America the Superhero

I have suspected for some time that some Americans believe too literally in their action movies. In particular, they think that the superhero approach to solving the world’s problems, which they see in these types of films, is the answer. Now I have some support for this suspicion, in a book by Robert Jewett and John Shelton Lawrence called Captain America and the Crusade against Evil: The Dilemma of Zealous Nationalism (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003).

            The authors describe what they call the crusading zealous nationalism that characterises much of the approach that the United States takes to the rest of the world. This mirrors the myth of “Captain America”, a cartoon character dedicated to saving the world and securing it for freedom and democracy, by the use of violence if necessary (it generally is). America’s sense of being “Captain America” in the world has a long history and is deeply embedded in the national consciousness. It had its foundations in the Puritan impulse to religious violence: to “convert” the world to its view of how things should be by force. When the first missionaries were sent to Hawaii, the Rev. Heman (ironic name) Humphrey preached a sermon in 1819 comparing their missionary endeavours to ancient Israel’s conquest of Canaan (p. 251).

            Another motivation for America’s crusading zeal is its sense of Manifest Destiny. Many Americans see their nation as fulfilling the role of a “city on a hill”, taking the benefits of their way of life to other nations. They see their nation as “innocent”, and unready to resort first to violence, but needing to do so in the face of evil forces ranged against it (or threatening to take over other nations). Feeding this sense of mission is the tendency towards conspiracy theories: perhaps the most obvious one in the twentieth century was the “domino theory” of the fall of South-East Asian nations to communism, if nothing were done to stop its spread from North Vietnam.

            The book traces the story of American “Captain America” syndrome and “redemptive violence” from its early days, through the Mexican-American war (1846–48), the Spanish-American war (1898), two world wars, the wars in Korea and Vietnam, through to the war against the Taliban in Afghanistan following the attacks on 9/11. Alongside the “Captain America” syndrome, the belief in conspiracy, sits a tendency to think, speak, and act against stereotypes: “the Hun”, “Japs” “Gooks,” or “Arabs”. To be fair, this is a general human tendency, not confined to Americans.

            One of the most common, and in a sense dangerous, stereotypes is found in the “good guy/bad guy” rhetoric. This stereotype, and its association with movies, is captured nicely in a story they tell of Reagan’s annoyance when his space based defense initiative was given the moniker “Star Wars”. Reagan saw it as a defensive stratagem and a move to ensure peace. In fact, a defence analyst Fred Reed stated that “Star Wars, if it works, will be an offensive weapon of absolute power” (p. 118, italics original). A film scholar Michael Rogin “reviewed Reagan’s movies and discovered that, in Murder in the Air (1940), [Reagan] played an agent maintaining the secrecy and security of ‘the Inertial Projector’, which ‘stops and destroys anything that moves.’ It had just the qualities sought for in Captain America’s religion of defense.” (119) Richard Perle, Reagan’s “brilliant young assistant secretary of defense, told colleagues that he thought the name [Star Wars] wasn’t so bad. ‘Why not,’ he said, ‘It’s a good movie. Besides, the good guys won’.” (p.107, quoting Frances FitzGerald, Way Out There in the Blue: Reagan, Star Wars, and the End of the Cold War, New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000, p. 39).

            In my opinion, the “good guy/bad guy” stereotype is particularly dangerous as it is applied as a defence of gun ownership. “Good guys” have to own guns, and, no doubt, carry them, so as to be ready to stop the “bad guys” with guns. The problem is that most people with guns are considered “good guys” until they go bad. The idea that a “good guy” carrying a gun will be able to pre-emptively stop a “bad guy” killing with a gun is most of the time pure fantasy.

            On the subject of guns, Jewett and Lawrence have a fascinating passage that is worth quoting in full. They write about the mystique of violence that has “imparted a distinctive character to American wars” (p. 254), rising first from Mexican war, and helping to “prepare the way for the Civil War in the 1860s”. They write:

As Michael Bellesiles has shown, the Civil War also ‘altered the national character’ and showed ‘the need for one American to be able to kill another’ with a firearm. For the first time in American history, guns had been made widely available by mass production, and they were in popular use. While guns had rarely played a significant role in American life for its first two hundred years, the Colt Company had begun in the 1840s to merchandize its pistols with mythic engravings of men defending their families against Indians with a Colt pistol. It was after the Civil War that the company perfected revolvers that would fire self-contained metal cartridges, which Colt called ‘the Peacemaker.’ According to Bellesiles, ‘The Wichita Eagle reported in May 1874 that ‘Pistols are as thick as blackberries.’ By that time a gun seemed to most men a requisite for their very identity…The Civil War transformed the gun from a tool into a perceived necessity. The war preserved the Union, unifying the nation around a single icon: the gun.’” (p. 255, quoting Bellesiles, Arming America: The Origins of a National Gun Culture, New York: Vintage Books, 2000, pp. 429, 379, 430).

I suspect that the fondness of many Americans for the gun (leaving aside arguments derived from the Second Amendment) stems from the depiction of much gun violence in action and superhero movies. Apart from the fact that the hero has nine lives (if not more), the amount of shooting and blowing things up that goes on, makes it difficult to know who’s a “good guy” and who’s a “bad guy”.

            Against “zealous nationalism” Jewett and Lawrence place “the tradition of prophetic realism.” This, they state, “avoids taking the stances of complete innocence and selflessness. It seeks to redeem the world for coexistence by impartial justice that claims no favored status for individual nations.” (8) They use the description “prophetic realism” a little loosely at times, I feel, as it sometimes stands simply for anything opposed to zealous nationalism, even if the motivating factor is more likely to be pragmatic politics.

            Their book is itself an exercise in prophetic realism, and is well worth reading and pondering. While it is one thing to look at the United States from the outside (as a non-American) and consider its faults, it is both heartening and welcome to see that prophets within provide cogent and clear critique. They are the best prophets: hopefully not without honour.