Posted 8:15 AM by Gene

Despite all the hooey written about Superman over the years, we'd bet little has been said of Clark Kent's job: a reporter. Joe Shuster and Jerry Siegel probably gave him the job simply because the alter ego needed gainful employment (in 1933!), although the turn of the century did see the muckrakers, those crusading exemplars of the Progressive movement; and the notion of little guy as great big hero fit the Rooseveltian ethos (even as we guess it probably had more to do with two grown adolescents daydreaming; they must have been Walter Mittys six years before the fact). Indeed we suspect the occupation was an afterthought, a mere launching pad for his transformations into the Man of Steel. But somehow over the years as the character became more popular the notion of reporter as superhero slowly and insidiously rooted itself in our culture, with the result that the sixties and seventies saw an explosion of news supermen -- the New "Journalists", Woodstein -- and the difference was these guys didn't have to put on leotards to perform their derring-do. Of course all their superhero strength covered up the inner kryptonite of their egos, until they became so loud and bold in their self-regard as to poison the whole news trade, and now we see these heroes for what they are -- guys with glasses who can't write straight, and who retreat in their huge salaries, and their thoughts of being supermen.