Superman to the rescue!

The United States recently went through a rather abrupt change in leadership when the pre-ordained winner of the presidential election, in fact didn’t defeat the other candidate who was the pre-ordained sacrificial lamb.

The result has been (amongst other things) an equally abrupt redefinition of goals and the way we measure results.  The two candidates were as different from a personality standpoint as their policies, goals and objectives seem to be.

What we see coming from this latest episode of patch-the-dike governance is a “Superman/Lex Luthor Syndrome”.  A condition in which one person is seen as the sole reason why good or ill exists in the world – and/or why good things happen or why bad things happen.

We have enculturated this. We like to quote where the stock market was when a president took office versus where it was when his (so far, they’ve all been men) office ended – insinuating that somehow he single handedly had a role in whatever progress or regression occurred on his watch.
The French national elections happened yesterday and the anti-immigrant candidate lost.  As a result, I saw posts that claimed “and end to xenophobia in France”.  Holy crap, Batman!  The winner isn’t even scheduled to take office for a while and he’s already being credited with ending xenophobia!  If it was that easy, we should have elected him years ago.

Superman/Lex Luthor gives us an out.  If we drag ourselves to the polls once every four years, we can say that we’ve done our part in ending xenophobia, or whatever other ill needed to be ended.  And THAT is one of the big contributors to why nothing ever gets done.