Much like Jesus would not recognise his "followers", Cap would not recognise the "america" he was fighting for...
Considering he went to war in the 40s, I think he would recognize this America. For all of our flaws, we're doing better now than we were then.
Like he said - he fought not because America is great, but because it is fragile. America is not some shining precious jewel, it's a deeply flawed creature - the only thing that marks it as worth saving is the ideal that all people are equal. The further we get from that, the closer we come to being nothing more than trash and a rag.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiorello_La_Guardia
New York City in the 1930s was full of Socialists and Communists.
Much of the 1950s Red Scare was set up to punish the 'premature anti-fascists' who a young Steve Rogers would have listened to.
But in that fragility, he understood that we were only as strong as our weakest link
For all of our flaws, we’re doing better now than we were then.
Really? How many Palestinians were the US helping to murder back in the 40s? How many Afghans? How many Iraqis?
Or are you just happy that the people being murdered happen to be brown people and not ones you think should be included in the "white enough" club?
Dang. This is a real Captain America from a "What If?" Published in 1983. "What if Captain America was thawed out today (1983)?"
Please save us, Cap. Oh wait, I guess now Disney owns you, too.
Cap got so disillusioned by Watergate that he changed his name to Nomad for a while.
It may be my ignorance, but the history of the USA i know starts with the massacre of indigenous people, then goes to the massacre of black people, then the massacre of mexicans, the massacre of communists, then the massacre of vietnamese ppl, then iraqs and afhgans, and so on. Where is the part that inspires the idea that the USA has such great values?
You left out a bit. We also fought the British, and the Confederacy, and the Spanish, and the Kaiser, and the Nazis, and Imperial Japan.
America's history is complicated, and full of atrocities, like the history of nearly every major nation.
The values he's referring to in the comic are the core principles espoused in the founding documents. The idea of one nation with liberty and justice for all. At no point in history have those ideas been fully realized, but striving to meet those ideals is what America means to the Captain, not some borders on a map or colors on a flag.
Sounds like pinko commie talk. Am I right?
He didn't say women. /s
The business coup plot in the 1930s almost succeeded for a reason. There are... unsavory elements in the American political apparatus.
Remember when Nixon made him so hopping mad he quit and took on the mantle of Nomad over it? Pepperidge farm remembers.
I'm pretty convinced all the craziness with hydra cap and old cap was just the writers trying to dodge the backlash of having Steve Rogers be the cap that made all the political statements that Sam Wilson did as cap during that stretch that happened to line up somewhat with the Trump Presidency.
While he blithely conflates nations with states as if that's the only natural arrangement.
(To be fair I do not expect comic book writers to understand those kinds of differences)
"American exceptionalism is when you think that America, a country founded on a handful of documents, relates to the ideals expressed in those documents."
I’ll offer a cautionary note on that take. We really need to meet our heroes, in this case our founding fathers, and frame their words and mindset in the time they said what they did. Those “ideals” revolved around landed white males and not the sugar-coated “I can not tell a lie” history we got in 4th grade.
Oh look... American Exceptionalism and American Innocence all rolled up into one ubermensch-style Objectivist "super hero" character.
History teaches us what US "ideals" truly are and always have been - and all the "soft power" the US can conjure won't be able to paint over it ever again.
