and Democratic Decadence
I was surprised and heartened by the wonderful response to my piece, "My Name is Captain Future," which I posted at the Booman Tribune, European Tribune and E Pluribus Media this past weekend. I'm very grateful for the good words and the birthday wishes.
I realized later there were a couple of Captains missing in my list of homages. One was Captain Marvel, the superhero with perhaps the strangest pop culture history, being the name of several characters in comic books published by three different companies. The Captain Marvel I knew was the original, from the Fawcett comic books. He was a homeless and orphaned boy selected by a wizard to be given powers of classic figures: the wisdom of Solomon, the strength of Hercules, the stamina of Atlas, the power of Zeus, courage of Achilles and the speed of Mercury. Acronyms of these heroes combined in the magic word that young Billy Bateson invoked--SHAZAM!--that, with a flash of lightning, transformed him into Captain Marvel.
During the 1940s, this Captain Marvel was the most popular of the comic book superheroes, even outselling Superman. But DC Comics successfully sued Fawcett, claiming the Captain was copied from Superman, and Fawcett stopped publishing in 1953. (D.C. later revived the character, Marvel comics has had several versions, etc.)
I only learned of Captain Marvel by accident, and as one of the few good results of my father's understandable but usually disappointing parsimony. Our family was financially barely afloat for much of my childhood, so instead of the actual toys I craved (like Robbie the Robot) I would typically get a cheaper knockoff. But my father's eye for a bargain had this one benefit. Once when I was probably around 10, and sick in bed for a week (measles, mumps, chickenpox, I had them all) I asked for comic books to pass the time. My father drove all over our neck of the western Pennsylvania woods, selling and repairing Singer sewing machines. There were a lot of small neighborhood stores then, forerunners of 7/11s, and some sold comic books for half price--the top half of the covers were torn off, sent back to the distributor for refund, and the books were supposed to be thrown away.
Somewhere out in the boonies he picked up a pile of them, probably for 2 or 3 cents each. They had to be years old, because they included titles I'd never heard of. (And since my grandfather's tailor shop was attached to a barber shop where I would sit and read all the latest comics, I had a pretty good idea of the up-to-date.) One title was the Three Little Wise Guys. Others featured Captain Marvel.
Like the young in the 40s and early 50s, I was entranced by this idea of a weak, poor and often tyrannized boy whirling around and shouting a magic word to become "the world's most powerful mortal." And yet he didn't use his power for personal vengeance or gain--he used it to help others. I was so taken with that I sent for a membership in the Captain Marvel club, only to receive a return note in the mail that the club had been "discontinued." That word has haunted me ever since.
I was awed as well by Captain Marvel's identificaton with classic heroes, who I knew from the My Book House book series (twelve dark blue volumes that were the magic books of my childhood) and the Classic Comics (which were stories of classic heroes and classic novels in comc book form), as well as from movies and school. All of the superheroes and TV heroes were my links to mythology, and to the hero myth that Joseph Campbell abstracted from the most important stories of many human cultures.
Heroes are admired for their power and exploits, but that's not the entirety of the myth. Campbell emphasized the journey, which is probably most meaningful to us as we mature. In my youth I of course admired the power to act effectively, but what I learned just as strongly is the importance of using power for others, for the common good. Steadfast principles, nobility, courage and sacrifice were what made the hero admirable.
Today I still believe in the hero. On the other hand, while I recognize the King as the expression of a significant archetype, in practical terms I'm convinced that kings are the worst idea in humanity's history. Beginning with large scale agriculture and urbanization, the king became so central to civilization that we probably find it hard to believe that kings are just a bad idea rather than a natural human expression.
Thomas Jefferson and those guys despised kings, and they were right. That should have been the true American revolution, but we haven't shaken the need for kings yet (partly because kings and kingmakers are rich and powerful, and have always worked hard to keep everyone enthralled and enslaved ).
Instead we've apparently dumped heroes, who are often poor peasants and outlyers, orphans whose "noble birth" is a secret even to themselves (from Moses to Harry Potter.) Some see this as a feature of our "democratic" society, where everybody is supposed to be "equal."
“In ancient Greece, people expected their heroes to be different," wrote Dylan Evans in the Guardian last year. "Nowadays, if someone is vastly more talented than us, we don’t congratulate them—we envy them and resent their success. It seems we don’t want heroes we can admire, so much as heroes we can identify with…We allow halfwits to become celebrities precisely because there is no great gap separating them from us. That consoles us, because it makes us think that we could be famous.”
I don't think this is true of everyone--lots of people still need heroes, role models and mentors, or simply admire skill and achievement--but there is definitely something to this, or else so-called "reality" TV wouldn't be so popular. And some of the response is just as classic as the hero---in her recent interview with Bill Moyers, Jeannette Winterson talked about the Greek heroes: outside forces will always try to destroy the heroes. Because actually, heroes are objects of envy, as well as suspicion.
What we perhaps have invented in our age is a king we don't have to envy. Since the 1940s we've occasionally elected Presidents who dazzled us (FDR, JFK) and we accidentally got smart ones who charmed us with folksiness (Carter, especially Clinton) but we've also gone for guys we knew weren't that smart---quite deliberately, in my opinion. G.W. Bush is the epitome of that, and it was extremely clear in 2004 when we were neoconned into considering John Kerry as practically un-American because he was intelligent.
What does this mean? Probably it's all part of the same fantasy: in America, anyone can become famous, therefore anyone can become rich. And with the ability to forget G.W. Bush's birth into wealth and power, the fantasy that anyone can be King. Because if George can do it, anybody really can be president. This is a little lesson in the decadence of this democracy.
Jeannette Winterson warns: I think in our society, we are quite uncomfortable now with the hero figure because we're told we live in a democracy, and everybody's the same, and everybody's got to be treated equally. But it doesn't really seem to work like that, because it's always an individual of some kind, who then pushes things forward. Things don't happen in mass movements, they happen because somebody has a vision, or an idea, or a brainwave, and that changes things for the rest of us. It's always about the individual. It's never about the collective in that sense.
That's the hero as illuminator, visionary and perhaps leader--but in a democracy (which is about equal opportunity and equal say, not equal talents), the rest is up to us, working together.
Yet even this hero is not a cardboard cutout--not G.W. in his flightsuit. And Winterson is right to point out that superheroes are often too one-dimensional, especially when compared with Greek heroes, who acted like jerks at least as often as they acted like heroes. But superheroes and the Captains of our mythology (which would also include the Great Captain, a name given to Abraham Lincoln, and the title of a three-volume biography of Lincoln I remember being on my mother's bookshelf) exist in story, and the stories often do make them more complex figures.
Which brings me to the other Captain I was reminded of, by a comment on dkos, that quoted the song, "Hooray for Captain Spaulding"--a comic explorer played by Groucho Marx. Groucho is another of my heroes, who demolishes the king with wit, and his own pretensions with pratfalls --that is, the archetype of the Jester, the Fool. So Hooray for Captain Spaulding as well: the Wise Fool who sang the perfect Zen song, summarizing life thusly:
Hello
I must be going
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