Captain America Is Dead; Indeed.

Of course, we’ve all heard that Captain America is dead. R.I.P., "Cap."

Captain America has been dead for some time now, actually. You do remember what he once stood for, don’t you? The “Spirit of America?” “Truth, Justice, and the American Way?” An “America” who battled the Nazi and the “Jap,” and went like the Lone Ranger to the aid of other nations?

Captain America has been dead in the minds of the world for some time now. But now he’s dead in the comic books, too.

In the comic book story, it was a sniper; here in the real world it has been neo-conservatism and its miscreant progeny. Born in 1941, the comic book Captain America did not interfere and dictate to other nations. He did not invade, seize the head of a foreign government in order to kidnap and bring him here for trial and imprisonment under our laws, nor did “Cap” set up drum-head trials in the hapless nation in order to execute their head of state, either. Old-fashioned honorable and incorruptible, comic-book heroes like Captain America didn’t condone and support things like Schools of the Americas, establishment of secret prisons in foreign countries, or parking nuclear aircraft carrier battle groups off their shores each time they misbehaved where our “interests” are concerned.

Captain America didn’t torture prisoners, in order to obtain “critical intelligence.”

No, Captain America is dead all right – dead long ago. But even the comic book version is also a product of, encapsulated in, the workings of the real world, you know. He’ll be back. The “Cap” will be back when it’s profitable for Marvel Comics. After all, the miracle of resurrection requires only that the cartoonist draw the costumed, shield-carrying hero again.

And he’ll be back in the real world, too. Oh, drawing the hero resurrected will require some effort, things like “plausible denial,” “limited hangout,“ and other “damage control” devices. This is a post-CIA Operation Mockingbird world, don’t forget. “Deception,” a former CIA Director of Counter-Intelligence once observed, is a state of mind; it is also the mind of the state.”

Don’t forget, either, the real “issue.” In the real world, what killed the Captain America was his insanely addicted desire for corporate profit. Being rescued by a super-hero who then demands your wallet lacks something of the comic book story. Do you really think we’d be in Iraq (or anywhere else), were it to cost corporations like Halliburton rather than enrich them? Would we be brandishing the mailed fist of nuclear carrier battle groups and torturing people, were there no profit in it? Sure we would. So resurrection of Captain America, corporate-style, will take some real economic and diplomatic legerdemain.

But we’re up to it. For a capitalist, addiction to money is as powerful a motive as there is. It’s the only reason for life, in fact – his or his victim’s.

Yeah, we’ll try to draw the character again. We did very well with the old one. Very profitable. We’ll use those “plausible denial, “limited hangout,” “damage control” colored pencils, and voila! Captain America will be back. A new alter ego like the lamented Steve Rogers will don the red, white, and blue costume, take up the shield, and sally forth. And “Americans” – the modern, U.S. version, that is – will buy it just like always (well, hell - try to imagine anything the public in this country won’t buy; a short – very short - review of recent events should convince you of that).

Yes, selling the new Captain America to the rest of the world will, indeed, take some doing. The rest of the world has already seen one change of the alter ego inevitable where super heroes are concerned. They know the hero behind the Mighty Wurlitzer and its Mockingbird program costume and shield of “Cap” isn’t a Steve Rogers. This guy works for Halliburton. His object isn’t “truth, justice, and the American way,” it’s the bottom line.

This guy’s shield isn’t the Vibranium-Adimantium alloy of that wielded by Captain America, its corporate law firms. This “masked crusader” doesn’t bother to master boxing and judo, he lobbies congress and the state legislatures and practices tactics like the Pinto Rule (remember? – let the victims of your mistakes die, because the cost of the lawsuit settlements will be less than the cost of correcting the mistake?) This guy’s athletic muscle is tons and tons of money.

And the world isn’t into meeting this Captain America head on in conventional combat, either. As I once (1958) asserted during a conversation with General Tom Van Natta, no one would try to stand up to a U.S. with all its military muscle. Who can match our fifteen trillion dollar military? Neither are today’s “Red Skull” adversaries “into” trying to penetrate the shield that is our nuclear missile submarines, either. But we won’t give them a choice, I said all those years ago. We’re a capitalist country, and that’s not capitalism.

Nope, I said, their only choice would be the “death of a thousand” cuts, or guerrilla war (1958, and a second john lieutenant knew it then – what does that tell you about the public and what it will believe?). In the fatal issue of Marvel Comics, Captain America is killed by a sniper, someone shooting from the cover that is the modern version of impenetrable jungle, the city. Guerrilla war. The only way to deal with a super hero gone bad.

So, Captain America is dead. The comic books had to tell you?

Meanwhile, back in the real world, where reality resembles the comic books more than they do reality, an illegal alien woman from Mexico caught availing herself of college tuition grants and a dozen more programs intended for our people doesn’t think she has done anything wrong (!). She has millions of similarly illegal aliens supporting her, too, and threatening to use the power of the vote to legalize her theft. “’Splain dat one, Luci.”

You thought I jested about comic book reality? Recently, school boards have begun announcing their intentions to hire illegal Mexican aliens as teachers in order to educate bi-lingually the children of illegal aliens attending our schools. Surreal? How about this: our president is in Brazil negotiating with the government there in order to assure that Brazilians will be able to undercut our own farmers in the U.S. market for bio-fuels. Does anyone remember the definition of “treason?” How about “capitalism?”

It gets even more bizarre. Elsewhere in the news, a pizza store owner who has announced acceptance of Mexican pesos (presumably, he’s found a bank here or in Mexico to help him) personifies the truth of the illegal immigration debate. Pizza Patrón founder Antonio Swad says right in our Anglo faces that it’s about profit, “not a political statement.” I couldn’t have said it better myself.

”You really don’t see the parallel “Pizza for Pesos” draws with the reason we’re in Iraq?

Take away the profit, what do you think would happen? Well, try to imagine the super hero Captain America selling pizzas. The corporate one will sell anything. While you’re thinking about what killed Captain America, here are a few more: The people who guard you while you sleep, prevent terrorists from boarding airliners (unless they happen to scream “racial profiling” or the like), and do “security” work not only get minimum wage, but many or them are aliens (“work Americans don’t want to do,”) you know.

Parenthetically, the better to make the point, a true story: during my travail under criminal assault at the hands of the “Nation of Laws,” I worked several times for security guard companies. Having within a short interval at one such cohort been obliged several times to defend myself against violence at the hands of would-be perpetrators of crime against the premises and property I was guarding, I asked why it was that I seemed to be the only member of the guard contingent who seemed to have so much trouble.

“Well,” the captain confided, “you’re the only one who actually protects the places you guard. You don’t expect the old farts, women, and fat people we hire to risk their necks for minimum wage, do you?”

To my flabbergasted reaction, he confided further that his company just paid the cost of whatever was damaged or stolen as a result of the guards’ cowardice or sleeping on duty (the Pinto Rule, again?), the better to keep the contract and client. If the security company kept overhead – including, I assume, wages – down they made a profit.

The people who protect you from your enemies are not Captain America, in other words. He didn’t used to work for pay, remember?

Did I say surreal? Comic-book? Last night, obviously expecting attentive consideration from her audience, a magnificently coiffured woman wearing pearls and garbed in a manner costing at least the monthly salary of a private soldier in Iraq held forth authoritatively about what U.S. policy and tactics in Iraq should be. Her opposition in the supposed debate was even more of everything theatrically meretricious, her greatest assets where reason to persist in watching is concerned being heroically-proportioned mammaries.

G.I. Jane doesn’t even bother to wear the costume any more.

Meanwhile, turning the pages of the comic book that our electronic and print media have become, we come to the massive, “plausible denial,” limited hangout,” effort that is the latest Veterans Administration revelation. The latest edition of Media Marvelous Comics has it that the Captain America super heroes of the U.S. Congress really care about the minimum wage soldiers they sacrifice on the altar of their god, capitalism.

Several scripts for the Operation Mockingbird drama are being considered (currently, the Goebbelsian strategy is to avail our superheroes of the super speeds provided them by technology in order to test alternatives). Which will prove most effective in mesmerizing the hapless, stunned and stolid, brother to the ox, herd represented by the voters? There is little doubt, state of the art what it is, that the “limited hangout” – in this case a scapegoat – will be most effective. The public has sucked this one up repeatedly – it should work again. Ostensibly (you don’t really think anybody get fired, do you?) someone is found to be at fault, shifted to another six figure salaried job – and the story falls out of the news. “The system works.”

Lord!

By the way – you don’t see the parallel between Building Eighteen at Walter Reed and that of the forty million poor in the U.S. and the portrait of the nation being promulgated by the media? REALLY?

You don’t see a parallel between the story of the guard company and that of the nation’s government bureaucracy? Really? You don’t recognize that a person devoid of any skills (or one having been totally deprived by the system of assets and recorded qualifications having to do with employability) will do nothing to jeopardize his job and put his salary at risk? Phenomenal!

Go back and consider, now that it has been discussed again and again, the World Trade Center debacle. See if you can still think that way. See if you can imagine Captain America having behaved as the various persons must have.

It goes on an on, as one might expect of an equation or system as big as a nation and culture. Consider along the way the peculiar form of entertainment known as “rap music.” Try, if you will, to imagine music or entertainment reduced to a more fundamental and/or primitive state. In this cultural embarrassment, particularly for the Afro-American communities, nothing remains of civilized music except rhythm. There is no melodious sound or tone, nothing of musical instrumentation or related artistry, nothing but emotionally scatological smart-mouth. This is the stuff of aboriginal proto-intellect and consciousness awakening. If it's Captain America, it's the great man with a bone in his nose.

At that, the resemblance to the bloviating bilge of today’s political punditry can’t be mistaken. That never occurs to you – really? Amazing!

Finally, speaking of “rapping” diatribe and oratorical hyper-nonsense, we have the totally surreal, comic-book spectacle – fully aware of her purpose, I use the term anyway – of the strange woman named Ann Coulter. The appeal to the intellect of Coulter’s tawdry blabber is about what her physique would be to prurient interests, were she to stoop so low – and, given her previous remarks, she may – as to disrobe on television. Trust me, Ann – stay in costume, even if it’s one of Captain America's Femizons. "Nightshade," for instance.

Ann Coulter personifies radical capitalist neo-conservatism, the George W. Bush Administration, and the very ugliest of what we have become - utterly nothing left of heroic America. In that, I think, she does us a favor. An idealist always looking for something good to say about even people of the most reprehensible behavior, I can’t help wondering if that isn’t what she has in mind. Like Sean Hannity and Michael Savage, her male counterparts in the FoxNews-genre electronic info-tainment media, this shrewish, vicious virago simply can’t be for real. She has to be yet another comic-book villainess. Poison Ivy, for instance; no, that was Batman, wasn't it?. Whatever.

The Spirit of America and Ann Coulter, after all, are Captain America and the Femizons. You can’t be more diametrical.