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sanguinity turned me onto the comic miniseries "Truth: Red, White, and Black", so it was
sanguinity I turned to to rant after this most recent episode of Falcon and the Winter Soldier, also titled "Truth".
Truth retconned the history of the super soldier program that most famously produced Steve Rogers as Captain America, to reveal that among the prior super soldiers was a group of African Americans abusively treated as test subjects, given dangerously experimental doses, before Steve Rogers got the serum. For their trouble, many of them died either as a result of the drugs, or as a result of being sent unsupported on dangerous missions. The last and best of them, Isaiah Bradley, went against Army orders to do what he thought was right (the thing Steve Rogers is famous for) and as a result spent decades in Fort Leavenworth.
But that's only half the story of Truth. The other half is a story of those left behind, in an equally unfair America. Isaiah's wife Faith coping with believing her husband dead, then learning he was in military prison, then fighting to get him out, and finally getting that moment she never dared to dream would happen, a reunion with her husband. As much as Isaiah Bradley, the first Captain America, is the hero of Truth, Faith Bradley is equally the hero. She's my favorite part of that comic and though she's only been given a couple of additional cameos in the 616, in The Crew and in Young Avengers, I love her fiercely in those appearances as well.
In Falcon and the Winter Soldier, we meet Isaiah, who has gotten out of prison at last, and in his second appearance, he tells Sam Wilson in a throwaway line that his wife died while he was in prison. It's so typical of what the MCU does. Who do they write out of their stories in the name of simplifying the complexities of 616? The women. The people of color. (The Jews, too, but that's a different post). Especially the women of color. It's so infuriating to me that in the process of finally, fifteen years into the MCU and a decade after The First Avenger, acknowledging Isaiah Bradley (The comic came out and was widely acclaimed eight years before The First Avenger. It could have worked Truth into Steve's storyline from the start instead of treating it as a retcon!), they fridged his wife and left out the story of a black woman fighting for her own civil rights.
I think the conversation Sam and Isaiah have in the episode is interesting, well acted and politically relevant, but I can't forgive it for that throwaway line.
Fuck Marvel. Seriously fuck Marvel. I keep saying as I watch this show that Marvel really seems to want me to make more vids to protest songs.
Meanwhile, there's a bigger rant brewing about the post-Blip global politics we see in Falcon and the Winter Soldier, which are massively fucked up on so many levels. I'm trying to be a little careful about how much I wind up right now, because there's still another episode and clearly the show is aiming to put its main political thesis in that last episode, but also so much of this is garbage.
Says Karli Morgenthau, our sympathetic terrorist, during the Snap, nations banded together and forgot about national boundaries in the desperate need to help people. But after the Blip, capitalism resurged as governments tried to reorganize as they'd been before, restoring primacy to the returned. It might have been nice if any of this had shown up, even a taste, in Far From Home, previously our only glimpse of post-Blip life. People like Morgenthau and her associates have, for complicated geopolitical reasons, become essentially stateless permanent refugees living in underresourced displaced person camps. Morgenthau styles herself the Flag Smasher, fighting against nationalism, which she blames for this condition.
The oddness of this storytelling is that nobody in the story stands for nationalism, ideologically, in opposition to the Flag Smashers. Sam and his foil John Walker stand for, at best, the instrumentality of nationalism- there are threats to the security of noncombatants, so they must be neutralized. Who gets the right to be a noncombatant and who is oppressed by the state is of course a consequence of nationalism, so it's not like Morgenthau's position is uncontested, but it's not contested at an ideological level- Sam is in fact deeply reluctant to stand by an American flag. There's a straightforward analysis of the Flag Smashers where as soon as they start blowing up civilians, it doesn't matter what ideology she's fighting for. The same analysis applies to Sam, Bucky, John Walker, and the rest of the forces aligned with them.
And that's the big problem that I doubt is going to get resolved in the finale. For all that Morgenthau talks about tearing down borders, borders seem utterly irrelevant to the story. Sam, Bucky, and Walker hop borders and launch police actions like the idea of national sovereignty and local jurisdiction has no meaning. Perhaps as signatories of the Sokovia Accords that is true? This has been the problem with the Sokovia Accords as we've seen them from the beginning, they are inherently anti-nationalist in a truly disturbing way. They apparently assert that the world's major powers can deploy military force anywhere for any reason, provided there's a figleaf of international oversight, because national security is a global problem.
Meanwhile, Sam is out there struggling with whether a black man can carry the Shield of Captain America, and certainly that's an important question, but it all seems besides the point, when what he's being asked to do, as Captain America or not, is to stomp into Eastern European countries and beat up local criminals. Until Sam objects to that assignment, what does it matter if he does it while draping himself in an American flag or not?
