The Tea Bag Jokes Write Themselves
Alternate title: "High Tea, Emphasis On High".
Second alternate: Do Tea Parties Happen In Tea Rooms?
I keep trying to articulate the brain-freeze that sets in every time I consider the Tea Baggers' collective finger-waggling at, of all people, Captain America of late. If you follow comics blogs or, in some cases, non-comics political blogs, you've probably heard: Captain America and Falcon went to rural Idaho in issue #602 and found themselves in the middle of a "tax protest" which was transparently a Tea Party protest. Lots of Palinites got their collective knickers in a knot because in that issue Falcon notes that he - a black guy from Harlem - probably isn't going to fit in well with them. In response, Joe Quesada apologized on behalf of Marvel and promised that reprintings and trade paperback collections would have the most obvious hallmarks of Tea Party identity removed from those scenes.
I think apologizing is pointless and editing the imagery in future collections is caving in for no good reason, but I also think the Tea Party reaction to this has probably involved enough pearl-clutching for all of us, so I'll (mostly) spare you the soapboxing. Why bother, anyway, when Brendan McGuirk of Comics Alliance has so clearly laid out exactly why Captain America and Marvel shouldn't apologize to anyone. I had gone in hoping that he would mention Cap's anger over Watergate, which he does. What I don't see mentioned is that the whole Civil War story arc at Marvel was clearly in some ways a reflection of the controversies and questions surrounding the Patriot Act in specific and our society's post-9/11 atmosphere in general and that Captain America was the leader of what could be read as either the liberal faction, the anti-government insurrectionists, or both. Captain America is not a safe, predictable hero who blindly accepts orders or allegiances - what one might expect from one who uses a defensive item as his primary weapon - and the Tea Party reaction, that Captain America is somehow "theirs" or exists only to exemplify the parts of America that are obedient and approving, is an irony too great for me to capture in mere words. These are people who, in the real world, shout down elected representatives at town hall meetings, take guns to political rallies and wave signs about wanting to "water the tree of liberty," an allusion to and complete misapprehension of a quote from Thomas Jefferson that seems to praise violent revolution. Now they want to stop everything and demand an apology because the Falcon said something that hurt their feelings?
What a bunch of duh-rama queens.
Updated Later: Chris Sims of Comics Alliance hilariously answers the question, if they weren't Tea Partiers, about what were they protesting?
Why Marvel Owes No Apologies for Captain America's 'Tea Party' [Comics Alliance]
Klarion
Posted to editorial on 12 February 2010
· Comments (7)
Other stuff like this: Captain America, Ed Brubaker
I don't think Marvel needs to apologize, either. I thought this was still a free country and social commentary, even if it does get the Conservatives' knickers in a knot, does point out to the thinking crowd what's really wrong with our society.
The very idea that we have to be more careful about what we say in the 21st century than we did in, say, the Hippie Era, only goes to show that the Conservatives are struggling even harder to win the censorship war. They won't give in until the very last liberal sits down and shuts up. And I'm going to pack my bags and move out of this country if they ever do.
Wow... I've been so caught up in my personal life lately that the few times I heard the words "Tea Party" on the news didn't even faze me. Good lil editorial, especially with your insightful observation about Captain America's characterization as a questioning American, searching to do what's right, and not just what's expected of him from any particular group (no matter how much they want to use him for their own ends).
I've struggled, really, probably more than they deserve to figure out exactly what the hell the, "Tea Party," (I think to even give them a title gives them a bit more credit than they deserve) people are trying to get at, and I think really it's just them still being pissed about us having a black president. Seriously. I've read interviews with these people and so forth, and no two of them quite seem to agree with each other or have any real specific ideas about why they're pissed, but boy they're pissed. Yep. They really hate socialism, I guess they'd say, but I'd be pretty surprised if any of them could give you a clear definition of what the word means, why it's bad, or how it relates at all to what anybody in congress or the White House is currently trying to accomplish. These are the same people, by the way, who would have called you unpatriotic for going to an anti-war protest in 2004. That's an anti-WAR protest, to be clear. That's you trying to stop people from dying. Meanwhile, these people are protesting health care. Which last I checked was meant to keep people from dying. So, are they pro-death? No, they'll tell you they're, of course, "pro-life," if you bring up that other controversial issue.
I agree, I think they are largely a vehicle for undirected aggression/antagonism that a lot of their participants can't name or explain because they know it would be socially unacceptable. I think Falcon is absolutely right, he probably wouldn't fit in among them and very well might be extremely unwelcome. I also think that it is worth pointing out anytime anyone grants them any sort of social or political clout, as I feel Marvel did in this instance, for those reasons.
Yeah, I think it's dangerous and upsetting that Marvel apologized like that. It tells the crazies that not only are they respectable and important, but that they should some how have control over independent companies' and artists' freedom of speech with their opinions. And you're saying this to an organazation that it, at its core, possibly racist and reactionary and seven kinds of nutty.
I suspect that your average Tea Party rally has about as large a black contingent as you'll see at comics conventions. And I don't think that malice or willful exclusion is to blame, in either case.
There was just an article in Time or Newsweek, (Can't remember which) that discussed a Tea Party convention in which a speaker was met with favorable reponse for saying that Obama was elected because people who can't speak English voted for him, and that if we required testing to ensure that people knew what they were talking about before they voted, he would have lost. That's not representative of all Tea Party people, I'm sure, but this crank was a speaker at one of their conventions, was encouraged and approved, and if some of the people in the, "movement," liked him and some didn't, that's just indicative again of the fact that they don't really have any unified philosophy, but are just a bunch of angry people. They're not all angry about the same thing, so hostility is the thing that unites them.