Why I wear a Captain America lanyard at work

I have barely read a comic book in my life. It just never appealed to me. When I watch the Marvel movies now with my son, I have no frame of reference to decades of stories, alternate timelines, crossovers, reboots, etc. I just watch them for what they are in themselves. Sure, I knew before the movies that there were heroes named Captain America, Thor, and Hulk, but I could only tell you the origin story of one of them. (It was Hulk. As a teenager, I still thought I could be a body builder.)
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Everyone knows this, of course, but it really can't be emphasized enough what a vast difference it is going into a movie that has a long history pre-movie as a pre-existing enthusiast or not. Most people I know who have never read Tolkien loved the Lord of the Rings movies in an unqualified sort of way. I like them overall, but see them as deeply flawed in places. The person who has never read the books going in finds it easier to like them, because to him, the movie is the one giving him all the surprises of the plot. For the fan who knows the story going in, the movie has a lot heavier lifting. It has to do what Titanic did--be interesting to people who already know how it ends.

So with all the Marvel movies of the past decade, I'm an easier audience. Civil War couldn't disappoint my expectations, because I didn't have any.

For two of the Marvel movies, the first Captain America and the first Thor movie, I had lower than no expectations. For Thor, I thought, "Who the hell is Thor?" I thought Marvel was trying to shove more super heroes down our throats than we had an appetite for, because super hero movies were all the rage. Thor proved me wrong, because Chris Hemsworth's roaring over-the-top Shakespearean schtick not only holds its own, but in my view, he threatens to offset the entire balance of the Avengers every time he's in a scene, because he steals it. (Memo to self: movie idea: Hemsworth plays Hamlet, but entirely in character as Thor the whole time.)

For Captain America, I went into the movie thinking the whole notion of a super hero named for jingoistic patriotism was a stupid idea. Not just stupid, but totally inappropriate for our times. I actually thought that a movie like Captain America was bad for America, because the world looks to American movies to tell them about us, and Captain America, I thought, said nothing so much as Americans think America is pretty awesome, and everyone ought to feel lucky to know us.

But I've found Captain America to be a breath of fresh air throughout the series, through the three Captain America standalone films and the two Avengers ensemble movies. Here's why:

1. He's an antidote to the emo-hero. Even Superman has gotten mopey these days. I get that we live in an age where right and wrong are difficult to discern, and a dopey motto like "truth, justice, and the American way" has no place in a super hero's lexicon. Any hero spouting those words is likely to use his powers in terrifying ways. But just because the right way is hard to find doesn't mean you can spend 135 minutes of a 150 minute film avoiding trying to figure out what the best option is.

Captain America is a throwback to a time when people still believed right was knowable. That's naive, but naivete in small amounts can be useful. More useful than cynicism at the levels I usually ingest on a daily basis, anyhow.  It helps that he dates back to the last time most Americans thought U.S. actions on the world stage were very likely a good for the world. He represents a confidence in right action that a Captain America whose first action was in Vietnam or Iraq couldn't feel.

His insistence on following his conscience even if it's inconvenient annoys other Avengers, especially Tony Stark. Tony and Captain America aren't simple mirror images of each other. It isn't that one follows his conscience and the other doesn't; it's that both follow distinct inner voices to the exclusion of other voices. For Tony, that means an ego-driven quest to follow his inner truth, and if that happens to match the public good, so be it. For Cap, it means following what he thinks is right for others every time, but in his version of the golden rule, the "others" he does unto might be narrowly construed.

I was surprised during Civil War to find that not only did half the Avengers side with Stark, but about half my friends. Making good moral decisions is practically Captain America's super power. It's why the others naturally deferred to him as their leader in the first Avengers movie. The reason he became the first super hero was because he was tried for his moral intelligence and found worthy.

2. As traditional as he is, he's also an updated expression of the boy-scout super hero. In 1950, under a different system in America, he'd have probably argued that we needed to sacrifice our personal freedoms for the public good. But this version has never stood for that. In the second Captain America movie, he fights an Orwellian surveillance state that would have been put in place for our ostensible safety. In Civil War, he's the one who leads the rebellion against state control. It's not clear to me that Captain America is so patriotic, he wouldn't take a knee at a football game.

Since the Federalist Papers, we've seen American democracy as a balancing act between keeping the mob from destroying the minority and also not allowing the minority to hijack the entire process and hold the majority hostage. Captain America, a former downtrodden prole himself, tends to see the danger being stronger in one direction than another. 

3. He defines good and bad as much by his relationships as by abstract laws. This may not always lead to the right conclusions, but it does mean his decision-making is consistent and somewhat simplified. He does not turn Bucky in because he knows Bucky was once a good man. That's really all there is to it. I don't know that this is always a good heuristic, but there's something to be said for keeping things simple.

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I wear his lanyard first because I needed a lanyard and that one was an easy one to find, but I keep wearing it because I often find that the difficulties of determining what's right in an extremely complicated world have nearly made me apathetic to even trying. Steve Rogers isn't going to help me to make the right choices--he is, after all, just a character in a mostly escapist comic-book series of movies. But wearing it does remind me that it's worth trying to find what's right. It's better than the alternative. The alternative is a DC movie.