume, as many Europeans did, that Obama’s election had fundamentally changed America in almost every possible respect. The cultural forces that powered “evil Superman” were very deep rooted. No presidential election, no matter how unprecedented and spectacular, was ever going to wholly sweep them away. But the fact that this presidential election was possible also shows that Superman was never entirely evil. It was just that the political manifestation of the cultural forces behind Superman was so strong that Superman somtimes seemed evil (I know that this is a very pejorative term but, while its use would be justified by Abu Ghraib, I hope it is clear that I do not use it in a wholly serious way).

Essentially, there are a lot of people in America and they are very different (I know that this is a supremely obvious thing to say, but sometimes the obvious can be forgotten in such moments of elation and excitement as Obama’s presidential election). Some Americans even like trucks and allow them to take on a significance that Europeans find odd; indeed, comically and strikingly so. These people have long been part of America. They are not going away. But, just as the nice liberal Obama voters that Europeans find so much more reassuring and familiar couldn’t stop the Dubya years, all the trucks in America couldn’t have created a roadblock big enough to keep Obama out of the White House. We know this because they made their best try (It’s called Sarah Palin).  

The election of Scott Brown doesn’t mark the return of “evil Superman”. Superman was never evil; he’s just made much show of the many and varied sides to his character over the years. As well as being a headache for health care reformers, the election of Scott Brown was a reminder of the diversity of this character.