Stop me if you’ve heard this one.
A child is born under the threat of immediate death. Desperate to save the boy’s life, his parents place him in a basket and abandon him to the wilderness. A kind family takes the baby in and raises him as their own. But as the boy grows up he realizes he is different from his family, his friends, from everyone he knows, and upon becoming a man, he learns the truth of his heritage.
Now, at this point of the story, whether you’re talking about King Arthur, or Moses, or Oedipus, or Tarzan, our hero leaves his adopted family to take his rightful place among his birth people. But we’re not talking about them. We’re talking about Kal-El, a.k.a. Clark Kent, a.k.a. Superman. And Superman stays on Earth.
What’s great about Superman, what makes him a modern hero, a populist hero, and an American hero, is that Superman upends the myth of aristocracy.
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