Broken Frontier

Daily Bugle publisher J. Jonah Jameson proudly presents: an editorial civil war exploring both sides of the most controversial topic of our time—the Superhero Registration Act. Should masked vigilantes be forced to unmask before congress? Should all super-powered individuals be documented and controlled by state and federal legislatures? Is this an idea whose time has finally come? Only one thing is certain: whether we're super or human, we're all fiercely divided upon the answer. Making a stand for superhero registration is heroic fiction critic Dave Baxter.

My god, it’s come to this: the immediate condemnation of cultural development before it even reaches failure to launch.

Go ahead, name one instance in the history of the universe wherein “guilty until proven innocent” was the better approach to a world-changing event rather than cautious optimism.  What’s that?  The earth isn’t the center of the universe?  Off with his head!  Lincoln wants to free the who?  Get your guns, boys!   You mean anybody can just have an abortion?  Not on my watch: get your guns, boys! 

Christ, are we still railing at the bars of our respective cages when the door swings open and we’re let into a whole new section, never before seen but – let’s face it – just as sealed and openly imprisoning?  As our world grows bigger, more complex, more complete – with new compartments annexed onto our undersized world-views, allowing us to journey through and explore heights heretofore unseen, unconsidered – still are we maddened beyond all reason to find that the multifaceted compound we call home is still, for all its expansion, a cage, and that unlimited freedom and unbridled power is simply not ours to enjoy.  In fact, those who spend their lives seeking just such a way of life, they’re called super-villains, folks.

Let’s get something straight: the passing of the Super-Hero Registration Act is not a revolution of freedom, and therefore its disputation is not a revolutionary struggle.  This is within our own borders and fought between our own people.  This is a civil war, make no mistake… and, sorry, but Cap and Co aren’t the Union.

To quote JP Dorigo’s ridiculously starry-eyed look into our native national icon’s recent actions: “Captain America is about personal freedom.”  Okay, sure, but when soldiers were drafted due to the necessities required by wartime conditions, he didn’t go on some berserker rampage to free the poor saps who wanted to hide at home and live their lives the way they saw fit rather than fight for their country.  And yes, while the Registration Act isn’t a “wartime condition”, it’s been put into effect to counter a supposedly inevitable crisis, just as a declaration of war would be called for under an explicitly identical rationale. 

Admittedly, Cap didn’t hunt down the draft-dodgers, either, and therefore I wouldn’t expect him to be copasetic with policing his own kind, but he should not be opposed to a call for lawful registration, especially not before the act has harmed any of its supporters. And if such is the case, why would any then not support it?  Super-powered individuals can decide not to actively act as illegal vigilantes, or they can become deputized and registered – it’s a choice, it’s freedom, but not unlimited freedom.  It’s a multiple choice predicament, not a free association essay.

Civilization, and America in specific, is about equitable legislation and governance.  You don’t have a society without it.  The SHRA is the beginning of a larger evolution to a grander, more cohesive society, just as the original American Civil War was the first step toward a cohesive nation, the last hurrah for the era of free settlement and unchecked, westward expansion.  Basically, there’s liberty and there’s anarchy – they are not synonymous with each other, not even technically.  It’s understandable to be supremely suspicious and unsupportive of major change, but to condemn a ruling government before their actions have resulted in tragedy (and even then, only if the administration is wholly unrepentant and unswerving after the failure to achieve their well-intentioned goals), is hideously aggressive and incendiary in ways that the true American sensibilities of “freedom” and “liberty” just do not support.

You have to register a firearm, though in past times every man had the equal right to bear arms, and (actually) still does: as everyone has to register – it’s not voluntary because that wouldn’t be just, wouldn’t be fair.  Once, the right to freely carry firearms was necessary and beneficial, but that time ultimately passed as the United States became a vastly more composite, cohesive nation.  Eventually, the freedom to carry arms became a hindrance, and lo and behold we needed a control before everyone simply killed each other wholesale (go ahead; tell me you’re okay with ALL your neighbors wielding unregistered firearms).

To quote JP Dorigo again:

“When Steve Rodgers puts on his red, white and blue uniform, he becomes the living embodiment of what our forefathers represented. He’s George Washington. Abraham Lincoln. He’s every [sic] American soldier who ever died defending this country.”

Damn.  Skippy.  He’s every American soldier who ever died defending his country.  If you are drafted or volunteer to serve as an officially recognized military member, you are a soldier.  If you are not, then you are mother-lovin’ not.  If you work with and/or for the democratically elected governing forces of a nation, then you are “defending your country”.  If you aren’t, then you’re defending yourself and your own interests (at the absolute best).

Mr. Dorigo says: “Shouldn’t we look to the Captain as an example?”

Yes!  Amen!  Hallelujah!  Unfortunately, the Captain isn’t looking at himself as an example and has (if he is indeed the same Captain A. as the one who fought in WWII) allowed the intricacies of an era in which he was not raised, and therefore does not recognize, as being distinctions from the times of his past, though such distinctions are superficial at best, a parallax view of the same people and the same nation as that of the 1940’s and 50’s. 

Though even if the man behind the mask is a relative newcomer, he has a legacy of necessary nationalism to look to. In this case, the man behind the mask is ignoring the lesson of his predecessor(s) that, if concerned with the political atmosphere and doings of an era, fighting for a nation and leading the way through troubled times as a public, present example and spokesman, far outshines any good accomplished as a mere subversive.  That’s not to say that Captain America ought to blindly become “Captain Confederacy” if our government demanded it.  Still, the Captain should consider the administration’s demands, whatever they may be at whatever time, and orchestrate an appropriate, mediating response, rather than attack federal employees without pause and become an overnight guerilla. 

The extent of his response is bewildering to the point of contrived, as if a virulent protagonist in some hackneyed, Hollywood blockbuster; which convinces this writer that the man must be young, and not the original – he’s a product of the times, relating and reacting as our modern-day media purports that strong, heroic men should.  In the end, he has become Captain Confederacy, and he’s playing for the wrong damn side.

Some might claim that he’s our John Brown, fighting for the “Free Staters” against the “pro-slavery terrorists”, but the parallel simply does not align, not beyond the surface.  Brown worked toward the federal abolitionist ideal, and held back those who wished to live as they had always lived, those who transgressed federal law just so they wouldn’t have to change their lives in a way that they considered personally disastrous, regardless of what the rest of the nation believed to be a necessary evolution for a better future.  Abolition gave and took freedoms; the lives of fringe Americans became regulated, progressively over the course of time.  It was the beginning of the federal government having the final say in all things, and no, I don’t think it’s a remote possibility that we’ve reached the time where such an ideal is obsolete; we still cannot police ourselves.  We still need freedoms granted and taken away.  We may be free otherwise, but we certainly wouldn’t be a nation, and what we are is a free nation, with both aspects intrinsic to the American ideal.

Captain America has chosen an unconvincing, reactionary route, but one only needs to look to Spider-Man, and the bravery of his recent decision to unmask to the general public in order to understand the difference between the extremist and the hesitant moderate.  Parker chose to come clean and continue his heroic career because that is what he is: a hero.  It defines him, and nothing political or otherwise would stop him from being such.  He may suffer for the choice he has made, but as he hasn’t suffered yet for becoming an Avenger (a half-stepping toward the public spotlight he now finds himself in), he was willing to try.  If this does hurt him as an individual, then both he and we will know, and the SHRA will be put to the test.  He has protected himself and his family alone for a long time; now with a veritable army to back him up, at worst the danger is equal to what it was before – more villains, more heroes.

I’m certain that, whatever family Mr. Parker has, they are well aware of his situation and decisions in this time of crisis.  He is an adult and every man must abide by his decisions and the consequences inherent therein.  That is freedom.  Captain America is no longer deserving of his title, though perhaps he can replace the recently assassinated Flag-Smasher as good-intentioned overseer of a third-world country like Rumekistan, a role more suited to his new temperament of rage against all things incongruous to his old-school, outmoded libertarianism. 

Spider-Man, on the other hand, no longer deserves criticism for being a rogue element, though now he will, of course, receive it for no longer being the poster child for the fiercely independent, my-way-is-the-only-way anarchist.

On a final note, one Bugle reader, a Mr. Eric Lindberg, recently wrote in to express his concern with our government’s ability to protect those in the super-powered community from super-powered threats.  I had recently claimed that the Fantastic Four were a prime example of public exposure equaling a healthier, safer standpoint than masked, hidden vigilantism, and I wholly concede the reader’s point that the FF are an entire family of powered beings rather than a singular super-human with an indelibly non-powered family to contend with. 

However, the solution to this is inherent in the SHRA’s very concept: if the government resources include all super-humans that aren’t intentionally villainous, then the government will indeed have the ability to protect registered heroes from even their supra-able enemies.  This is, in fact, the very argument Mr. Lindberg employs for why the Fantastic Four work as a public family of heroes; they are not alone, but a family, and so then should the entirety of the heroic community be.  We cannot judge a fresh framework by the standards of the old, but rather by the proposed standards of the new.  The vigilantes are nervous to step forward solely on the basis that the resources they maintain as individual operatives are not enough – but this is not an applicable argument if they are members of a larger whole.

No more slaves.  No more uncontrollable firearm ownership.  No more freedom to publicly spout anything that is damaging and hateful to another individual if it serves no other purpose.  These were all freedoms we once held, but time and moral evolution have boarded up passages that were once open and which were – and for some backwater blunderheads still are – difficult to adjust to.  But they have, indisputably, made this nation the greatest and brightest and most diplomatic of all the current paradigms. 

Our forefathers would no more try to force their way of life and thought and politick upon a differing future nation than they considered that the stagnant and inbred way of the United Kingdoms were the proper governing method for a burgeoning United States.  Remember, they created the ability to amend their foundational, set rules.  If anything, they understood the absolute need for change when the time for change inevitably comes.