MARK JUDGE: Revisiting Norman Mailer’s “Superman Comes to the Supermarket.”
John F. Kennedy was such a figure—a politician, but also a war hero and a man with a genuine aura of grace, sexiness and danger. He’s the “Superman who comes to the supermarket,” a dashing and epic figure who met with shoppers while he was campaigning. Kennedy’s connection to sex, violence, art and “the dream life of the nation” made him powerful, mythic. It was archetypal, deeper than mere politics.
Over the decades such a figure has continuously reemerged in American culture and politics—much to the dismay of those who would keep him down. Two from the world of politics since Kennedy are Ronald Reagan and Barack Obama. Reagan, renounced as a psychopath by the left, came from the West and movies—two archetypical places. Mailer argued that when the West was settled “the expansion turned inward, became part of an agitated, overexcited, superheated dream life. The film studios threw up their searchlights as the frontier was finally sealed, and the romantic possibilities of the old conquest of land turned into a vertical myth, trapped within the skull, of a new kind of heroic life, each choosing his own archetype of a neo-renaissance man, be it Barrymore, Cagney, Flynn, Bogart, Brando or Sinatra, but it was almost as if there were no peace unless one could fight well, kill well (if always with honor), love well and love many, be cool, be daring, be dashing, be wild, be wily, be resourceful, be a brave gun.”
Then there was Obama. As a black man Obama was conversant in the dream world of the nation—the place of jazz and soul and Ralph Ellison. There was no way that Hillary Clinton, a dry and calculated politico, could compete with that. It’s important to emphasize that Mailer’s Superman isn’t a messiah. He doesn’t promise salvation. Reagan told us the government could not save us. Kennedy openly acknowledged that “we are all mortal.” Obama was treated like Jesus by the left, something he played off of but knew was a scam.
What about Trump? Trump comes from the worlds of New York business and Hollywood. He’s perceived by many Americans as a glamorous success story. That’s probably why all attempts by the left to shut him down have failed. Trump doesn’t have Kennedy’s sexiness or Obama’s soul. What he does possess is what other Supermen have—the unstoppable will to live freely despite what the mob thinks. For this he remains impossible to euthanize.
Over six decades ago, Mailer saw this: “This myth, that each of us was born to be free, to wander, to have adventure and to grow on the waves of the violent, the perfumed, and the unexpected, had a force which could not be tamed no matter how the nation’s regulators—politicians, medicos, policemen, professors, priests, rabbis, ministers, idèologues, psychoanalysts, builders, executives and endless communicators—would brick-in the modern life with hygiene upon sanity, and middle-brow homily over platitude; the myth would not die.”
Norman Mailer’s “Superman Comes to the Supermarket” — not to be confused with that time the socialist came to the supermarket: When Boris Yeltsin went grocery shopping in Clear Lake. “‘When I saw those shelves crammed with hundreds, thousands of cans, cartons and goods of every possible sort, for the first time I felt quite frankly sick with despair for the Soviet people,’ Yeltsin wrote. ‘That such a potentially super-rich country as ours has been brought to a state of such poverty! It is terrible to think of it.’”