Word: superman
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...story that comes closest to Wolff's stunningly rendered "Powder" is "Transactions" by Jamaican writer Michelle Cliff (No Telephone to Heaven, Abeng). As wonderfully bizarre as it poetic, it tells the story of a traveling salesman hawking American goods and culture ("Witch hazel. Superman. Band-Aids, Zane Grey. Chili Con carne...Camels") on a Caribbean island who buys a poor German girl that he finds on the roadside. Before taking the girl home to his sterile wife, they go to an enchanted spring/hotel/tourist attraction run by a woman with an obsession with Jet magazine...
...screenplay changes little of the book's simplistic plot. Matt Damon, following in the footsteps of Matthew McConaughey, is Rudy Baylor, a recent law-school grad with a soft spot for people in need. With the help of his diminutive mentor (Danny DeVito), Rudy evolves into an ethics-driven Superman--a lawyer with a heart, out to save the world from evil. First, there is his bold attack on a gargantuan insurance company that has a method of denying claims until policyholders give up. Rudy is astounded by the corruption of such a company that refuses...
...imagine how much these firms can make in the demining business. Indeed, that seems to be the aim of a number of companies who traveled to Ottawa to hawk their wares to treaty delegates. Bargains included the $500,000 remote-control mine detector, the supersonic air shovel and the Superman mine-awareness comic book. No word on what the hundreds of land-mine victims, observing the treaty signing on crutches and in wheelchairs, thought of such a commercial display...
...Kennedy and his family; in gossip columns and tabloids; and at times in official documents belatedly released. Together, these revelations form a tawdry counterpoint to the much brighter images that continue to dominate Kennedy's popular reputation. Against the heroic, romantic vision of Kennedy as a brilliant young superman stands the picture of an irresponsible libertine who bought his way into the presidency and then shamelessly abused...
That this profane creation could have been mistaken for a calcified Superman with a biblical pedigree evokes patronizing chuckles today. But Jacobs, an undersung writer (Beautiful Soup, The Egg of the Glak and Other Stories), treats bunkum and hypocrisy as endearingly ambivalent national traits. Unsurprisingly, his all-time champion of this view is P.T. Barnum, who at one point tells General Tom Thumb that "our mission is to startle and amuse, to make our audience pay too much for too little and forget to hang us from the nearest lamppost...