Below The Fold

I first heard the news only yesterday. I was scanning the days headlines, and it was the first one that leapt out at me. Cap is gone.
Few other characters of the American Mythos are as recognizable as the Marvel bastion. If Batman, Spiderman and Superman are all titans, then certainly Cap was a demigod. So for sheer eclat alone, his passing leaves a huge void.
But there’s also something much deeper and disturbing about his death than the simple end of a comic book hero.
Superman is Metropolis. Batman is Gotham City. Spiderman is New York.
Captain America was a nation.
His passing is as troubling to me as the loss of each and every WWII veteran. He was borne of that war; he stood for a dream and people entrenched in a battle with the devil himself. His nobility was as pure as the flag of the time (later civil rights struggles and red scare witch hunts notwithstanding). Cap was the very personification of America. He was a hero to the world, the scourge of totalitarianist regimes and despot disctators. He was what America was supposed to be.
And now, today, in 2007, 66 years after his birth (as a full grown adult), he lies dead, and Marvel Comics effectively pulls off what the Red Skeleton Skull, the Third Reich and a gazillion other criminals, murderers, miscreants, thugs, demons, and crazed lunatics couldn’t do.
You can almost hear Bucky’s cries now: “Say it ain’t so, Cap!”
The worst part of it all, the part that hurts the most, is that we’ve never needed the Sentinal of Liberty more than we do today. America’s torn at the seam, bleeding from the inside out, a product of her own in-bickering and political corruption. In 1941, the states were at their most United. There was a universally reviled foe across the seas that we had to stand up to. America was the only one left to save the world.
Today, America is split. Foes exist, but we can’t find them anymore. We’re not sure who to stand up to, or even if we should be standing up to anyone at all. We scream across the aisle at each other, angrier about perceived political slights and a definition of “morality” that seems thoroughly unagreeable. The very liberties Cap spent his life defending are eroding faster than his shield could fly, whether it’s under the sickle of secret organizations within our own government or at the blunt of the hammer weilded by big business.
If ever America needed her Captain, it’s now.