Jamelle Bouie has noticed that Marvel’s 2006 “Civil War” storyline (which is scheduled to be integrated into the Marvel Studios superhero franchise ) sounds awful right-wing. It isn’t. It’s just mindless political tribalism, and the only thing that has changed is the date and the party in the White House.
For those of you who don’t know the story, a tragedy involving superheroes leads to the passage of the Superhero Registration Act, which forces all superheroes to give up their secret identities and work with the government, or else be sent to a government prison in the Negative Zone (just think bad place). Captain America leads the resistance to this law and is assassinated.
Sonny Bunch has some fun with Bouie by pointing out that the writer of Civil War is a self-professed liberal who wrote the series as an attack on the Bush administration. The Superhero Registration Act really is an awful metaphor for the Patriot Act (it wasn’t like the law forced al-Qaeda members to enlist in the US military), but that didn’t matter. It was 2006 and 2007. His heart (and by heart I mean hate) was in the right place. Dixie Chicks/Green Day dissent was the highest form of patriotism. You’ll notice they never said thoughtful intellectually honest dissent was patriotic.
But now it is 2014, and dissent is a pretty low form of patriotism. The idea that a demagogic politician might exploit a crisis to increase the reach of government is less a threat than an opportunity. Never let a serious crisis go to waste. There is a Democrat in the White House and only people who worry about government registration are the ones with their hearts in the wrong place.
This isn’t real an issue of Left and Right. When I was reading Paul Johnson’s Modern Times, I was struck by a passage in which he wrote that the politics of France between the two world wars was so divisive because it wasn’t my country right or wrong, it was “Whose country, theirs or mine?”* When you get to things like Marvel’s Civil War, the conflicts only make sense when you know that conflicts as being about tribes rather than ideas, and it is all about who is telling the story. You can easily invert the characters because it is about attacking the other (and advertizing one’s own place in the tribe).
It shows up on the right too. Look at the lines of a song written by right-winger Ted Nugent:
Here’s to the laws of Eric Holder,
Congress will pass an act in the panic of the day,
And the Constitution’s drowning in an ocean of decay,
And freedom of speech is dangerous I’ve even heard them say,
Here’s to the land you tore out the heart of,
Holder find yourself another country to be part of
So you have an aging right-wing artist attacking a nonwhite Attorney General, saying that the AG wants to “drown” the Constitution and destroy free speech – strange that Nugent doesn’t worry about what will happen to himself in post-constitutional America. You also have this celebrity trading on his white privilege and telling a nonwhite Attorney General (whose family history in the United States goes back three generations) to leave the country. If Bouie really wants to know what paranoid right-wing extremism looks like, he should have cited this song.
The thing is, the song isn’t really by Ted Nugent. The (racist?) white rocker is Eddie Vedder and the Attorney General is Alberto Gonzalez. No problem.
I have good news for Bouie. The “Civil War” stuff isn’t due to be integrated into the Marvel movies until after the 2016 election. That means that the Superhero Registration Act might be a perfectly appropriate metaphor for the corporate, war on women, Koch brothers fascism of Chris Christie’s first budget. It won’t be any stupider in 2017 than in 2007.
Update: It looks like Captain America 3 will be coming out in 2016. Should be fun seeing the spin.