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PaperclipPerfector  9d ago (text post)   27512 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 26, 2025

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Cap is the Marvel version of Superman. The idealism is the point. Whether it's starting out as 40s literal "punch a Nazi" or 60s "Vietnam is not what we're about" or 00s Civil War "this is authoritarianism", or whatever they're currently doing with the character, the ideal of Captain America is what is best about America, its foundational myths, its aspirations, the shining city on the hill. The land of opportunity. The nation of immigrants, where you can leave the shackles of the Old World behind and have a fresh start, work hard, succeed on your merits, with nobody holding you down because of out-worn social classes like nobility and peasantry or because your lot in life is predetermined.

If you make the character dark'n'gritty Punisher type, you fundamentally misunderstand what it's about and you wreck it, so you either create a new different character to be the new dark'n'gritty pragmatist, or (as the development seems to have been with the John Walker character) retcon the retcon so it fits the ideals better (maybe our current ideals are feminist anti-racist pro-woke Cap, but the character is still a representation of idealism and not 'shoot 'em all, let God sort 'em out' pragmatism and cynicism).

The nation of immigrants

Ugh, I've always hated the writers for this shit. This is the kind of mindwash you get when you let a particular group of people drive your modern myths for decades. America Chavez and Ms. Marvel are just the latest most hamfisted reincarnations of this.

Eh, Steve Rogers is the son of Irish-Americans (not noted if they're Protestant or Catholic) so he's the exact type the Know Nothings were objecting to (even though he's literally white, blond and blue-eyed):

The American Party, known as the Native American Party before 1855 and colloquially referred to as the Know Nothings, or the Know Nothing Party, was an Old Stock nativist political movement in the United States in the 1850s. Members of the movement were required to say "I know nothing" whenever they were asked about its specifics by outsiders, providing the group with its colloquial name.

Supporters of the Know Nothing movement believed that an alleged "Romanist" conspiracy to subvert civil and religious liberty in the United States was being hatched by Catholics. Therefore, they sought to politically organize native-born Protestants in defense of their traditional religious and political values. The Know Nothing movement is remembered for this theme because Protestants feared that Catholic priests and bishops would control a large bloc of voters. In most places, the ideology and influence of the Know Nothing movement lasted only one or two years before it disintegrated due to weak and inexperienced local leaders, a lack of publicly proclaimed national leaders, and a deep split over the issue of slavery. In parts of the South, the party did not emphasize anti-Catholicism as frequently as it emphasized it in the North and it stressed a neutral position on slavery, but it became the main alternative to the dominant Democratic Party.

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