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The Hoard Potato runs this up the flagpole to see who salutes.
Edit: Yes, this is a May Day post.
John Seavey is a contributor at the Mighty God King blog.1
He just posted an outline for the Captain America prologue story he'd like to write, putting young Steve Rogers' life into its historical context: a sickly, working-class 98-pound weakling who had enough patriotic fervor to try and enlist and to fight his 4F status passionately enough to get the notice of the archetypal Secret Government Project.
He's the son of working-class, Depression-era Irish immigrants, and he's politically-motivated. Seavey observes that his parents were likely union organizers, and quite possibly members of a party that wasn't quite so demonized in the '20s and '30s, though it still wasn't exactly respectable.
This is something that most people outside the fandom don't get about Captain America. They look at the flag-colored costume, the blond hair and blue eyes, and immediately equate him with jingoism and the "America: Love It Or Leave It" crowd. They think he's a right-wing icon, a government tool, a crypto-fascist.
Even the right wing thinks so.
And they are so wrong. Only someone who just looks at the pictures, and doesn't look too closely at them, could think so.2
Cap's a New Deal Democrat, and always has been. He was created by a couple of poor Jewish kids from New York, for the express purpose of punching Hitler in the snoot, almost a year before Pearl Harbor, in a period when a lot of "respectable" Americans were still pushing for isolationism.
He's not a symbol of "Love It Or Leave It": he's a symbol of "Love It and Fix It". That's what real patriotism is, dammit.
He's a left-wing icon, and we need to take him back, and claim him as our own.
1He's not MGK himself, who has a long line of similar posts delineating just why he should write Dr. Strange and The Legion of Super-Heroes. These guys really need to get off their butts and submit to Marvel and DC.
2I'm looking at you, you illiterate hack.
John Seavey is a contributor at the Mighty God King blog.1
He just posted an outline for the Captain America prologue story he'd like to write, putting young Steve Rogers' life into its historical context: a sickly, working-class 98-pound weakling who had enough patriotic fervor to try and enlist and to fight his 4F status passionately enough to get the notice of the archetypal Secret Government Project.
He's the son of working-class, Depression-era Irish immigrants, and he's politically-motivated. Seavey observes that his parents were likely union organizers, and quite possibly members of a party that wasn't quite so demonized in the '20s and '30s, though it still wasn't exactly respectable.
This is something that most people outside the fandom don't get about Captain America. They look at the flag-colored costume, the blond hair and blue eyes, and immediately equate him with jingoism and the "America: Love It Or Leave It" crowd. They think he's a right-wing icon, a government tool, a crypto-fascist.
Even the right wing thinks so.
And they are so wrong. Only someone who just looks at the pictures, and doesn't look too closely at them, could think so.2
Cap's a New Deal Democrat, and always has been. He was created by a couple of poor Jewish kids from New York, for the express purpose of punching Hitler in the snoot, almost a year before Pearl Harbor, in a period when a lot of "respectable" Americans were still pushing for isolationism.
He's not a symbol of "Love It Or Leave It": he's a symbol of "Love It and Fix It". That's what real patriotism is, dammit.
He's a left-wing icon, and we need to take him back, and claim him as our own.
1He's not MGK himself, who has a long line of similar posts delineating just why he should write Dr. Strange and The Legion of Super-Heroes. These guys really need to get off their butts and submit to Marvel and DC.
2I'm looking at you, you illiterate hack.
Re: Boy, these paragraphs get narrow when they're indented this far.
I mean, I don't like patriotism because it is rooted in nationalism, but I'm not a political quietist and I'm not anti-American . . . though sometimes I do get incredibly angry with the people who run it. But, at the end of the day, it's simply a reality that I'm American and as a member of this society, I definitely want to see a better America. A freer, saner, more tolerant, capitalism-less, anti-imperialist, more inclusive, honestly internationalist America. It is, after all, my home, and I want it to be a nice place both to live and visit.