Truth, Justice and the (Insert Country Name Here) Way

Bit of Sue Bait here.

Well, this is certainly interesting...

I see that Superman has renounced his American citizenship. Conservatives react here.

Not to ruin the story (SPOILER ALERT), but his reasoning is fairly valid. He wished to go to Tehran to support the protesters. The Iranian government said that they would view this as an act of war by the United States. He felt constrained by being seen as an instrument of American foreign policy and well...Now he's a citizen of somewhere or another.

Or not. Who knows?

What's interesting of course is that this raises a bevy of questions for his poor, hard-working alter ego; Clark Kent. Undoubtedly, Super Man (even given his now stateless existence), has always wished to follow the laws of the land. This becomes difficult when one considers that he is the ultimate undocumented worker. While it's possible that his father Jor-El had the presence of mind to fill out the proper forms before shooting his baby at Earth strapped to a rocket, I would suspect that with his home planet exploding and everything, he probably had other things on his mind.

Superman may have had at least felt morally justified working in the country. After all, he came here as a small child and certainly had no say over the matter. Furthermore, he's quite certainly been a productive member of his adopted country, even if he never did get around to tackling the troubling matter of producing a birth certificate. I can imagine he must have felt that he was as American as anyone else (definitely as much as the student mentioned in this edition of the Morning Blog. ). But having renounced his citizenship, what now? In all good conscience, will he be able to continue laboring on as Clark Kent? Will he be able to justify his continued theft of American jobs from our troubled journalism industry?

One thing I'm certain of: Given that it will be a trifle difficult to retrieve any documents or records from Krypton (planet ending explosions make record keeping just dreadful), I can't imagine that he'll go through the herculean task of applying to become a legal worker in the United States, an effort that in even the best of circumstances, can take years to complete. Frankly, that's the sort of struggle even the Man of Steel can't be expected to undertake. Far easier, to go punch a comet that's hurtling towards the Earth.