nationalist asshats.

So we’ve reached the point where we sell our contry for a few marketing bucks from other countries where American isn’t a shinny as she used to be. Business has no pride

It’s becuase we’ve sunk to this level that this makes me angry.

Be American. Be proud to be American, even if you don’t approve of your government. Tell the haters you don’t approve of (Iraq/Bush/torture/whatever) but you love your freedom. Tell them you voted for Kerry (if you did). Hiding your nationality will do nothing to end prejudice. Peaceful, moderate Muslims have suffered for years because their leaders have not raised their voices loudly enough against prejudice and terrorism. You are not to blame for the misdeeds of governments, even if you voted for the people in them. They messed up, not you. The inability of the ignorant to separate governments from the governed will not go away. Do not allow others to make you carry that cross.

That’s basically the central theme to Marvel Comics’ Civil War, in which Captain America refuses to help the government round up and imprison vigilantes who refuse to reveal their identities in the wake of a 9/11-like event involving superheroes. It’s a bit heavy-handed as far as plots go, but I’m glad that someone feels the need to open a discussion about whether our country has lost its way over the past five years.

Another extremely successful Marvel franchise has been their Ultimates series of comic books, in which they reimagine their flagship characters without any the tradition constraints imposed by maintaining continuity. In this 21st century reboot pretty much every superhero is the result of a national super-soldier experiment, so the issue that Jeff originally addressed in this entry is explored at length: what does it mean to be an American hero?

Safran: I haven’t had a chance to pick up True Brit yet, but I absolutely loved Red Son. The artwork alone (riffing on the Soviet realists at their best/worst) was worth the cover price!

And as for this “abhorrent leftist rhetoric”, 62% of Americans polled currently disapprove of the way Bush has handled the situation in Iraq. Awful lot of leftists out there these days, eh? Boo! We’re hiding under your bed.

When the manuals of the NKVD and the NSA can’t be told apart from context, you’ve got some serious thinking to do.

Oh, and for a totally different take on Superman, I highly recommend “SUPERMAN: RED SON” which envisions what the Caped One would have been like if he had been born in the Soviet Union: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superman:_Red_Son

Or, SUPERMAN: TRUE BRIT which dittoes above, born in the UK (and was co-written by John Cleese) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superman:_True_Brit

First of all, I was using the term “general” loosely to connote the leadership as a whole. Second, are you nuts? Rumsfeld has not only been micromanaging the Iraq war since day one (when he gutted General Shinseki’s call for a half million troops), but he’s also allowed the troops to suffer on the macro level as well in order to prove his pet theories about what the military of the 21st century should look like.

As for Bin Laden, if anyone should be to blame for his still being at large, it should be General Tommy Franks, who so thoroughly botched operations in Tora Bora back in 2002 that most of the Taliban and Al-Qaeda who weren’t completely suicidal were able to escape before being killed or captured. And yet how was this man rewarded for his incompetence? Why, he was put in charge of the Iraq invasion! How can you not lay this kind of serial stupidity at the feet of the Bush Administration?

Finally, my anecdotal evidence had nothing to do with proving any shift away from Bush but disproving your assertion that one cannot support the troops and find fault with military leadership at the same time. Your statement “Did you really expect people to boo *veterans*” in fact proves my point, not yours. Americans are smart enough to know the difference between decent people forced to do a crappy job and the ones who created the shithole in the first place. Attempts to conflate the two are rightly being seen as the desperate rhetorical scramblings of a party about to get hammered at the polls come November.

Why would you expect an ugly reception? It wasn’t our side that said it “supports the troops” but spat on them.

That’s right, you’re dragging the generals into it, as well. You have to, because the Bush administration has for the most part avoided micro-managing the military, which is why the left insults the troops every time they complain about specific failings. Bin Laden didn’t elude capture in the Oval Office, after all, he eluded capture in the field.

And, yippee for self-deceptive anecdotal evidence of the huge shift away from Bush and to the anti-war left! If anecdotal evidence counted as votes, you’d rule the world by now. Did you really expect people to boo *veterans*? I’d applaud them, myself, as they walked by, even though I disagreed with their message.

Absolute rubbish. The disconnect between an individual soldier’s honor and the incompetence of his generals has been recognized since Homer’s Iliad (the original “bungled” war). You have the burden of millennia against you in attempting to sell this desperate logical fallacy.

Anecdotal evidence to further disprove your claim: up here in Gloucester, Mass. — a fiercely patriotic town since World War Two, when twice the average number of residents enlisted to fight the Axis Powers — we had a demonstration by the local Veterans for Peace chapter in the annual Fishtown Horribles/July 4th parade. I expected an ugly reception, but the lone boo was drowned out by applause and cheers.

Don’t tell the families of active servicemen and veterans that they can’t support the troops while at the same fault the leadership which gambles away their lives so carelessly. In doing so you insult both their honor and their intelligence.

That being said, of course it’s good news that al-Qaeda’s number two is dead. But it’ll be even better news when the carbombings stop in Iraq. Even the more red-meat hawks on your end of the political spectrum are beginning to suspect that the two have very little to do with one another, and that even if we paraded Osama bin Laden’s severed head on a pike through downtown D.C., we’d still have a godawful mess on our hands in downtown Baghdad with no end in sight.

Captain America is alive and well, and currently leading the “resistance” against the government’s mandatory registration of superheroes in the much-ballyhooed Civil War crossover event that’s going on in Marvel Comics right now. The NYT wrote about it back in February.

Getting Zarquawi embarrassed Democrats just as they thought they were winning the global war against Republicans, and I’ve heard nothing but the desperate chant of bungling bungling bungling ever since. But if we are bungling the war, you cannot say that the troops are doing a great job, but Bush is bungling; they are not that separable. How do you think the troops feel hearing you say that we’re “bungling”, especially after Zarquawi?

The greatest bungling going on right now is coming from the left — the bungling of the New York Times in printing harmful secrets, the bungling of the left in doing everything they can to assist our enemies in fighting us. And, of course, the bungling of Democrats of being incapable of winning elections that are prefaced every time with great predictions of a massive shift in public opinion against Bush, the war, and Republicans. Bunglers, indeed!

Now you know how muslims and south asians feel when they walk down the streets of america.

>But, no, now being pro-American — even at a time when America is
>attacked — us politically uncorrect.

Being PC has nothing to do with why they made the change from the American Way, it has to do with $$$$$$$$$’s which is what the American Way has become these days.

Live long America but that’s gonna be possible only when a saviour Superman replaces Bush, how cum country’s trusting a man who’s always sitting on a fence(halting between two sides, which one to go). Instant action is needed. Nways…………..

Thank you.

THAT is a question that would make Captain America bow his head in shame…of course, this excerpt from Wikipedia is relevant to Superman, wouldn’t you say?

In the stories published after the 1960s, Captain America becomes a more serious and less jingoistic hero. Writers often use the character to reflect upon the conflict between politics and ideology by placing him at occasional odds with the United States government or showing him being troubled about the state of the country.

He considers himself dedicated to defending America’s ideals rather than its political leadership, a conviction Captain America sums up when confronted by an army general who attempts to manipulate him by appealing to his loyalty: Rogers responds, “I’m loyal to nothing, General … except the Dream.”

Good thing Captain America isn’t around anymore. Maybe we should let Superman slip away, too.

Superman still stands for truth and justice, but even though he was literally born on another planet, he’s no longer so naive as to assume that any one nation has an exclusive claim to such concepts. I fail to see how the idea that right and wrong transcend any superficial notions as the country one was born in (or adopted by in Supes case) is “insulting” to anyone except for people who are so vested in an infantile view of the world that they cannot tolerate the fact that even our popular culture must eventually grow up.

Interesting aside: DC Comics occasionally explores the relationship of Superman to America in the form of a series of graphic novels called “Elseworlds” which lie outside of the regular continuity of established characters and their respective plots. In one of the most popular of these offerings — called Red Son, written by Mark Millar — Kal-El crashes in the heartland of the Soviet Union instead of Kansas and is raised to be a champion of truth, justice, and the proletariat. Does the hero emerge, regardless of the accidents of one’s upbringing? And they say that comics are only for kids!

The problem with “Truth, justice and the American way” is that it conjures up an image of Superman standing beside a pile of naked, tortured Iraqis, puffing on a cigarette. Of him lashing out with indiscriminate force, not caring whether he kills insurgents or young children. Of him callously executing prisoners. Of him abandoning rule of law, imprisoning people, most of whom are innocent, without trial in illegal detention camps. Of him invading nations on false pretexts, lying to Congress and the people.

It’s tempting to say it’s just Bush, it’s just the government. But the American people turned around and re-elected the same government that did all this, by an even wider margin.

That’s how it became ‘the American Way’. And that’s why the American way is considered repugnant to so many people around the world today. That’s why the phrase can no longer be associated with a universal symbol of truth and justice.