interesting post, Terry. I thought about some of those incidents as I was writing my earlier posts but was too lazy to look them up.
I'm less certain about whether Clark's using the words would automatically mean he "would walk the talk" though. Also I think it's significant that he used these threats in a limited way, as you point out, - he wanted to protect someone.
Nevertheless, I do agree that Superman could take a life in order to save someone - but I don't think he would deliberately kill someone if there were some other way to save that life. (at least that *he* could come up with - he wasn't MacGyver
)
Clark was never an "executioneer", though. He brought the bad guys to law. Once the Bad Guy had been thwarted, that was it. CK/S was never a revenge killer. He wasn't "wired" for the automatic violent response.
Xcully's HoL example is a good one - Clark knew what Luthor was, and, as well, Luthor had just put people Clark cared about through a private hell, and nearly succeeded in killing him. Yet his physical *instinct* was to try to save Luthor. Even when he could have killed Nor, Clark didn't (couldn't?) do it. The instinct to kill wasn't there.
The *instinct* to save is there in Clark Kent though - think of all the automatic quick saves he makes during the course of the show. that's one of the first things we see him doing with the bus in the pilot.
The only other point I'd like to make is that several respondents have tossed the term "murder" around as if it fit anyone who took a life.
To clarify, I'm one who used the term 'murder', but not to mean anything other than what would be a willful and deliberate act. As you point out, there's a difference between that type of crime, and self-defence or manslaughter or criminal negligence.
but I hope that if you do comment, you do it from a position of knowledge instead of presupposition and prejudice.
I think that's really hard to do because no one is free of either of the latter two. For example, some posters believe that all people are by instinct revenge killers and so that particular "prejudice" or "bias" shapes how they view this issue.
As well, we all have presuppositions about how the characters might act in an unknown situation because of how we've seen them act in L&C:tNAoS. For example, I mentioned Clark's "instinct" to help.
As well, we look at ourselves and say, hey, it's only natural for me to do this, and so therefore it would be natural for Clark or Lois Lane do that. But I'm not sure that sort of personal projection or "prejudice", if you will, is completely valid, either, as a way to judge Clark Kent or Lois Lane or any of the other characters.
As for knowledge - well, can never have enough of that.
One of the images I can't get out of my head is that of those Amish people who lost their daughters to a vicious murderer. There can be no worse thing than to lose a child. And yet their reaction was never less than truly "human".
c.
