I think good is a bad word for this. A better word would be effective.
Might be worth pointing out the word politics is, for many, a pejorative. In that worldview, this statement is more akin to "Good thievery" or "Good fraud" in which the implication is obvious that it is describing ways of being better at that act, not that you are working towards any moral aims.
But yes, the word "Good" is clearly intended as poetic counterpoint to the "Bad" in behaviour.
Politicians do and have done plenty of good things, from getting bridges built, to Medicare, to fighting a war to stop slavery.
Every single Superman story is at some level like it could be something from the Talmud about the costs and benefits of Jehovah's day-to-day involvement in the lives of his faithful. The writers were steeped in this culture.
He's not a vigilante. He's more like an actively-involved angel (or avatar in the Hindu sense).
The stories ultimately build into parables about intervention in human free will, and the costs and responsibilities of accepting that intervention.
The reason I say this is to point out the impossibility of this comparison.
Superman does not do "good", he does "god".
Politicians can do "good".
I am not by any means a comic book aficionado. Or Jewish! I'm the son of an RE teacher who was fascinated by subconscious cultural expressions of universal religious themes in sci-fi and comics. (She was really a Star Wars fan, read the books even!)
What you are presenting is a "reading" and not "wrong", but there are alternative readings.
I guess what I'm saying is you can read the character in a very secular way.
There are definitely riffs on Nietsche in there, course. Not least in the name gag.
But it's just one example of the extraordinary amount of hidden/telegraphed Jewishness in US culture of the time. And because it is so well-hidden, people are often surprised when you point it out.
(Like, can you name a really popular Christmas pop song that was not written or co-written by a Jewish person?)
Sure his having a secret identity as Clark Kent can be seen as mirroring a Jew trying to assimilate among gentiles.
His having fled a dead planet can be seen as mirroring Jews fleeing from pogroms.
There's a lot of messianic symbolism, but the moral issue he has to solve is "Lex Luther wants to blow up the west coast of the U.S." not some parable of Talmidic law.
The moral conundrums Superman faces are simple inarguable concepts like "genocide is bad" or "that guy on death row is innocent and somebody should find the real killer and save him". Or "law and order."
If he struggles whether to "interfere" with society it's obviously because the formula of a Superman story is about restoring the status quo to society after a villain tries to disrupt society or blow it up, to be repeated in the next adventure. Superman deciding not to "interfere" is just an in story explanation for the repeated formula of a low brow pulp serial.
The people who make the comics do not and did not even have creative freedom to stray too far from this formula. Superman is not owned by the men and women who write and draw the comics.
I guess exploration was not quite the right word, and this is a fair point for sure. I didn't mean it to sound quite as explicit.
What I suppose I mean is that there's a sort of narrative exposition of it. It's not subconscious, I think is what I mean, even if it is not explicit. Growing up the way Siegel did it would have been difficult to ignore a whole set of stories and cultural associations and dialogues.
The parallels about Superman himself are telegraphed, as you say. He's a refugee, he partially assimilated, and the main brake on his ability to get involved is a very explicit understanding that he cannot break cover without risk (though this is much more evident in the cinema Superman films I think). Both Siegel and Shuster were from families who had changed their names to avoid discrimination.
The stories are simple but I am not sure they start off from anything more than that experience. And the notion of justice and injustice is as I understand it very much something the Talmud concerns itself with. As well as at least one story about whether a largely absent Hebrew god should be allowed to to interfere.
Aside from bridges, all the politicians who did what you said are long dead. How long do current politicians get to rest on the laurels of long dead ones?
Many politicians absolutely do good. Politics itself is not about doing good, it is about working towards the possible.
One side of the US system is consistently better at getting elected than the other, and used to ideologically prefer the concept of a weaker form of governance.
The pragmatic one can say whatever maximizes their chance of winning.
I mean if you look at them with an uncritical eye, sure. The system is corrupt, at least in the US. Just look at what corporations pay in taxes.
Can you name some US politicians that "do good," and what do you define as good? Talk is cheap, they all tell you what they think you want to hear. Think of all the corrupt systems in play that are detrimental to the us population: NAFTA, globalization, policing, qualified immunity, civil asset forfeiture abuse, mass surveillance, over-prosecution, ungodly military spending, school defunding, many more. Things these "do good" politicians just ignore. Doesn't that taint them at all in your mind?
Sit back and think about how leaving that thought unchallenged -- not looking for and appealing to the good in politicians -- leads inexorably to the kind of collapse of democracy that you nearly experienced less than a year ago.
Apply the same logic to other organizations. Are there good police? Sure. Are they still good if they ignore police brutality and cover it up? I would argue that would make them bad police.
Currently if you drive with cash, police can pull you over and take it. They split it up with the federal government. You are left with no cash and are now responsible for hiring a lawyer to try to get it back. That is literally theft from the government. Which politicians are trying to stop this? How does legally stealing from citizens reenforce the faith in the rule of law? It doesn't. Rather than trying to blame the person pointing this stuff out for the decline of democracy, maybe put some blame on the people who write unjust laws.
I guess it would but I said nothing about ignoring it.
So what are you saying then? What does that even mean? Sounds like the feel good rhetoric politicians have been feeding us for decades. I can look for the good all I want but that doesn't magically make it appear or make the "do good" politicians effective. I've been giving politicians of both parties the benefit of the doubt for 20+ years, and without fail, they disappoint. Most of us are a lot worse off than we were in 1995.
Be optimistic? Is that what you are saying?
How's our life expectancy looking? Worse. How's the drug war going? Worse. How does the average person's prospect of retirement look? Worse. How's the prospect of home ownership looking? Worse. How's our freedoms looking? Worse. Remember that whole net neutrality thing that the Ds were pushing? What happened to that now that they have power? The politicians are controlled by the parties, the parties are controlled by the donors. Our futures are being sold down the river to the highest bidder. What's good? Give me some optimism.
But if I must spell it out to you -- I'll get downvoted for it -- I am saying that, essentially, "othering" politicians as inherently not doing good, or saying that they are all tainted by the actions of some of them, is the precise sentiment that was exploited to allow a corrupt, amoral, malignant narcissist and populist into the White House, who deliberately tried to overthrow the democratic process.
Very few of the politicians tarred in that way are anything like as dangerous as the man this enabled. And the most dangerous of them take part in the tarring.
If you cannot look at politicians and seek to find the good and the common ground in them, you're doing the nihilistic groundwork of future fascists. Don't do that.
I'm not dehumanizing anybody, I'm just calling them corrupt. Politicians have been doing a lot of dehumanizing though. "Socialists," "basket of deplorables," "anti-vaxxer," "thugs," "racists," etc. You know the routine.
>I am saying that, essentially, "othering" politicians as inherently not doing good, or saying that they are all tainted by the actions of some of them, is the precise sentiment that was exploited to allow a corrupt, amoral, malignant narcissist and populist into the White House, who deliberately tried to overthrow the democratic process.
Don't you feel the corruption of the existing system was what allowed him to get elected in the first place? Would we have Trump if we didn't have the bank bailouts in 2008 while letting grandmas get their house foreclosed on? Doubt it. Would we have Trump if we hadn't insisted on staying in Iraq and Afghanistan for 20 years, then barely help vets when they came home? Doubt it. Would we have Trump if Occupy Wall Street made a difference rather than get jackbooted? Probably not. Would we have Trump if politicians didn't wholly allow globalization at the expense of the US worker? No. Would we have Trump if politicians didn't almost exclusively pass legislation to the benefit of their donors while ignoring the citizenry? No. Trump absolutely wiped the floor with GOP darlings at the GOP debates and he largely did it from the left of GOP dogma, at least economically.
I see Trump as a symptom of our current predicament. He was popular because he pointed out the corruption of the existing system. The irony of course is he was just as corrupt. Make no mistake, unless things improve, there will undoubtedly be another, who is more politically and bureaucratically expedient. If you are concerned with that at all, the status quo is almost a guarantee it will happen.
Anyway I gave you a couple upvotes incase someone comes along and tries to downvote you. I'm enjoying this discussion.
"Good" is almost never the solition to "bad -- it's usually impractical for pragmatic or political reasons. The solution is "better" aka "less bad" and iterate. Progressive ideas, and ideas that can get some semblance of consensus, work much better than Revolutionary ideas.