Song of the Day 10/21: Crash Test Dummies, “Superman’s Song”

I don’t know if anything was lost in translation, but I hear the Faux News Freakout of the Week is over DC Comics changing Superman’s slogan from “Truth, Justice and the American Way” to “Truth, Justice and a Better Tomorrow.”

Never mind that DC Comics are sold around the world, and that the majority of the world cares not one whit for “the American Way,” particularly when Republicans hold the White House. Never mind that the slogan did not originate with the comic books but instead with a 1940s radio serial, and it didn’t debut until the height of World War II. Facts and context rarely matter to Republicans.

Yet the inescapable truth is that Superman is not at all a conservative, an insight songwriter Brad Roberts of the Canadian band Crash Test Dummies drew on for the song that made them famous. After the song came out on the band’s first album, “The Ghosts That Haunt Me,” and became a No. 4 hit in Canada (No. 56 in the US), Roberts told an interviewer for a newspaper in Nova Scotia,

Superman as cast in “Superman’s Song” is obviously a left-wing political figure. His activity in the community is intrinsic to his being. Superman is being juxtaposed against Tarzan, who is kind of a laissez-faire capitalist type who retreats to the forest, and rejects the idea of community. He wants to live in a so-called animal state, and he doesn’t have to be bothered with any kind of political realities.

I always thought the song’s ultimate irony lay in the line “sometimes I despair the world will never see another man like him.” The world has, of course, never seen a man like him in the first place.