A QUICKLY BEATEN POST SEQUEL

My initial reason for writing this was just to link to last year's post, since THE BEAT has recently announced the essentials of the "Nazi Captain America" plotline have been concluded. To no one's surprise, it was, as I said, all a big kerfluffle designed to grab readers' attentions and sell more comics. Allegedly the Cosmic Cube was involved, which may be the rationale by which the story's writer claimed that Cap's nasty Nazi nature was "real," or as real as things get when you have devices with which you can change reality.

Whether or not the creators of the storyline managed to comment on "creeping fascism" or not, I can't say. I read a snippet of the story in some Free Comic Book, and I found it to be sub-Bendis drivel. I have no reason to doubt that the writer, one Nick Spenser, really thought that he was saying something meaningful about the dangers of fascism, and it may be that the piece I read did not capture the totality of his ambitions. To say the least, though, I'm skeptical of that.

Nevertheless, even if Spenser wrote a bad, possibly pretentious comic book, his deed is probably not more blameworthy than the legions of readers and pundits who lamented the storyline as some sort of terrible blow against diversity. Political correctness has become so pestilential that apparently one cannot even depict any character who seems allied to the forces of darkness without incurring an immediate and ill-conceived attack.

The impending HBO series CONFEDERATE has been attacked in similar fashion. I find it highly unlikely that the show's producers intend to use their postulate-- that of imagining an alternate world where the Southern States seceded from the Union-- to champion the values of a slave-holding society. I think it extremely likely that the producers will use the show for the opposite reason, to critique said values. There's no way to tell whether the show will be good or not, until we see it-- but to the partisans of political correctness, one should never do anything that in any way might encourage the forces of fascism. In such a repressive climate, a concept like Norman Lear's Archie Bunker-- that of using a racist character to critique racism-- would be well-nigh impossible.

And so, to all the politically correct partisans, I can only let Archie speak for me:

ADDENDUM: As the Wiki link shows, politically correct objections caused CONFEDERATE to be aborted. so that the creators' intentions will never be known.