Fox News threw a fit over the fact that Captain America, the comic book character and movie fantasy, was just too darn liberal. In the latest iteration of the character, not only is he black, but his enemies are home-grown American fascists who hate immigrants, which is just cutting a little too close to the Republican bone.
Amanda Marcotte has a good factual rundown of Cap’s genre history, but I have to say my favorite treatment is this work of fiction, told from the point of view of Steve Rogers’ 21st century publicist.
Something else she didn’t see coming: it turned out Captain America was basically a communist.
“More of a socialist, really,” he said, when she tiptoed toward the matter over lunch on Monday. Luckily, there hadn’t been any fallout from his weekend. It wasn’t that the media had suddenly developed a sense of restraint, more that neither protest had been deemed worthy of press coverage in the first place. Of course, if he kept at it, he would become the reason for said coverage.
“Went to meetings sometimes,” he was saying now, “but I worked a lot and I was pretty much always sick so sometimes I couldn’t—” He gestured vaguely with his chopsticks, then indicated the stone bowl in front of him. “This is really good, what is it?”
“Bi bim bop,” she replied, mostly on auto-pilot, still trying to process the way he’d shrugged off the question as if it was about something totally innocuous. Ice cream flavors. Sports teams. Favorite models of car. Steve experimentally added another couple dollops of hot sauce to his rice, and then it hit her: “Oh my god,” she said, “you slept through the fifties.” He looked up from his bowl blankly. She stared at him. “The whole thing. You missed the entire Red Scare—”
It’s a strange historical phenomenon that people came out of the Great Depression appreciating the role of government in providing security, and then went through the 50s and suddenly turned paranoid against the government.
I like bi bim bop.
Really? The revived Cap has been fighting this home-grownfascists since Avengers # 32 back in ’66 when the Sons of the Serpent were introduced.
Not to mention all the 5th column types the original golden-age version fought.
There is another Captain America who participated in and was part of the Red Scare in the ’50’s but he was insane.
Details! We need details!
As it became clear that “government security” was moving in the direction of “security” for everyone, and not just white guys, the New Deal coalition fell apart. That’s not the only reason, but it’s a big factor.
I love that fanfic you linked!
In general, I used to read a lot of fanfiction about Captain America, Avengers and co. and I loved the trend of making Captain America a very progressive social justice type.
For example, I read more than one fic where he was openly criticizing anti-vaxxers, citing his own times as a prime argument for vaccination. Pretty cool.
@Rich Woods:
The fanfic doesn’t include any details about ‘the thing with Bill O’Reilly’, and that’s probably for the best. With the setup, anything that the author actually came up with would likely be a let-down.
Actually, my one problem with that story is the minor historical revisionism that went on, but then again, it’s perfectly in character for the publicist to not know about it as most Americans don’t seem to: the 1950s was the second Red Scare.
The first one was in the late 1910s, starting in the spread of strikes and workers’ uprisings after the Russian Revolution, and mostly ending in 1920 after the May Day scare made the Attorney General look like a complete idiot for forecasting an attempt at overthrowing the government when nothing major happened. Fortunately, that time the media was quite willing to call out the Attorney General for being a scaremongering idiot, and the whole Red Scare pretty much collapsed.
On Monday I learned that in the official Marvel comics universe*, Steve Rogers canonically had all bigotry removed from his brain sometime in 1980s**. And that it didn’t actually make that much difference, because Steve Rogers was a pretty decent dude to start with.
But you take a character who was a kid when the stock market crashed, and saw the New Deal as the program that turned a serious economic depression around in the 1930s, then saw the ugly results of hyper-nationalism on Europe during the 1940s. (And, in the movie universe, in America, since he worked with black soldiers who still normally served in segregated units when not backing up Captain America, and at least one Japanese-American soldier whose family back home had been interred.)
(In fact, I recall reading a study that showed that the political landscape in your late teens and twenties tended to shape party affiliation statistically: someone like Steve Rogers who came of age during the FDR presidency was very likely to vote Democrat and lean towards more government involvement.)
* Well, the main one. Not any of the many, many alternate timelines.
** Magneto apparently thought Steve Rogers’ opposition to ‘let me use this relic from the Silver Age to brainwash the world into no longer being assholes’ might be due to anti-mutant sentiment, rather than it being a terrible idea to begin with. It was not a high point in comics writing.
I’ve actually never read Captain America – unless you count the Cap-heavy sections of civil war – so my knowledge of him is limited to his cameos with other heroes like Colonel Ms Captain Marvel and the movieverse, but this really feels like it could be canon. I mean, I seem to remember the whole civil war thing being a thing at all because Cap, who had originally been cautiously neutral on registration kinda exploded over the ever-so-slightly jackbooty way it was being carried out. I could totally see that fanfic being the general plot synopsis of an officlal 7 or 8 part serial.
I’d come across this fic before – it’s funny, intelligent and well-written, and a great example of what good fanfic does: entertainingly play with and flesh out the most interesting and thought-provoking what-ifs of canon. Nice pick! :-)
Steve Rogers, before the experiment, was a Brooklyn dwelling son of immigrants and professional artist. He painted for a living through the WPA.
He was always pro-integration, pro-immigration, and anti-fascist. He’s a dyed in the wool New Deal Democrat. Conservatives are nuts.
He’s also gay coded pretty fiercely. “This is Steve. He’s a handsome bachelor from Brooklyn. He’s an artist” isn’t subtle.
My one critique here is: why would someone who slept through the last few decades, who is unfamiliar with Korean food, have developed a taste for spiciness, and want to add *more* hot sauce (though I suppose his superhero qualities might give him enhanced ability to withstand spice)?
Even someone who is absolutely respectful of other cultures will need at least a few years of exposure to get used to the kind of spicy foods many Americans are regularly eating today. If the last time you ate a meal in America was in the mid-forties, I doubt you’re going to react to a tasty bibimbap drenched in hot sauce with anything but shock.
The cinematic and comic book incarnations of Cap are making Fox News blow a blood vessel due to their progressiveness as characters? Yet another reason to like them both.
re @10:
Agent Carter would disagree.
slithey tove (twas brillig (stevem)) @ 13;
Black Widow might have a thing or two to say about it as well…
In one version of the origin, Captain America receives his shield when it is handed to him personally by Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Another fun fact: there’s a multi-part story in which a group called The Secret Empire tries to take over the government from within but maintain the democratic facade so no one will ever know it, much like Karl Rove’s old idea of a “permanent majority”. The story also featured a phony grassroots movement in the public that was sponsored and driven by the SE, with a high profile media figure loony as their informal spokesman. Why didn’t Rove, and the TEA partyers, and Glenn Beck pitch a fit over that you might ask? Because that story was published in 1974.
It amuses me to no end that Captain America goes up against racist, xenophobic thugs, and conservatives immediately think he’s going up against them.
Ah, poor dears. And what about the children? (Over a comic book character!? Really? That’s some serious issue for a leading news outlet to deal with. If they could only put it in a spliff.)
There’s a comic on the web somewhere (I wish I’d saved a copy or bookmarked it) that has some fans in a shop talking about Cap and how the in-comic quality of his life correlates with out-of-comic presidency — when a Dem is in, he’s fairly happy. When there’s a Republican in office, his life is miserable and angsty. The writer varies, the editor varies, ownership of Marvel varies, and yet this relationship prevails, like it’s natural somehow.
Also, in the comics, Marvel has Fox News watching counterpart to Cap called “The USAgent”. So they should actually be complaining that he doesn’t get a movie, if they’re looking to gripe about something.
re 17:
I’m sure that’s exactly Faux Noize’s concern. Children being the key demographic of the Comic Books readership, means Comic Books publishing socialist dogma will program the kids to be socialists.
Becca @7:
I think that was from Avengers vs. X-Men #4…
iankoro @11:
One thing to remember: while Steve Rogers’ last meal prior to awakening in the modern era was in the mid-forties, he was fighting in World War II-in his secret identity and as Captain America-in locations around the globe. I know he visited multiple European and Asian countries. I can imagine during his time in those countries, he probably sampled some of the regional food.
Yes, and Superman was originally a populist anti-big business figure who mostly fought evil rich people. It must be really weird to be so totally un-self-aware that you can’t even process the idea that people think that your sort of person is a villain, and might express that.
Anyone ranting “What about the children?” about American super hero comic books is just showing how out of touch they are with the genre. The average age of the readership has been going up for years, and is probably in the mid 30s these days, if not older. Kids haven’t been the primary market for decades. It doesn’t help that single issues of comics are pretty much entirely sold in speciality comic shops.
I never read Captain America, so I’ll have to take Ms. Marcotte’s word that he was always a liberal. But I did find David Willis’ take on him being a conservative quite amusing, even if it turns out to be completely inaccurate.
My favourite thing to come out of this whole kerfuffle:
Some asshole on Twitter: “Liberals should invent their own Captain America, if that’s what they want to do.”
Some non-asshole: “We did. In the 40s.”
Couple of things that aren’t quite right.
1. Steve Rogers is not the current Captain America in the comics. Rigers took over SHIELD when Fury stepped down and passed on the Cap identity. The Captain America everyone is upset about is Sam Wilson, the original Falcon. You might be familiar with the character from the movie universe, he was in Cap 2 and Antman. You may notice sometime about Sam Wilson that makes conservatives mad.
2 @22 – as long as I’m the comic book nerd, have to correct this. Superman started out fighting street level thugs and then moved on to all kinds of whacky bullshit in the Silver Age. It wasn’t until the Joihn Byrne did a reboot of Superman in the 80s that he really got set up as fighting big business. That’s still the case by the way, Superman still regularly is fighting greedy businessmen. He also routinely fights factions of the US military that do things like unauthorized surveillance and torture.
Basically neither Cap nor Sups are the establishment characters that some people would have you believe.
@22 The Vicar (via Freethoughtblogs)
Let´s face it, these folks probably see Mr. Burns from the Simpsons as a virtuous job creator who is being unnecessarily punished by job killing health and safety inspectors and oppressively high taxes.
This is another thing that drives me barmy about US conservatives, does everything about their entertainment have to reflect their values and must do so rigidly lest it become part of the dreaded liberal media? I´m sure these fools think Super Mario Bros is leftist propaganda because well, they are plumbers so probably in a union, the bastards!
*raises hand*
You don’t eat bi bim bop with chopsticks.
There was one time when Captain America literally led an army of minorities and hippies to overthrow the US government.