NEWS: Ten Lessons Spider-Man Can Teach Our First Nerd President

GEEK: Ten Lessons Spider-Man Can Teach Our First Nerd President

President Barack Obama is a nerd. A geek. A dork.

Last March, he said:

Obama fulfilled the fanboy fantasy of flashing Leonard Nimoy the Vulcan salute, and on his now defunct official Senate web page, he posted an image of himself posing with the statue of Superman in Metropolis, Illinois. As a kid, he copied pictures of Spider-Man and Batman out of a friend's comic books and he even uses geek speak while decked out in formalwear.

Obama's such a Spider-Man fandork that Marvel Comics made him a character this month in Amazing Spider-Man # 583. Marvel's Editor-in-Chief Joe Quesada said:

So, at the dawn of his presidency, SG would like to offer Mr. Obama a few important political lessons that can be learned from the adventures of everyone's favorite wall-crawler.


Ten Lessons Spider-Man Can Teach Our First Nerd President:


1. With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility

This is self-explanatory, especially for the guy who's gonna be Commander-in-Chief...and who isn't a knuckle-walking fucktard from Crawford or a bald, pink Yeti from Wyoming who delights in the lubeless fisting of the Constitution.

While this is a lesson Spidey's taught millions of comic book readers, the idea mighta started as a presidential concept before it became as central to Spidey's mythology as the irradiated spider chomp that gave Peter his powers.

Comic book writer Mark Evanier tracked down a slew of antecedents for this idea, not the least of which comes from Teddy Roosevelt, who wrote in 1908:

And Teddy's cousin FDR said in his 1945 State of the Union address that:

FDR also wrote in a speech that he didn't live to deliver that:

And when JFK was President-Elect in January of 1961, he pinched a line from the Gospel of Luke when he said:

As this was just months before Spidey debuted in Amazing Fantasy # 15 (August, 1962), this might have been the kernel of the Spidey concept. In any case, if Spidey can be the means by which this idea swings back into the Oval Office after eight crushingly irresponsible, drunken frat boy-led years, so much the cooler.


2. Conflict Leads to Collateral Damage

The idea of "collateral damage" got staked through the skulls of Spider-Man fans in the early 1970s, in the days when footage of the Vietnam War got shown on the Six O'clock News...just in time for dinner -- or for cocaine and cocktails hour at the Champagne Unit of the Texas Air National Guard.

This was especially the case when elderly hero cop Captain Stacy, father of Peter's girlfriend Gwen, got crushed to death while pushing a toddler out of the way of falling debris knocked over during a fight between Spider-Man and Doctor Octopus (in The Amazing Spider-Man # 90, November, 1970). To a little kid, Captain Stacy's dying in Spider-Man's arms, calling him "Peter" and "Son" ('cuz he knew all along that Peter was Spider-Man!!) and telling him to take care of Gwen after he's gone had the heart-trampling impact of Lear.

And a few years later, when Gwen was knocked off a bridge by the Green Goblin, and Spider-Man caught her with his webbing only to find that the sudden whiplash had broken her neck... "tragic" gave way to "traumatic" (in The Amazing Spider-Man #122, June 1973).

There's still ambiguity over whether the Green Goblin had broken her neck before Gwen fell, or if the shock of the fall had killed her. But the idea that you can kill the person you're trying to save (even before they've had the chance to fulfill their moral obligation to greet you as a liberator) was a heavy one for a kid who'd just laid down 20 cents at the candy store for a quick four-color read.


3. How to Deal with Negative Press

Spidey's gotten some steel-toed scrotum kicks from the press, most especially in the form of rants from the editor of The Daily Bugle, J. Jonah Jameson, who also happens to be Peter Parker's boss.

Jameson's said in editorials and public lectures things like the following, from The Amazing Spider-Man #1:

JJJ himself mighta been proud to have come up with the famous, or infamous, insinuation made in the press last June that Obama's fist bumping with his wife Michelle at an event in St. Paul could have been a "terrorist fist jab."

Spidey's strategy for dealing with negative press has been to take it in stride. That is, when he didn't mope about it, and when he didn't famously quit in The Amazing Spider-Man # 50 –– "Spider-Man No More".

Taking bad press in stride the way Spidey (mostly) has works pretty well. Eventually the press comes around. Just look at how Spidey himself is the means by which Obama got the last word in on that fist jab, courtesy of the image above from The Amazing Spider-Man # 583, the special inauguration issue, which has been reprinted in a slew of newspapers over this past month. It's a pretty good re-spin of negative spin.


4. Your Old Mentors Can Be a Liability

Spidey's had a complex relationship with Dr. Curt Connors, both as Spider-Man and as Peter Parker.

Dr. Connors, who lost his right arm while attending fallen soldiers in a combat zone, treated Peter's Aunt May when she was sickened by a transfusion of Peter's radioactive blood. He helped Spider-Man face down the Rhino by coming up with a chemical agent that dissolved the Rhino's exoskeleton. Peter became Dr. Connor's teaching assistant. And Connors had a heart-to-heart with Spidey about facing down one's inner monsters after curing Spidey of a pesky medical condition -- the growth a few extra arms.

The downside to this relationship is that Connors, due to an effort to regenerate his lost arm, sometimes becomes the scaly supervillain the Lizard.

While Obama's former pastor, the Reverend Wright, has never done anything as bad as the Lizard, his comments donkey punched Obama's campaign and forced Obama to leave Wright's church, giving Atwater-y assholes attack ad ammo in the process.


5. It's Important to Support Public Education

I'll let Spider-Man director Sam Rami make a point for me. While addressing his decision to forgo Spidey's use of artificial web fluid, created by Peter and shot from web shooters of his own design, in favor of the movie's biological webs, Rami said:

But in the comics, a 17-year old science geek from Queens did invent web fluid and web shooters that 3M couldn't. Peter's also returned to his alma mater of Midtown High to teach science. If there are stronger endorsements for the public education, I can't think of it!


6. It's Important to Support Alternative Households

As a teen, the orphaned Peter Parker was raised alone by his (stunningly oblivious) Aunt May upon the death of his Uncle Ben. For years, Aunt May's fragile health was as constant and reliable a plot device ("If she finds out I'm Spider-Man, the shock will kill her!") in the pages of The Amazing Spider-Man as Scotty's limp-dicked dilithium crystals were on the original Star Trek.

The importance of supporting alternative households isn't something Obama needed to learn from Spider-Man, as he was partly raised by an older relative, his Grandmother "Toot", Madelyn Payne Dunham, who died just before Election Night. During his acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention, Obama said:

But the parallels between Peter's and Aunt May's life and Obama's certainly reinforce a sensitivity to the plight(s) of older people and kids living in alternative households, especially when it comes to health care, better than any pie-charted government report could.


7. Your Former Associates Can Be a Liability Too

As of this writing, Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich has been impeached for trying to sell Obama's vacant Senate seat and Blagojevich's choice for that seat, Roland Burris, had a pissing-out-kidney-stones hard time getting his credentials accepted by the Senate.

The tribble-topped Blagojevich's antics aren't as much of a liability as, say, Harry Osborn's getting his lobes scrambled by drugs, finding out his roommate Peter is Spider-Man (the person he blames for the death of his father Norman Osborn, the original Green Goblin), going bugfuck and becoming the new Green Goblin and blowing up the apartment he shares with Peter (seriously hurting Peter's gal Mary Jane in the process). While Blagojevich and Obama were never so close as to be roommates, the fact is, your long-time associates really can "taint" your ass sometimes.


8. Surveillance Issues Are Tricky

The USA PATRIOT Act, data mining, the government giving big bucks to cities and municipalities to set up new hidden camera systems, erosion of the FISA Court's authority... all open cans of legal and ethical worms. Obama told George Stephanopoulos, when referring to the people whose job it is to look over other people's shoulders, that:

Which brings me to another kind of worm, the Mindworm, aka William Turner, a mutant Spidey first encountered when Peter lost the lease to his fleabag apartment and had to crash at Flash Thompson's place on Far Rockaway. The Mindworm was the product of experiments in a government lab, and he spent his life probing his way into people's thoughts and feeding off of their mind's inner workings. William was so dependant on crawling around in people's heads, that when Spidey gave him a blow to the ears and "deafened" him to other people's thoughts, he freaked out because he couldn't stand the solitude of being alone in his own mind. William spent a lot of years on a bad downward slide, and died because he couldn't come to terms with his own constant inability to not intrude on other people's privacy.


9. War Veterans Need To Be Taken Care Of

Peter's nemesis at Midtown High was Eugene "Flash" Thompson, a jock who used to pick on the nerd he dubbed "Puny Parker," ironically, while also being Spider-Man's number one fan.

In the 1970s, Flash's story arc included a tour in Vietnam, with some attendant PTSD that led to Flash becoming an alcoholic.

Last year, Flash quit his job and enlisted in Iraq. Amazing Spider-Man writer Marc Guggenheim told the Los Angeles Times:

Flash's admiration for Spider-Man was such that while fighting in Mosul and with his legs shot to bloody rags, he carried a fellow soldier out of danger rather than be medevac'ed out and get immediate treatment that could have saved his own legs.

Peter stood by Flash when, after his first tour, he suffered the lasting effects of PTSD and alcoholism. Peter later shows support for Flash after he's wounded in Iraq by sending him a CARE package while he's being treated at a base hospital in Germany.

On a larger scale, Obama has pledged to reverse the 2003 legislation which stops modest-income veterans from receiving care from the Veterans' Administration. He's also vowed to establish a "zero tolerance" policy when it comes to allowing veteran war heroes to fall into homelessness. He has promised to smooth out the bureaucracy that impedes vets from getting their benefits. So, maybe guys like Flash will get just a bit of their due.


10. It's Important to Support the Development of New Technologies

Technology in Spidey's world goes wonky. Witness the advent of Doctor Octopus and the Sandman. But in the form of John Jameson, the astronaut son of J. Jonah Jameson, we have an old skool "Right Stuff/Roger Ramjet" hero who embodies something Obama thinks has been missing from the American imagination. Last March, Obama said:

So, yeah... even though through scientific mishaps and misadventure, John Jameson wound up fighting Spidey in a special exoskeletal "Jupiter Suit," became the lycanthropic villain Man-Wolf, and morphed into the superbeing known as Stargod (and as an aside, married Bruce Banner's wicked smart and urgently fuckable green-skinned cousin, Jennifer Walters, aka She-Hulk), he, through his place in the Spider-Man mythos, embodies that "can do" NASA mojo, that Obama talks about, and which has given the U.S. a real edge in the world technologically. The fact that Obama plans to create the first Cabinet-level post of Chief Technology Officer hints he's taken that "can do" outlook to heart.




© Michael Marano 2009.

Horror writer, pop culture commentator and film critic Michael Marano wrote "Inner Demons, Outer Heroes, Outer Villains: A Look at Monstrosity in Spider-Man and Spider-Man 2" for the book Webslinger: SF and Comic Writers on Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man, edited by Gerry Conway (the writer who killed Gwen Stacy).

Click HERE to purchase a copy of the limited edition Obama/Spider-Man comic, and support the progressive news hounds at BuzzFlash.com (at time of writing they had just 120 copies of the third edition left!).

That's pretty the president featured on a comic book. "Change" has come to america LAMO.

The most important thing he needs to learn is that when you make a deal with the devil to make it so your marriage never existed, your approval ratings plummet.

QFT

Fantastic article and wonderfully well-researched. Great job.

This was awesome! Very well written, and just fantastic!!! Amazing!!!!

Agreed. Excellent article.

Very clever. Well done.

Obama is more popular then Jesus Christ.

Obama gets more awesome every time I hear something about him. He is evidently replacing the White House bowling alley with a Basketball court, and going to have a stretch Cadilac for his limo. A G for sho'.

Gawd I hate talking like that, but seriously, epic president is epic.

fucking brill

This is brilliant.

Very well written. I'm sure we all hope that he does his best to do what he Says he wants to do efficiently. I just hope he doesn't plan on curbing our future space endevours. :-/

Clever article

god YES! hes so great.

This was a great article. Thank you.

Pfft... Obama > DC.

If you don't like DC, you'll love this one:

Geeks finally won big when we got Obama into the Whitehouse...it's about damn time!

i really enjoyed this. along similar lines - another good one from the Onion today...

Obama Disappointed Cabinet Failed To Understand His Reference To 'Savage Sword Of Conan' #24