In his State of the City address today Austin Mayor Lee Leffingwell made a pretty great DC Comics analogy.
In his speech, he said:
If New York is Superman; and Chicago is Batman; and Los Angeles is the Flash; then Austin is the Green Lantern.
We are a city without fear. We are a city that can create anything we can visualize, through sheer force of will. We are a city with a special charge to shine a light into the darkness and lead the way to a new and better day.
I’m not sure if the mayor himself is a major geek, or one of his speech writers, but they both deserve to be commended. This is not only an incredibly appropriate and accurate use of superhero metaphor, but the crafting of the words is actually pretty spectacular. I’m a bit of a politics nerd (my dream last night was that I was in the State Legislature, seriously), and this is just good political writing.
Hell, just reading it gave me goosebumps.
This goes to show how far comics have come into the mainstream, and I am pretty happy to see it.
Our own Citizen-Bot was covering the event and sent it in, even though he didn’t have time to write it up on his own, he wanted it passed along.
Now if he would have only made everyone in attendance recite the Green Lantern’s oath…