Captain America is dead. The most recent issue in the venerable series killed off Cap with an assassin's bullet.
Oooh: heavy. You might sniff that it's just a comic book; who cares? But comic books convey and reflect cultural messages to millions of youthful Americans, and the movie versions carry those messages around the world.
If Captain Saudi was shot trying to teach his daughter to drive a car, it would mean something. If Captain France turned into a vigilante prowling the suburbs to root out Islamic radicalism, we'd pay attention. So the death of Captain America is important. But what does it mean?
It means he'll probably be back as Captain American't, a tortured superhero who realizes the futility of nationalism in an interconnected world, or Captain Pre-Columbian, who avenges the sins of colonialism. Or maybe just another version of whatever dispirited, slump-shouldered version of Western Civ the cynical lads in the comic mills want to serve up today.
It's not surprising; Captain America has been a vessel for cultural self-loathing for some time now. If we put out an unapologetically patriotic Captain America these days, we'd be shouted down as fascists who want to give military recruiters access to day-care centers.
In the old days, though, figures like Cap were plentiful and resolute, smashing Nazi schemes to drill a tunnel under the Atlantic to Brooklyn. Even Superman joined the Allied cause, although why he didn't fly to Berlin and kill Hitler was never explained. Maybe he thought we'd feel better about Victory if we accomplished it on our own.
And he was right. That's just the sort of lesson parents want their kids to absorb. But junior-jingo comics of the '40s gave way to horror books, monster mags and other peace-time indulgences; eventually the trend toward conflicted, angsty heroes intersected with the last batch of teenage boomers, and the square-jawed Pepsodent Nazi-bashers gave way to "realistic'' heroes with "problems.''
A great idea, really, and in the hands of Marvel comics it revitalized the genre. But it took only a few years before social consciousness and counter-culture themes entered the picture, and the results were predictably self-righteous. In the '70s, during the first spasm of eco-panic, superheroes battled ... pollution.
DC Comics' Green Lantern and the Green Arrow, for example, teamed up to take on an aircraft manufacturer whose plant so upset the delicate ecology that it convinced a saintly ecologist to dress like Jesus and crucify himself in front of a jet engine. Eventually the Lantern and the Arrow were strung up on either side. All the scene lacked were soldiers throwing dice for their uniforms.
While some may have appreciated the ham-fisted morality plays, it just gave teens an excuse to read comics in college. They were relevant, man! But only to the adolescent imagination, which had become smug and moody. Heroes began to quit their crime-fighting pastimes; girlfriends usually ended up dead; authority figures were revealed as corrupt and immoral. (Remember the Spider-Man movie? The Green Goblin was a wealthy, sociopathic arms contractor — as if there were any other kind!)
By 1986 we had Frank Miller's brilliant "Dark Knight'' revision of the Batman story; it culminated in a fight between Batman and Superman, who was recast as a anachronism who believed in that yankee-doodle twaddle and did the bidding of a Reaganesque president.
Captain America has been dead for a long time, in other words.
So it's hopeless, right? No. There was always something a bit quaint about the modern incarnations of ol' Cap, and he never quite fit in with the modern roster of comic book heroes. If his demise bespeaks a moment of self-doubt in America, then the enduring popularity of Tintin represents nostalgia for Belgian colonialism.
For a more pertinent lesson, you might look at another Frank Miller work; instead of Batman, it concerns a band of brothers whose martial code compels them to sacrifice their lives for the sake of their freedom, their society, their conception of liberty. It's called "300.'' They made a little movie out of it, and it seems to be doing well.
Trading Captain America for the King of Sparta may not be the ideal bargain, but these days, you take what you can get.
