Presidential Action Heroes

Monday is Presidents Day here in the United States of America.  Our pop culture has a peculiar fascination with turning our political leaders into superheroes.  I've written about fictional Presidents in action movies before, but even real historical figures have been depicted as over-the-top mythic warriors, from Barack Obama on the cover of comic books and in parodies as a Rambo-esque annihilator of terrorists like Osama bin Laden to the popular Saturday Night Live cartoon shorts that portrayed Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, and George H.W. Bush as superpowered avengers called the X-Presidents.

Like many other leaders throughout history, our Presidents have been glorified with monuments, statues, paintings, and portraits on our currency. Caesar may have been considered a god by the Romans and even contemporary dictatorships often attempt to deify their rulers, but it is interesting to see how our American democracy turns our Presidents into larger-than-life figures through mainstream entertainment.

Abraham Lincoln will be hunting vampires on movie screens this summer, but he also battled aliens alongside the crew of the U.S.S. Enterprise in the original Star Trek.  Andrew Jackson was re-imagined as a kick-ass young hero in a Broadway musical and artist Jason Heuser depicted George Washington as a zombie-slayer, Thomas Jefferson in hand-to-hand combat against a couple of vicious gorillas, Teddy Roosevelt battling Bigfoot, and Franklin Roosevelt as a giant cyborg.

Is it just silly fantasy or a satirical examination of our nation's cult of personality as we become more and more fascinated with image over substance in our leaders?  Happy Presidents Day!