Hero is … um

Hero: Bryan Singer, for signing on to direct “X-Men: First Class,” according to Comic Book Resources. This is good for two reasons: 1) Singer did nice work with the first two X-Men movies; 2) He’ll be taking the franchise away from the tone-deaf Brett Ratner; and most importantly 3) It means there’s that much smaller a chance that Singer will make a sequel to “Superman Returns.”

Granted, the Big Blue Boy Scout’s silver screen presence is in development hell, mostly thanks to a blood-sucking attorney who’s snookered the heirs of Superman’s creators into a lawsuit that helps almost no one but the former ambulance chaser himself.

Still, as long as Singer keeps his dumb ideas (Supes being a deadbeat dad, a peeping tom, and a wuss, among them …) in the Marvel Universe, I’ll be happy.

Zero: Forty-one percent of the people polled recently by the Wall Street Journal and NBC News, who have a favorable view of the “Tea Party.” This compares to 35 percent who favor Democrats and 28 percent who favor Republicans. My first question is whether this means it’s safe to be a Republican again. …

The GOP is better off without the masses who are gullible enough to fall for the hype machine built primarily to raise the profile (and bank figures) of self-aggrandizers such as Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck and any of their penny-ante wannabe acolytes at the local level.

My submission for the actual name of their band of self-assured zealots is The Dogmatic Party. These are people who would gladly cut off their noses to spite their faces, ears, and the bald spots they’ve worn into into their scalps from repeatedly shoving their heads into sandboxes (the ones with big walls meant to keep out nasty government overlords). I live in a town teeming with them. There’s not a tax on the books they look kindly upon. In recent years these wise, wise people have chosen not to pool their money through minor tax increases to improve their own crumbling streets or put textbooks in all their children’s classrooms (full disclosure: I work for the school district, and this is all I’m going to say on that subject). What I’ve observed of the Tea Party types is an irrational disdain for all taxes, complete distrust of anything quasi-governmental, and an ironic and/or paradoxical fervor for one-sided talk radio types.

This is not to say I don’t find myself agreeing with some aspects of their passion for freedom, liberty, small government, and personal responsibility. I probably have just as much in common with The Dogmatic Party as I do the Democratic Party. I’m very much middle of the road. Rush Limbaugh would call me wishy-washy, but it’s more of a case of being willing to listen to all sides before making up my mind — I don’t live with the delusion that those on the Right get to claim all definitions of the word. This probably comes from my born-and-bred Nebraska values mixing with an artist’s heart. Some things are black-and-white; many others are an array of gray tones.

The Dogmatic Party needs to wake up the fact that there is such a thing as nuance in this life and that only a fool thinks s/he is right all the time. No one gets things done well by alienating people with whom they could find common ground — if they tried.