Talking about Things that Happened

Jaybird

Jaybird is Birdmojo on Xbox Live and Jaybirdmojo on Playstation's network. He's been playing consoles since the Atari 2600 and it was Zork that taught him how to touch-type. If you've got a song for Wednesday, a commercial for Saturday, a recommendation for Tuesday, an essay for Monday, or, heck, just a handful a questions, fire off an email to AskJaybird-at-gmail.com

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13 Responses

  1. Will Truman says:

    I agree on every account. I am at once uncomfortable with the whitewashing and also glad that they did it. I haven’t read Truth, mostly because I’m not a Marvel guy and though I was aware of the Captain Tuskegee experiments*, I never knew where that was established. I have issues with some of the ways that Cap has been used to advance a political agenda, but this isn’t one of them.

    * – My reaction was the same as yours: makes sense. Interestingly, one of the (many, many) thoughts I had after reading Watchmen was wondering how many Russians died as they tried to create Dr. Moscow.Report

    • Mike Schilling in reply to Will Truman says:

      The US must have retried the experiment until it became clear that the Osterman effect wasn’t reproducible. Five times, maybe? Ten? The most we can hope is that they were volunteers.Report

      • Do you need two of them, though? Especially given that Jon wasn’t viewed as unreliable until later on. When he went off to Mars, then maybe it was a bad time to be a good candidate.

        On the other hand, I doubt it would be anything but volunteers on either side. I mean, would you want to create a Dr. Manhattan that is mad at you?Report

        • Matty in reply to Will Truman says:

          No, not again we never did get those stains out the carpet.Report

        • Mike Schilling in reply to Will Truman says:

          Do you need two of them, though?

          I presume that Jon discovered how great his powers were gradually, as time went on, so at first he seemed to be just a powerful weapon, not a god-like being, and the military would have wanted as many of those as it could get. Good point about volunteers, though.Report

    • Pyre in reply to Will Truman says:

      “I have issues with some of the ways that Cap has been used to advance a political agenda, but this isn’t one of them.”

      *Looks at publication date.*

      2003? Yeah, that’s about right.Report

      • Jaybird in reply to Pyre says:

        As much as I hate Joe Q (and I hate him with the hate of one thousand Khans), I don’t know that this story should fall under the same umbrella of him assassinating Captain America whenever Republicans win an election and bringing him back to life when the Democrats do.Report

        • Pyre in reply to Jaybird says:

          I kinda think it should because:

          -Joe Q was not the first one to have Cap hang up the shield or die under Republican Presidents. That’s just a Captain America/Marvel thing. Even in the What Ifs for the first series run which ran in the 70s, Captain America has been a soapbox against right-wingers. It’s really not just a Joe Q thing.

          -This story would have neatly dovetailed into the Florida voting. It probably didn’t come out sooner because, after 9/11, there was a period where we had to show shots of Doom crying and Juggernaut looking for a chicken sandwich. That’s why I said that 2003 was about right for this mini-series to come out.Report

          • Jaybird in reply to Pyre says:

            The problem with that, however, is that if we look at who had what policies in, oh, 1942, we find ourselves saying “wait, that’s doesn’t fit the narrative”.

            I think it’s more likely that the story came out in 2003 because, crunching the numbers, it couldn’t have come out much sooner (see, for example, Milestone Comics).Report

            • Pyre in reply to Jaybird says:

              Who was in office in 1942 is far less relevant than who was being disenfranchised in 1942 in terms of making a political point for a Captain America story published in 2003.Report

              • Jaybird in reply to Pyre says:

                I don’t know. This particular story could have played out a hundred ways… and, yes, it’s true that many of those ways could easily be interpreted as an anti-Bush story about an evil Government that does evil things.

                It didn’t feel that way to me, though (and I looked for stuff like that). I think it did more of a job of communicating a lot of things that were, sadly, historically accurate.

                To be sure, I read the book when Obama was in office… but I can’t imagine the experience of reading the story would be *THAT* different had I read it back when “Bend It Like Beckham” was still in theaters.Report

  2. Kazzy says:

    “…seriously discuss a lot of the ugly things that don’t make for good summer action movie conversation.” Part of the problem is that the vast majority of us are always going to pick the summer action blockbuster over the serious conversation. Which is one reason we continue to have the same old serious problems.Report

  3. Kimmi says:

    credit where credit is due. someone walked the path of thorns.Report