All of us

have had our superheroes. Mine was Spiderman.

I am not sure how cool it

was to worship at the feet of a leotarded guy whose

powers were contingent on sticking to walls with the

ferocity of a wad of chewing gum, yet all I wanted to do

was wear a mask and shoot thread from my wrists. I must

have been entranced by the genius lyrics of the theme

song: Spiderman, Spiderman does whatever a spider can.

Wow, deep.

When I was growing up,

superheroes had all the complexity of a squirrel staring

at itself in a plate glass window. Whether coming from a

strange, exploding planet or being accidently doused in

radioactive goo, the original role models readily

accepted their circumstance and moved forward. This was

the best lesson they could teach us.

I wonder what difference

this, soft, PC generation could have made for the

fabulous crime fighters of yesterday. Could the

Incredible Hulk have benefitted from anger management?

Would Superman have been quite as violent and strong with

the crooks? If only he could have flown around the earth

at the speed of light, turned back time and helped these

bad guys through their troubled childhoods.

No doubt Wonder Woman would

have had to watch all her captives be set free because

when extracting the truth from them with her magic rope,

she failed to read them their Miranda rights. It would

have been enough to make her bust her bustier.

Where in olden days we were

naive enough to dream about patterning our lives after

cartoons, today kids seem more interested in emulating

pop stars and sports stars and generally any too-young

millionaire with bad manners

While superheros of old

would change into Spandex in a tollbooth, today's

superhero just phones it in on the way to a Spandex

endorsement. The Batmobile has been replaced by a

limousine. Where a cape was once the sign of the

invincible, now it's a Nike logo.

Yet, in all the confusion

there is one stalwart fixture on the influence of youth

of the ages: the parent. Girls still rate their mothers

as the person they are most likely to pattern their life

after. And teens say that they seek to please their

parents more than any other group.

So, in the end it's never

the superhero that makes the difference. In the end,

dreams are just fantasy and real is real.