Captain America Hates America!

[CheesalaIsGood 0]

http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/comm...edved040403.asp

 

April 4, 2003, 7:15 a.m.

Captain America, Traitor?

The comic-book hero goes anti-American.

 

By Michael Medved

 

s if Defense Department officials didn’t face enough challenges in and around Iraq, they must now prepare for battle without a celebrated component of past victories. Captain America, the patriotic superhero whose comic-book exploits inspired the nation in World War II, now feels uncertain about the nation’s cause; in his latest adventures, The Sentinel of Liberty seems disillusioned, embittered, and surprisingly sympathetic to terrorists.

 

 

This odd, unsettling direction for Marvel Comics comes at a time of maximum cultural influence. The company owns 4,700 characters, including classic figures like “Spider-Man,” “Daredevil,” “The Incredible Hulk,” and “X Men,” all celebrated in recent or upcoming movie blockbusters. This mainstream clout makes the radical rethinking of the company’s signature hero, Captain America, all the more unsettling.

 

In 2002, Marvel responded to the horrors of 9/11 with Captain America: The New Deal, a series featuring a terrorist named Al-Tariq who’s determined to punish the U.S. for its reckless misdeeds. After taking hostages in a small town with a defense plant, the militant addresses Captain America through loudspeakers, demanding: “Tell our children then, American — Who sowed death in their field — and left it for the innocent to harvest? Who took their hands, their feet?” A horrified hostage mother turns with fury on her own husband and shrills: “This is how you feed our baby? With bombs? You make bombs?”

 

No one in this comic (#3 of the series), neither Captain America nor any of the hostages, ever offers a word of rebuttal to the pro-terrorist tirade.

 

In the next installment of the series (#4), Al-Tariq insists: “I am not a terrorist. I am a messenger-here to show you the truth of war. YOU ARE THE TERRORISTS!” Later, Captain America seizes an ID device from around his enemy’s neck — a “CATtag” used by U.S. intelligence. He later confronts the secretary of defense by declaring: “You tried to hang one of these around my neck...The terrorists I fought in Centerville all wore them — these CATtags.” In other words, Marvel Comics thoughtlessly recycles a notion that’s been lovingly nurtured by anti-American conspiracy theorists of all stripes: that our own intelligence establishment somehow orchestrated bloody terrorist attacks against U.S. civilians.

 

This idea of America the Guilty permeates other additions to the series, including #5 (October, 2002) in which Captain America visits Dresden to receive a history lesson on American war guilt — for World War II! The broad-shouldered hero goes through a searing reverie about America’s controversial fire-bombing of the city in 1945: “You didn’t understand what we’d done here — until September the 11th,” he tells himself. “These people weren’t soldiers. They huddled in the dark. Trapped...And while there was nothing left to breathe there in the dark, they died... History repeats itself like a machine gun.”

 

Captain America’s post-9/11 understanding of the destruction of Dresden suggests a moral equivalence between the Allied forces in World War II (in the midst of a bloody, all-out global war) and the al Qaeda terrorists who randomly attacked unsuspecting office workers. Especially in a comic book aimed largely at children and teenagers (and rated PG) the comparison (in the hero’s own voice) is both illogical and obscene.

 

The indictment of the United States becomes even more explicit in issue #6 (December, 2002) in which Captain America listens to yet another sympathetic rant from a terrorist mastermind. “Guerillas gunned my father down while he was at work in the fields — With American bullets,” the militant helpfully explains. “You know your history, Captain America...You played that game in too many places... The sun never set on your political chessboard- your empire of blood.”

 

To this verbal assault, The Sentinel of Liberty responds meekly, “We’ve changed. We’ve learned...My people never knew. We know now. And those days are over.”

 

In addition to making one-sided, damning references to controversial elements of American foreign policy, Marvel Comics recently highlighted totally invented atrocities to underscore the nation’s vicious, racist nature.

 

In January, 2003, the company published Truth — Red, White and Black, a prequel to the original Captain America story. That classic tale from 1941 focused on Steve Rogers, a blond-haired weakling who, after rejection for military service, volunteers for a secret government program. Scientists inject him with “super soldier” serum, producing a muscular fighting machine.

 

In the new addition to the yarn, we learn that the government first tested the formula on unsuspecting black soldiers, employed as human guinea pigs. The evil Army scientist in the comic baldly declares: “It’s necessary to see if our methods apply to the inferior races.” White commanders separate African-American GI’s into two groups, one of which speeds away on locked trucks (like Nazi train transports) to a secret laboratory, while the remaining soldiers face mass murder from squadrons of machine gunners (like Nazi Einsatzgruppen). The sadistic experimentation on the survivors (in the PG-rated series) includes horrific panels showing bodies exploding, and laboratory walls splattered with blood. The recent comic unequivocally suggests a heavy-handed analogy to the death-camp experiments of Dr. Mengele.

 

Joe Quesada, editor-in-chief of Marvel Comics, cheerfully acknowledges the holocaust echoes. “There are moments in our history that may not have been our shining glory,” he told me. “We’ve done things in our history that aren’t right to our own citizens.” He specifically cited the infamous Tuskegee experiment, in which medical researchers left syphilitic black patients untreated in order to study effects of the disease. “The beauty of America is that we can tell these stories and learn from our mistakes and move on.” The messages he hopes to convey to children who read the comics include “the need to learn racial tolerance and that peace is the best way to go, wherever possible.”

 

In a special introduction to the hardbound edition of Captain America: The New Deal, Max Allan Collins (author of the acclaimed graphic novel The Road to Perdition) praises Marvel for its edgy content. He cites the determination to “take this classic character of a simpler time into the smoky aftermath of September 11th” and “this story’s courage and ability to examine the complexities of the issues that accompany terrorism... specifically, not to duck the things America has done to feed the attacks.”

 

We might expect such blame-America logic from Hollywood activists, academic apologists, or the angry protesters who regularly fill the streets of European capitals (and many major American cities). When such sentiments turn up, however, hidden within star-spangled, nostalgic packaging of comic books aimed at kids, we need to confront the deep cultural malaise afflicting the nation on the eve of war.

 

— Film critic Michael Medved hosts a nationally syndicated radio talk show on politics and pop culture. This piece was prepared with the assistance of Michael Lackner as part of a research project for the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, a nonprofit, bipartisan think tank on terrorism.

[Jingus 0]

"Extra! Extra! Read all about it! Artists and writers have liberal political opinions!"

 

Thank god he never read Preacher.

[TheBigSwigg 0]

Hasn't anyone ever told him that comics aren't just for kids anymore?

[CheesalaIsGood 0]

Guess not. It's just sad that they just seem compelled to lift every rock looking for anything they might consider bias. It's a friggin comic book!

[Guest PlatinumBoy]

This is kinda old, but this has been done MANY times in comics. Remember, in DC/Marvel people in the government are either A: People who piss on the American flag and are superevil bastards who love to torture and kill, or B: Heroic people who would lay their life down for their country in a second. Cap has gone aganist corrupt people before in his government--remember Nuke in Daredevil? The point of Cap is to always be a source of pride and power for America--him having his beliefs shaken isn't bad--I'd rather see a Cap who thinks, "Gee America has done bad stuff, but compared to the bad we've done more good and have never done things anywhere close to a Russia/Germany/Japan/China/etc. etc. level, so I'm more devoted to making America perfect than ever before!!!" than a Cap who is just, "NAZI BAD! CAP SMASH!"

[LessonInMachismo 0]

Supreme Power and Rising Stars both have a good amount of anti-American sentiment in them, too.

[Vern Gagne 0]

May has well call him Captain UN with this new prissy attitude.

[Guest CronoT]

This really isn't any different than the Captain America comics from the Vietnam Era.

 

As long as this current war is on Terrorism, innocents will either be in the wrong place at the wrong time, or will go out of their way to be in the way.

[Guest PlatinumBoy]

CronoT is right here. Again, they've done this with everyone from Superman to Cap, and it normally ends with the character more firm in their beliefs. I haven't read Rising Stars, but Supreme Power seems to have a good mix of angst about the government and such.

 

 

However, you know comics are getting two PC and hippieish when in the Iron Man movie they won't call Mandarin by that name since they deem it racist...

[Vyce 0]

Supreme Power and Rising Stars both have a good amount of anti-American sentiment in them, too.

And look who's writing them.

 

No offense to the guy, he's super talented, but my respect for him dropped quite a few notches when he became just like every other writer out there and started pushing his own social / political agenda in his work. You could make an argument that he did that to an extent in Bab5, which would likely be true, but nowhere near as heavy-handed as he is today.

 

BTW, Michael Medved should have kept reading the Cap series, because a couple issues later, in a different story arc, a terrorist cuts this big promo in the book that is virtually the same as Al Tariq, about how Americans are all terrorists because they're complicent in the death and destruction that our government has wrought in the world, and Cap just looks at him and says, "That's terrorist double-talk, mister, and I, for one, am SICK of it."

 

And then he beats the royal shit out of that guy. And at the end, he and Thor paraphrase Shakespeare, Henry V I think. It was great.

[2GOLD 0]

I actually like the thought of a super hero who questions things before doing what is right. In fact, I kinda remember that most super heroes had arcs like that.

 

Mindless beating people up, that was Wolverine. Captain America is just a man confused and it sounds like the arc was interesting rather than completely bull.

[JasonX 0]

"Extra!  Extra!  Read all about it!  Artists and writers have liberal political opinions!" 

 

Thank god he never read Preacher.

To be fair, while Preacher is pro-athiest it's also pretty anti-gay/anti-liberal given how Ennis used Custer to bitch about how soft America was and other right-wing BS about how people should behave not to mention the way all characters who had alternative sexual lifestyles were made out to be monsters or pedophiles.

[JasonX 0]

This really isn't any different than the Captain America comics from the Vietnam Era.

 

Some would say there is a big different, if only in the sense that the Vietname era Cap stories were GOOD stories that had political disections of America and the war in Southeast Asia while the current political stories involving Cap have either been poorly written stories that have been savagely castrated and forcibly changed by editors at Marvel who are chickenshit scared of offending the right (as in the case of the Marvel Knights Cap book, which went through countless writers who quit the book as a direct result of editors forcing constant changes to the storylines which they deemed were "too political") or in the case of the Ultimate Marvel Univese, features a Cap who is so utterly right-wing conservative that he would make Rush Limbaugh and Tom DeLay cum in their pants with glee.

 

Then again, the Vietnam era Cap stories had Richard Nixon and his fellow Whitewater goonsquad running the science geek division of the Ku Klux Klan as the book's main villain so take that for what it's worth towards their overall quality.

[SuperJerk 0]

Medved's on crack, as usual.

 

I wouldn't classify acknowledging some mistakes that we've made to be anti-American at all. I own almost every original issue Medved is yammering about and he's completely missed the point of those stories. As usual, he's taken stuff out of context and completely omits the part where Cap denounces the terrorists and beats them in the end.

[Guest JMA]

Again, they've done this with everyone from Superman to Cap, and it normally ends with the character more firm in their beliefs.  I haven't read Rising Stars, but Supreme Power seems to have a good mix of angst about the government and such.

Agreed. I love Supreme Power, partly because it's not dark for the sake of being dark.

 

However, you know comics are getting two PC and hippieish when in the Iron Man movie they won't call Mandarin by that name since they deem it racist...

Ugh. That definitely is hippieish.

[Special K 0]

You know what was awful? The old Iron Man cartoons from the 60's.

Mandarin: I'rr get you Ilon Man, if it's the rast thing I do!

Jesus, it was that bad. It wasn't even in an accent. It was just an American guy switching his l's and r's.

[Justice 0]

Why are you posting an article that is two years old?

 

Am I the only one who noticed this?

[kkktookmybabyaway 0]

And on my birthday, no less...

[CheesalaIsGood 0]

Why are you posting an article that is two years old?

 

Am I the only one who noticed this?

Stop whining.

[Justice 0]

Why are you posting an article that is two years old?

 

Am I the only one who noticed this?

Stop whining.

Stop posting out-of-date articles.

[kkktookmybabyaway 0]

That take place on my birthday...

[Vyce 0]

That take place on my birthday...

Uh....happy belated birthday?