This post is me fucking with Sanguinity

This post is me fucking with sanguinity by pretending I got matched with her for Kaleidoscope. Or else it's me faking sanguinity out by being more forthcoming than you'd expect to throw attention away from the fact that I did match with her. Or it's just me reading lots and lots of Marvel comics because the Unlimited subscription is great and I've been reading piles of comics for months.


I read the first few issues of Sgt Fury and his Howling Commandos yesterday. It is super-weird to see Nick Fury as a white guy with two eyes. It is also super-hilarious that Stan Lee's liberal fantasy in the 1960s of how to write a black soldier was to make him carry his trumpet into war to play jazz whenever he's not fighting. It is also fascinating to have a counterhistorical integrated commando unit with nobody saying anything about it. (Dear people who were annoyed with the integrated unit in the Captain America movie: They stole it from here. It was just as strange back in the sixties.)

I desperately want the Izzy Cohen / Inglourious Basterds crossover, where he tells Fury "It's been real, sir, but I'm a Basterd at heart." Then marches off to kill Hitler!

Also Nick Fury/Ilsa?????!!!! To bring in my other WWII fandom of the moment. Since I don't believe Nick Fury can sustain a stable romantic relationship, but I do believe he can sustain for quite a long time an unstable one.

Also, in issue 2 the Howlers lured the guards away so the US Navy could bomb a u-boat base, liberated a concentration camp, and stopped the German atom bomb project. So Badass.

I really love that Stan Lee was unafraid to tell a story about World War II soldiers that was incidentally a Holocaust story. I was really angry at the Captain America movie for not doing likewise. It's so easy to pretend that World War II was a battle among White European powers for land and money, that Hitler was evil because he refused to honor treaties, that he was, as Steve put it in that movie, 'a bully'. It's a seductive lie because it's a half-truth. But telling the story of the War without acknowledging the parallel march of the Holocaust is a horrific act of forgetting. That's something I can never tolerate. And it's something the Howlers can't tolerate, either. They have orders to disrupt the German war machine, but choose to interpret their orders in a way that lets them liberate the concentration camp on the way there, because as Fury puts it, "This is part of why we're fighting, too." Oh, my heart.

There was something very The Escapist about that moment, for those Chabon fans out there. Yes, these are American heroes. But they're also an Italian-American hero, a Jewish-American hero, an African-American hero, a Southern American hero, and whatever the hell Dum Dum Dugan is. And while that is totally tokenism, there have been manifestations of those ethnic identities that I find stirring and compelling. They're fighting for their country, but also for ethnic pride, and sometimes there is more at stake than that. Izzy is fighting for his family's safety. Gabe is fighting to break down barriers. And all of them are fighting because the Nazis aren't just the enemy, they are an evil in the world that must be fought until it is gone. And they're unified in purpose despite the cultural differences- can you believe Gabe fights happily in a group with someone who calls himself Reb?

It would be interesting to thrust this against Isaiah Bradley, wouldn't it? :P Truth: Red White and Black presents an entirely different view of America, an entirely different view of the US Army in World War II. Both are fantasies, but both do hold kernels of truth, both aspirational and real.