Playing Osama Some Chin Music

"I wouldn't mind seeing a comic about superheroes dealing with the current world climate. I also don't think a book with a guy in a pervert suit playing Osama bin Laden some chin music is the way to go."

"Playing Osama bin Laden some chin music." What a beautiful phrase. Why, oh why, aren't we all still talking like forties private eyes?

That line is taken from one of Pete Milan's comments on the American Power post. That thread has generated some awfully interesting exchanges (you should go check all of them out), particularly once Ken Lowery and the inimitable Joltin' Jeff McCoskey raised the inevitable question: what separates American Power's cover from the classic World War II numbers in which Cap gives Corporal Shicklgruber a good right to the jaw?

I think Pete's take is exactly right, and I also think Pete is exactly right when he talks about the differences between Captain America (or the Escapist, for that matter) clocking Hitler and the Gimp punching Osama being more about differences between the wars than about our relative levels of "sophistication" then and now. Whether we're more sophisticated or not (in many ways, I think not), we know the politics this time around aren't that easily reducible. (And we also know that, because of its author, American Power was likely to reduce them in the service of a political ideology that ultimately has nothing to do with Osama Bin Laden.)

Pete also says there were no mitigating factors back then. One might just as easily argue that there are no mitigating factors, vis-a-vis Osama Bin Laden, now - that it's just as imperative that we hit back at him, to prevent future Al Qaeda attacks and to bring them to justice for past ones, as it was that we hit Hitler in 1941. I wouldn't disagree with that.

Yet the two wars, and the two covers, are profoundly different. First of all, no matter how widespread the patriotism was back then, no matter how easy it was to jump on the wartime bandwagon, printing an image of a superhero punching Hitler in 1941 was a lot ballsier than printing one of Osama is today. For all they knew back in '41, Hitler might have won. Surely Kirby and co. had to be wondering, if the war didn't work out, if they'd be lined up against a wall somewhere and shot for printing that. Then again, as they were mostly Jewish, they were probably already wondering that anyway... and that too points to the much higher consequences. Publishing an anti-fascist comic book may have been no less easy then - at least, post-Pearl Harbor - but it was far more brave.

American Power is another beast entirely, and oddly enough, I think it's for reasons that have nothing to do with Bin Laden or Sept. 11th. It's impossible to read that cover and the book's concept without thinking about the most recent exercise of our American Power in Iraq, and Iraq is what belies all of Dixon's assumptions about how great it is to flex our muscles.

The Bush administration has spent the last three years running around like a humiliated child, milking our wounds for its political gain while simultaneously picking fights with the easiest target possible - despite, or, perhaps, because he posed no imminent threat to us - in order to reassert its manhood, to convince us that we didn't get our dicks cut off on September 11th. There's nothing noble or brave about that kind of petulant flailing; there's not even anything particularly powerful about it. You only do it if you're afraid you're weak. (To put it another way, beneath every Grenada, there's a Beirut.)

This, then, is ultimately the thing I find most troubling about American Power; it's not a display of American Power at all, but of American geopolitical impotence. You only need to draw a picture of the Gimp punching Osama Bin Laden on a comic book cover WHEN YOU CAN'T DO IT IN REAL LIFE.

Or rather, when you can do it, maybe could have done it already, but your leaders have (to quote Dick Cheney on his Vietnam War non-service) "other priorities."

(No comments for this post - but do join the discussion already in progress.)