Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-1255374-20151023223507/@comment-995426-20151101204646

Yoshimickster wrote: The lesson in Bizarro is how to deal with cultures opposite to you. Superman always found a way to negotiate with the Bizarros, see things through THEIR eyes. The problem is suggesting at all that other cultures are opposite to you. They're still made up of people, after all. Cultural differences&mdash;even countries going to war against each other&mdash;are far more complex than being "opposite" to anyone else. It does viewers a disservice to do anything to teach you that people of other cultures are somehow your moral opposites. At worst, it comes off as rather racist.

You see, Superman (the example you cited) fights for "the American way"&mdash;that is kind of wide-eyed nationalism that treats one's own country like it is the most moral and superior country in the world, when to most everyone else that sounds like an ignorant racism of exclusion. It promotes the asinine delusion that everyone else wants to be just like the people of your own country, and that people of other cultures could become better people if they became "more like us," and that the good done by people from other cultures is somehow in spite of their own "opposite" culture. Almost no one wants to be just like the United States&mdash;not even much of the United States. Culture and intercultural relations are far more complex than that.