INVISIBILITY VS. FLIGHT?:

The Htoo twins come in from the cold: Myanmar's legendary child rebel leaders are like toxic cherubim, confusing our moral senses. (Lawrence Weschler, Jan. 29, 2001, Salon)

The image itself (splayed across virtually every newspaper in the world) was uncanny, the caption more unsettling yet: Dec. 6, 1999, a
pair of 12-year-old ethnic Karen twin brothers, the Htoos, Johnny on the left (that's a boy?) and Luther (Luther!?) on the right, leaders of a beleaguered Myanmar insurgent group known as God's Army, whose members credit them with mystical godlike powers that "render them invulnerable during battle."

In the photo, they look like Renaissance cherubs gone badly wrong (specifically like those two clichéd angels propped at the foot of Raphael's Dresden Sistine Madonna): toxic putti. Raphael's cherubs, that is, gone upriver, deep, way too deep into Conradland -- miniature Brandos bestriding their own demented cargo cult. Their aura is all the more unsettling in that, in this photo anyway, they actually look, if you'll pardon the expression, like Siamese twins. Johnny seems to grow right out of Luther's back, his tremulous innocence hitched helplessly to the latter's age-old, gimlet-eyed world-weariness: seen it all (toke), seen it all (toke), should never have seen any of it.

This American Life rebroadcast their show on Superheroes this weekend. The "Wonder Twins" were one of the stories, but the pick of the litter is, Act One. Invisible Man vs. Hawkman:

John Hodgman conducts an informal survey in which he asks the age old question: which is better? The power of flight, or the power of invisibility? He finds that how you answer tells a lot about what kind of person you are. And also, no matter which power people choose, they never use it to fight crime. (13 minutes)

It's very funny. Posted by Orrin Judd at March 4, 2003 9:56 PM