And every place I go, man, people wanna come to America. They really do. I mean, they start talking about America, make your dick hard for America. You hear ’em talk, man, you say, ‘We got all that shit in America? I gotta get my ass back!’
–Richard Pryor
Captain America is a tricky subject.
He can easily be viewed as a jingoistic symbol of Yankee imperialism. He wears the flag and he’s got blonde hair and blue eyes. He is the Aryan ideal.
That’s not what he’s about, though. Not at all.
Cap represents the American ideal. He is what America claims to be on paper, if not in deed. He is what other people should strive to be.
Captain America was born Steve Rogers. Steve Rogers was a patriot. He saw a war coming and wanted to do his part. The problem is that Steve was 4F– unfit for service. He was too weak to do what he thought was right.
Someone saw potential in Steve and got him into the Super Soldier program. He was injected with the serum, which was destroyed shortly after it took hold. He’s one of a kind. He’s finally fit and able to do right.
Steve Rogers died back when Captain America was born. Steve realized that he was a symbol. He was bigger than Steve Rogers now, and he had to be better. He had to be impeccable. He fought for the government. He was employed by the government. But, he was not the government. He could not represent the government. He represented the ideal. He had to show people what they could become if they embraced the ideal. “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
I wasn’t really a Cap fan as a kid. The Avengers, save for Thor and Hawkeye, were pretty much universally lame. They were made up of shrinky people, rich dudes in robot suits, robots dating humans, and other characters I didn’t really care about.
I think that my first real exposure to Cap was in the pages of a What If. What If the Avengers Lost Operation Galactic Storm? It was cover dated 1993. I’d never read the original OGS, and I wasn’t reading the Avengers, so I’m not sure how I ended up with that comic. In it, Earth gets blown up and everybody dies, as befits a proper What If. A cadre of Avengers are left behind on the Kree homeworld, where they are immediately imprisoned. Among their number is Cap.
They’re planning a public execution of Cap. Clint, in his Giant-Man costume, sneaks into his cell and changes places with him. He understands that Cap is important. He knows that he’s one of the greatest. And… Cap gets it done. He frees other Avengers, he gets the job done, and the Kree empire goes down. There were a lot of characters in here that I did not, and do not, recognize, but it was a pretty rocking story. It actually made me believe that Cap was it. He was a big deal.
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