The wearisome burden of superheroism.

In his fifth voyage, Sinbad came across a taciturn old man inhabiting the island where the Arabian Nights sailor was marooned. This worthy hopped on to Sinbad’s shoulder with his tacit consent and then refused to let go of his seat. Finally, according to Scheherazade, Sinbad had no alternative except to get his tormentor drunk and stone him to death. http://bit.ly/17FCKJL

Ever since the US of A usurped the role of World Supremo – did it happen in 1898 when it declared war on Spain and with the Paris treaty wrested virtual suzerainty over South America and the Philippines? – the mantle has rested heavily on its shoulder.

In the wake of Japan’s victory over Russia in 1905, President Theodore Roosevelt dispatched his Great White Fleet of 16 battleships with assorted escorts on a 14-month global cruise in order to demonstrate his country’s naval capabilities and preparedness. (Remember Nixon and Kissinger sending the US Fifth Fleet post haste to the Bay of Bengal in 1971?)

Once you’re on the superhero/superpower throne, it’s not easy to abdicate. You’ve got to keep on playing the role, like it or not. (Lord Acton’s axiom: "Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men." Note: Italics mine.) America did try to keep aloof in the Great War till Germany used U-boats thus forcing President Woodrow Wilson’s hand in early 1917. America’s entry on the Allied side in World War II too was belated: it only entered the theatre after the Japanese Navy attacked Pearl Harbour on 7 December 1941. (By the way, by a strange twist of Fate, Captain America had become Marvel Comics’ top selling title at around this time clocking a monthly sale of as many as one million copies. Point to ponder: Why is a majority of comicbook superheroes born in the USA?)

What has always surprised me, though, is how Uncle Sam never got his fingers entangled into the Great Game – the on-going strategic rivalry for supremacy in Central Asia between the British Empire and the Russian Empire (and, after 1918, Soviet Union) – during its heyday. The American intervention in the Afghan Civil War was in fact as late as in 1979 as a Cold-War related retaliation to the Soviet initiative in the region and later directly when the Russian withdrawal left a power vacuum there. After the World War II victory, there have been many more episodes in the overseas adventures of Uncle Sam in his Captain America avatar: Korea, Bay of Pigs, Vietnam, Cambodia, the Gulf War, Iraq, and now maybe Syria – apart from his several covert interventions on the side of Banana Republic chief honchos. When you have the world’s biggest stake in armaments, covet the world’s oil reserves most avidly and have always fancied yourself in the role of World Supremo, you don’t have much of a chance. Or, choice, for that matter. You’ve got to carry your burden, trudge with it and like it or lump it. Unless you decide to emulate Sinbad’s “carved in stone” example… 

Ho – hum!

Too much solemnity makes Charles Morgan a dull and drab writer. Charles Langbridge Morgan, to be precise. This Brit writes well enough but the tone of voice and the whole mood of his play, The Burning Glass (1953), gave me a sense of deep unease, almost malaise. I find it difficult to believe that anyone could write with such deadly seriousness continuously with nary a half smile for relief. It’s no wonder his work has been neglected by and large. His sensibility and views to me seem conservative and of the extreme Right. The biographical sketch at the website dedicated to him http://charleslmorgan.org/page4.php?SessionID=21f09d047d7150b0b6a1 mentions that he was a fan of Churchill apart from “the Book of Common Prayer, Keats’s letters, and the prose of Addison”. That kind of makes eminent sense when you’re reading him. He must have been a melancholy introvert, I reckon. He appears to be uncomfortable in his surroundings and sometimes within his own skin, if you get what I mean. His The Burning Glass I happened to read in an abridged version “adapted” for adult readers whose second language is English. I happened to find it lurking in a stack of old books. I hope Jennifer Taylor who worked on the adaptation did full justice to his style and flavour. This humourless play – no apology for this priceless aside: I came across a Daily Mail news story (11-03-2008) headlined ‘The cheek! Humourless American says we Brits are miserable. You've gotta laugh’, about travel writer Eric Weiner’s claim that the Brits “don’t merely enjoy misery – they get off on it” http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/columnists/dailymail.html?in_article_id=530237&in_page_id=1790 – is about the moral dilemma of a weather control scientist. He has accidentally stumbled upon a way to set his weather machine so that it can concentrate the solar heat and aim it at any target to wreak total destruction. Both he and his wife are – you guessed it! – paragons of virtue. His partner is not. He is a rebel and keeps bad company. At the height of the Cold War, he refuses to part with his knowledge to the Briish PM. The worthy seems to be no Churchill and accepts his terms that he or his wife would only “set” Machine Six to do the dirty work in case of an attack by the opposition. There is an East German spy lurking in the neighbourhood. He kidnaps the straight-laced paragon of virtue. In his absence, the equally straight-laced Paragon No.2 “sets” Machine Six in order to strike the fear of God in the atheist Commie hearts with proof that Britain has the ultimate weapon and won’t hesitate to use it under extreme provocation. Paragon No.1 is released and all ends well, except for the death of his partner. Ho-hum! Were the pre-Hiroshima Einstein and Oppenheimer his inspiration?