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Blue Saint said:
"All this “geekery” we surround ourselves in are aspects of commercial enterprise. "
I realize this banal line of Marxist thought has yet to shuffle off the mortal coil, that it continues to drag itself from Internet essay to Internet essay like a legless mummy.
But the fact is that no matter how one may try to define Captain America as an "aspect of commercial enterprise," this is an invalid "outside definition," proposed by someone who wants to reduce a given franchise to something predictable and determined by market forces and all that crap. None of this "culture industry" junk offers the slightest insight as to why people put down hard money for Captain America, or, for that matter, Love and Rockets, which is no less a ":commercial enterprise"-- or anything that was ever sold for money.
NOTE: The poster in question denied being an advocate of what I later caleld "Marx/Adorno 101," so I retracted the specific accusation, though it still applies across the board to other critics.
SECOND NOTE: Ripped off this cool quote from the discussion, possibly for later use:
“This is an age in which a woman might succeed a black man as president, but also one in which a member of the white working class has declining options to make a decent living. This is a time when gay people can be married in 50 states, even as working-class families are hanging by a thread. It’s a period in which we have become far more aware of the historic injustices that still haunt African-Americans and yet we treat the desperate plight of today’s white working class as an afterthought.
“For the white working class, having had their morals roundly mocked, their religion deemed primitive, and their economic prospects decimated, now find their very gender and race, indeed the very way they talk about reality, described as a kind of problem for the nation to overcome. …
“Much of the newly energized left has come to see the white working class not as allies but primarily as bigots, misogynists, racists, and homophobes, thereby condemning those often at the near-bottom rung of the economy to the bottom rung of the culture as well.”
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As for the essence of the current kerfluffle about Captain America turning out to be a Hydra agent, I covered all this in my 2008 essay EARTH-SHATTERING CHANGES AT THE LAST MINUTE.
Also, I appreciate the comment by a poster named George, who points out that death-threats from aggrieved fans predate the Internet. He mentions that both Claremont and Miller received such threats for knocking off fan-favorite characters.
Frankly, I really don't think that the Cap-Hydra schtick can be critiqued in terms of "diversity" until it's actually appeared. Whoever started the "anti-Semitism" angle was plainly trying to stir shit without having facts on which to base an argument-- not to mention the fact that Nazism, of which Hydra is a fantasy-analogue, is not defined ONLY by anti-Semitism.
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