The Hoard Potato runs this up the flagpole to see who salutes.

[athelind]

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.

---

Comments

[tombfyre.livejournal.com]

I'd say that's definitely a great way to look upon the fellow. ^^ Though I have it on good authority that he can also be fucking insane. :3

http://static.funnyjunk.com/pictures/lmfaolol0.jpg

[cpxbrex.livejournal.com]

I'll salute that. I really like Captain America for pretty much precisely the reasons you said - but I can't read his comic, anymore. (Yeah, I know, for a couple of years he was dead.) Because it is obvious to me that part of the crowd of people who have bought into the rightist jingoism of the character now run Marvel comics. He wasn't a right-wing icon . . . but it isn't over, yet.

[scarfman]

http://arthurkingoftimeandspace.com/1750.htm

[cpxbrex.livejournal.com]

After reading the post, I'd read the story but . . . c'mon, even if he submitted it, Marvel wouldn't publish. A story about how Captain America is a COMMUNIST?! That'd be right the hell out. ;)

[mocha-mephooki.livejournal.com]

I have to admit to never having been much of a Captain America fan, mostly because during the comic-shop-confidential conversations around here that I grew up through, he was usually portrayed to be that government tool. Since that usually sparked political debates with the geeks in charge, and I had no interest in said debates at the time, I pretty much walked away and kept to my indie and vigilante comics.

I think I would have preferred to have heard your portrayal of him back then... might have changed my mind on a few things.

[paka.livejournal.com]

Not that this is a huge statement, but this is merely a subset of the semantics of America, the USA or patriotism, and of this mix of right-wing brainlessness with left-wing cynicism. In the 1940s of course liberal types revered the flag and talked about "truth, justice and the American way" unironically in one sentence. And I'm gonna shut up now before it becomes overly bitter.