Flying faster than a speeding bullet, becoming invisible, and shooting fireballs out of one’s palms. The nature of super heroes is that they do supernatural things. But what really makes for a good super hero and heroines is a healthy dollop of mortality. Which is why the recent re-launch of the comic book series Batgirl was so contentious.

For the past 23 years, Batgirl (the alias of Barbara Gordon), has been paraplegic. But with the recent overhaul of DC Comics—also home to the Superman, Justice League, Watchmen, and Batman franchises—Gordon was miraculously cured of her spinal disability, able to walk around, fight evil, and otherwise kick tail like a conventional comic book heroine.

“Adding insult to injury,” writes Aaron Broverman for New Mobility, a publication serving active wheelchair users, “Gordon had become a beacon of pride for readers with disabilities, thanks to her post-injury identity—Oracle—an enterprising super-hacker relied on by all DC heroes for her intelligence-gathering skills.”

The Batgirl recovery, argues Broverman, is just the latest manifestation of the “miracle cure narrative,” a plot device that ensures a happy ending, but also stigmatizes people with disabilities. Other examples include Colin Craven in The Secret Garden, Clara in Heidi, and, oh, you know, all those folks that Jesus healed. Broverman explains the problematic of this narrative device: “Like these characters, if you’d worked a little harder or gotten a little more fresh air, you’d be cured, too.”

To be fair, DC claims that the company-wide re-launch set the clock back to five years after the inception of the DC comic universe—a convenient bit of timeline rewriting and rejiggering. “[I]n a universe where dead superheroes can come back to life,” cedes Broverman, “[where] aliens are real, time travel is possible and artificial intelligence has advanced past the singularity, it’s actually more unbelievable that this woman has had something so comparatively minor as a spinal cord injury for so long.”

Source: New Mobility (subscription required) 

Image courtesy of DC Comics. 

A few soup recipes that aren’t typically found on a seafood restaurant’s menu: tomato soup, turtle soup, bird’s nest soup, translucent soup. Maybe those restaurants should start including them, though, because photographer Mandy Barker was able to collect all the ingredients on her last trip to the beach. It’s fantastic what thrives in the sea.

Of course, I’m not talking about actual bird’s nest soup. Barker is making her “soup” from the riches of plastic that bob in ocean’s trash gyres. (“‘Gyre’ is a fancy word for a current in a bowl of soup,” seaborne garbage expert Curtis Ebbesmeyer told Harper’s Magazine’s Donovan Hohn. “You stir your soup, it goes around a few seconds.”)

“SOUP: Bird’s Nest,” the opening image of this post, contains a delicious mix of “discarded fishing line that has formed nest-like balls due to tidal and oceanic movement” and “other debris collected in its path.”

Barker’s tangles of fishing line look like a school of tropical jellyfish caught in a midnight migration. (Or an outfit worn by Björk, for that matter.) The colouring and fragility of the figures make for a beautiful image—until you imagine the world’s living jellyfish replaced by Barker’s artificial ones. As Barker explains in her mission statement:

The series aims to engage with and stimulate an emotional response in the viewer by combining a contradiction between initial aesthetic attraction and an awareness of the disturbing statistics of dispersed plastics . . . which results, ultimately, in the death of sea creatures.

“SOUP: Ruinous Remembrance”
Ingredients; plastic flowers, leaves, stems and fishing line 
Additives; bones, skulls, feathers and fish. 

“SOUP: Tomato”
Ingredients; red plastic debris. 

“SOUP: Turtle”
Ingredients; plastic turtles that have circled and existed in The North Pacific gyre for 16 years.
Additives; ducks, beavers and frogs. 

“SOUP: Translucent”
Ingredients; translucent plastic debris. 

“SOUP: Refused”
Ingredients; plastic oceanic debris affected by the chewing and attempted ingestion by animals. Includes a toothpaste tube.
Additives; teeth from animals. 

(Plastic’s proliferation is practically a department [read: permanent source of anxiety] at Utne Reader. See our previous writing on it here, here, and here. Also, Donovan Hohn’s book Moby-Dick—based on the aforementioned Harper’s Article—is a fascinating read that tackles the problem of plastic from every conceivable angle.)

(Thanks, Designboom.) 

Images courtesy of Mandy Barker.

Honesty has ceased to be seen as a virtue, and with its decline “our society risks a future of moral numbness,” writes William Damon in Defining Ideas, a journal published by the Hoover Institution at Harvard University. Damon is well aware that the little deception is sometimes morally justifiable, but he posits that “a basic intent to be truthful, along with an assumption that people can be generally taken at their word, is required for all sustained civilized dealings.”

And that’s not what he’s seeing out there in our schools, businesses, and institutions. Writes Damon in “The Death of Honesty”:

Although truthfulness is essential for good human relationships and personal integrity, it is often abandoned in pursuit of other life priorities.

Indeed, there may be a perception in many key areas of contemporary life—law, business, politics, among others—that expecting honesty on a regular basis is a naïve and foolish attitude, a “loser’s” way of operating. Such a perception is practically a mandate for personal dishonesty and a concession to interpersonal distrust. When we no longer assume that those who communicate with us are at least trying to tell the truth, we give up on them as trustworthy persons and deal with them only in a strictly instrumental manner. The bounds of mutual moral obligation dissolve, and the laws of the jungle reemerge.

Damon singles out schools, with their laxness toward cheating, as a large part of the problem behind slipping ethics. But he makes no specific mention of the legions of business leaders whose base dishonesty led to the spectacular financial collapse and ongoing recession that has plagued the country for several years. Maybe it’s because Damon is too humble to suggest that they didn’t read his 2004 book: The Moral Advantage: How to Succeed in Business by Doing the Right Thing.

Source: Defining Ideas