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Never seen this one before – Captain America beating the shit out of a reactionary who is trying to assume his image while representing the opposite of his values. https://twitter.com/artboypolitico/status/1349606453686923264
This is such a familiar dynamic that it has become a cultural cliché: conservatives taking pop art that is inherently leftist at its core, whether it’s Bruce Springsteen’s music, Star Trek, Star Wars, or golden era superhero comics, and trying to usurp & pervert it.
This is how we end up with bullshit like those National Review or Atlantic Monthly clickbait-y features that say stuff like “the Empire had some good points” or “here’s why Star Trek is inherently conservative” which is just laughably twisting the essence of the material.
I mean yes obviously there is a certain amount of self cancellation or “eating your cake and having it too” with characters like Captain Kirk, who was partly modeled on the anti-communist and womanizing JFK. But it’s hard, that was a Lyndon Johnson Great Society, utopian dream.
I’ve had this argument with conservative friends/acquaintances over the decades: I think the nature of a lot of popular art is, and should be, humanist and democratic, and take the part of the oppressed, and Republicans who love that art anyway have to deny that part of it.
I think that if you are a Republican and you love Bruce Springsteen’s music or Deadwood or the Godfather movies you are in denial about the fact that this artwork repudiates the core of your political beliefs and is an attack on your mentality.
On the flipside, I like a lot of pop art that is conservative/reactionary in nature, like Clint Eastwood‘s filmography and certain Mel Gibson and J Ford movies and The French Connection, but I am not perverting & denying core aspects of their world view to justify enjoying them.
