Chipperz said:
Therumancer said:
However right now being a nationalist American is wrong, heck they even turned GI Joe into a multinational unit... and it bloody stands for "General Issue American" and was also intended to be highly nationalistic. Sheesh.
It's actually based on Action Force, which was GI Joe, but without the fucking awful opening theme song and multinational dubbing. I understand that they kept the name GI Joe because most non-Americans who care know Action Force is also GI Joe but the reverse is not true.
Therumancer said:
If they have problem with Jingoism they shouldn't be making a Captain America movie at all.
Sadly, they have to so they can make the Avengers movie. If they keep to Iron Man's level of "America stands for freedom! It's a parallel universe, so it could be true here!" rather than an all-out "AMERICA! FUCK YEAH!" which should probably be kept for parody purposes only, then it might actually do alright in the international market, rather than bombing and becoming a cult classic which the rest of the world laughs at.
Then again, this is all a bit crap because even the Avengers are "America's Superheroes". I wish they'd done Nextwave : Agents of H.A.T.E.
Well, see that's the thing. I think America needs a serious injection of national pride right now, and I'm tired of all the self depreciating crud. The Cold War is over, and now a lot of our allies are out for their own interests, and we get quite the guilt trip. Like it or not we DO stand for a lot of very positive things, and always have. If anything half our problem is we've become so self absorbed and good that we lock outselves into not being able to do anything which is fairly ironic.
That said as someone who looks at the situation with China, Russia, and the way even our European Allies are becoming our competition, we very much need that "America! Fuck Yeah!" attitude that carried us through the Cold War. Forget World War II, even though that was a big thing, we were the global shield there and now that we're no longer wanted people want to pretend we weren't leading with our bloody chin half the time so others wouldn't have to.
No, I'm not looking for an arguement there, since none of the specifics are the point. The bottom line is plenty of other countries have their own patriotic, self-empowering crud, and more of it than ever before. There is no reason why we can't do the same thing. What's more given China's military build up, some of their speeches, and doing things like tagging the Kittyhawke (a carrier) with one of their subs, not to mention what they did during The Olympics to relocate people, the "national firewall", and other things... I feel absolutly no guilt at all with treating them like the bad guys the way we did Russia in the 1980s. For that matter I have no trouble with treating Russia like we did in the 1980s in our media either since we just got done watching them invade Georgia, and threaten to nuke poland (even if it was sort of withdrawn) over the prescence of a US missle interception base... while the EU and UN both wrung their hands and whimpered I might add. The EU pretty much sat there crying even as the Russians turned off the gas... like it or not that all happened.
So yeah, it might not be "politically correct" to present the US as the militant shield of good and freedom, fighting against powers like Russia and China, but that doesn't mean that it's totally inappropriate either given the way they are behaving.
This is very much the enviroment where again you might have Captain America fighting "The Red Guardian" (an opposite number from Russia), or "The Avengers" having to stop the Russians or Chinese from some plan to bring down the US, or the development of some new super-weapon (China in paticular IS building up it's military).
When it comes to GI Joe, the whole idea was about America heading out to save the world because nobody else could. The problem with a UN organization is that the UN has it's bloody hands tied and can't do much of anything. Half the people that it's supposed to be policing are members and have a say in it's policy. The Idea of say GI Joe or Captain America was pretty much that it was who we would send to clean house when the UN and other nations weren't capable of doing it. We would for example have sent our American teams in to turn the gas back on for Europe, or kick the Russians out of Georgia (in fantasy).
I think that the fact that people can't associate with Captain America because of his patriotism is a sign of a very deep problem.
I suppose in the long term my personal "endgame" has America itself dissolving into a global unity, but we're not there yet, and with the world as it is right now, I think American pride is very important. In an immediate sense without it, I think we're going to run into increasing problems because to be totally honest I don't think a conflict with China at least can be avoided.
