All This and Civil War, Too!

Hey, remember Civil War? Of course you do! If you read a Marvel comic at all in the past five years, you know all about Civil War; it’s an event that’s passed into the consciousness of even those trying to avoid it via cultural osmosis. Civil War!

I'm not entirely sold that the whole "Civil War" idea was good from a storytelling perspective, because it changes the fabric of the MU a bit too much. It makes sense from a real-world perspective, but we already have a healthy suspension of disbelief in place to appreciate superhero books in the first place.

Best example: the Negative Zone prison being such a big deal. That entire concept requires that super villain rights of due process have been constantly respected throughout the history of the MU. Even a cursory examination proves that's completely apart from the truth. But because the metaphor had to be right in your face, it's suddenly important. Alas.

However, placing yourself inside the story, the anti-reg side had no logical defense beyond some hastily-produced and poorly-conceived historical allegories to enforce their position. Whose Side Are You On? Well, Iron Man’s, if you give it any rational thought.

Tony Stark and those in his employ were acting to carry out legislation passed by the people of the United States' elected representatives. This wasn't an unreasonable request, either. "Hey, can we maybe start to keep track of these various super-powered folks who regularly dole out huge amounts of property damage, and endanger our lives and way of life on multiple occasions?"

Captain America, on the other hand, was in favor of an elite group of powerful individuals acting above the law, because it was owed to them by their past actions, and because, frankly, they better knew how people should be protected than the people themselves.

This, of course, is the logic of fascists. Now, one of the reasons I give Cap’s movement the label, is identity politics. Hitler (And Cap IS NOT LIKE HITLER THAT IS NOT WHAT I AM SAYING DO NOT FREAK OUT PEOPLE) organized his movement around racial identity politics. Mussolini organized around national (Italian) identity politics. Cap organized his political movement around, for lack of a better term, masked identity politics.

(Incidentally, Norman Osborn has a more complicated view of his own identity politics, a combination of those he views most politically useful and those he deems "outsiders".)

This is a bit incongruous, because Cap had a very John Lockean view of the relationship between the individual and their government. Locke was a huge influence on the Founding Fathers, and that influence runs through both the Declaration of Independence and the US Constitution, so it's only natural that Captain America would be on the same philosophical page.

In the Lockean view, individuals naturally exist in a state of perfect freedom, but this is an inherently unstable state. Ergo, the individual allows for the surrender of some of their freedoms in exchange for the safety the government's society provides so that they may enjoy the rest of their freedoms more fully.

More importantly, though, when an individual feels their interests are no longer being properly represented and/or protected by this government, they're free to either dissolve the government and form another, (which Cap and co. obviously weren't trying to do), or depart from that society (Which Cyclops recently allowed the mutants under his care do).

Cap's problem is that neither of the above were valid options for him to get what he wanted, which was as much of a resemblance of the pre-Stanford status quo as he could. In other words, you could accurately say Cap's two goals, upon which he wasn't willing to compromise, were:

-Not having to register with SHIELD

-Still being able to protect the public in a vigilante style

And, unfortunately, he never had a plan to achieve those goals in the long-term. He became so engrossed in the short-term concern of getting Stark and his allies off his back that he failed to make any plan for a lasting victory. Ironically, there really wasn’t a combat-oriented way to achieve this. The only way to do so would be to change the hearts and minds of American people and their representatives.

But that wouldn't have been nearly as big a seller.

It's fair to say that Cap doesn't view the heroes as an "elite", mostly because of his own personal relationship with most of them. I mean, there's no one less elite than Peter Parker, right?

But we're talking about a select group of people who, by the very fact of their existence, create huge changes in their society. (Although admittedly not as much as they would in the real world; Marvel wants a constant state of relation to the real world as possible, for obvious reasons.)

Just one example off the top of my head: in the first issue of Avengers: The Initiative, Henry Peter Gyrich (a cynical observer of the super-humans if ever there was one), offers a very real-world explanation for the founding of the Fifty-State Initiative: as a result of M-Day, the super-human balance of power had decidedly swung to favor the United States. Apparently, the mutant population was the great super-human equalizer, because mutants occur randomly around the globe.

So, there's this global shift in the balance of power, and what did it result from? M-Day. And what did M-Day result from? From a small meeting between two groups of super humans about how to handle one of their own numbers, who had become unstable (to say the least).

So, less than twenty people began a chain of events that completely changed the military landscape. And they did it accidentally.

Yes, these people are elite.

As we all know, the road to Hell is often paved with good intentions. (After all, any team which has a monster like the Punisher on their side can't claim moral high-ground when it comes to killing, or anything else.)What redeems Steve Rogers as a hero is his recognition of his mistake, and his surrender at the end of the Civil War.

Ultimately, Rogers was doomed from a dramatic standpoint. For the longest time, he's been practically an allegory, an embodiment of an American ideal. But he's still a human being, and no human being can live up to the standards he was setting for himself. Unmasking himself before his arrest was the final split between Captain America, the immortal hero, and Steve Rogers, a good but flawed man. He couldn't exist as both indefinitely; the Civil War was just the event that brought this conflict to a head. (Both in a thematic and storytelling sense, as the Red Skull had been planning to assassinate Rogers for a long time leading to this event.)

Bucky Barnes, on the other hand, (no pun intended), has a different relationship to the mantel. Steve Rogers embodied the spirit of America, and that's why he doomed; no man can be an ideal forever. (Ask Xorn.) Alternatively, Bucky Barnes aspires to the spirit of America, and that's why he's spared from a similar contradiction. Bucky is imperfect both personally and physically, and makes no bones about it, but he strives for that impossible goal of the perfected ideal every time he puts on the costume.

Now, though, we move to one of the biggest problems of the entire crossover. Neither Cap nor Iron Man, nor most of the major players in the story articulate their reasoning, anywhere. The most you get from the anti-reg side is, "This is oppressive!" and the most you get from the pro-reg side is, "This is the law!"

But almost no one on the pro-reg side articulated the next logical step in their argument: that this is the law because the people of America wanted it to be, and it's not an unreasonable request.

The only character who actually pointed this out, of all people, was Deadpool. If you didn't read the Cable/Deadpool CW tie-in, the titular characters are split on the war, with Cable being anti-reg and Deadpool being pro-reg. And in a completely serious moment, indicated because his speech balloons were white instead of yellow, Deadpool articulated his reasons for being pro-reg, beyond a government sanction to cause chaos directed at the rebels.

“You got psychos like me runnin around, much less your Dr. Dooms and Squirrel Girls, why shouldn't they want to keep tabs on us, and if they have to, lock us up and throw away the key?...Yeah, Nate, I get it, okay? I get all of it. We're not all totally stupid, you know. We do what we think is best, but good ol' Nate Askani'son Geshundeit boy wonder from the future, he always, always knows what's best..."

Deadpool, in a totally tangential tie-in that didn't reach a fraction of the people who read the main title, articulated a better retort to someone like Cable or Cap than Tony Stark was ever allowed to do. Of course, Deadpool wasn’t being used as a mouthpiece for warring political ideologies at the time…

(On a side note, I still find it infuriating that no one at Marvel actually thought to draft the SHRA bill, and make it available to the fans.)

Now, regarding the pro-registration side, something always worth considering is, what were Tony Stark's crimes? (And on some of these, I have to use the term “crime” loosely.)

-Cloning Thor
-Asking Spider-Man to unmask
-Using super-villains to hunt down rogue heroes
-Playing hard-ball politics with the Atlanteans
-Locking rebels up in the Negative Zone with no trial, indefinitely

But, here's the question: how many of these actions are logical results of the SHRA, as it's commonly understood?

This is my own theory, of course, but I don't think Marvel could find a way to "balance" the debate with a logical refutation of the SHRA, so they created a series of crimes to place at the pro-reg's doorstep. Otherwise, what rational argument can the anti-reg side stand on?

A common complaint I've also seen is that it apparently never occurred to Stark that anyone else would ever head SHIELD or have access to the SHRA database. Obviously, Stark knew that he wouldn't be running the show forever. But if he was replaced by a person like Dum Dum Dungan, or Carol Denvers, or even Maria Hill (she's unpleasant to heroes, but she clearly shares their goals), then, really, would there be a need for concern?

A reasonable, prudent person couldn't foresee a sociopath like Norman Osborn coming to head the SHRA. And Stark's relationship with Osborn has been very consistent since CW; Stark doesn't like Osborn, and doesn't trust him, but Osborn and the Thunderbolts initiative are outside of his influence. The political relationships and power structures between SHIELD, the US government, and the Thunderbolts initiative haven't been explained, to my knowledge.

Stark clearly has authority over the Fifty-State Initiative, and there's some kind of relationship between them and the Thunderbolts; Komodo was threatened with being moved to the Thunderbolts early on shoulder her attitude become a problem, and Ant-Man was recruited from the Initiative to the Thunderbolts before their "dissolution". Ultimately, though, it was shown repeatedly that if Stark could have fired Osborn, he would have. This actually strengthens Stark's reasoning; if he can't fire Osborn, it means Osborn wasn't part of his chain of command. If he's not his chain of command, then there's no way Osborn could ever become a high-ranking SHIELD operative.

Unless SHIELD is dissolved, and an entirely new organization is formed to take over its regulatory functions. Oops.

But the chain of events that led to that conclusion is so convoluted (no one even knew of a Skrull infiltration until after the SHRA was already enacted) that it's not an event that Stark could have reasonably calculated.

Tony Stark is far from perfect, of course, but his mistakes come from trying to do too much, too fast. He’s in a similar moral quandary as Steve Rogers when it comes to paving roads, but the road Stark is creating comes from the will of the American people and the rule of law.

Not that this has kept every character in the Marvel Universe from dumping all over Stark every chance they get. He’s been called a Nazi numerous times, been chewed out by Clint Barton (Who, having been acting like a psychopath since his return, really doesn’t have a place to criticize anyone for anything at this point…), Thor (who, okay, had a point), and most offensively, blamed by Hank Pym form the Wasp’s death, at her own funeral.

Now, for me, that would have been the line. Even if you could inadvertently blame Stark for Jan’s death, at least he never slapped her around. And Stark dealt with her death a lot more healthily that dressing up like her and hanging with a robot designed to look and act like her. Stark really proved his heroism by not shoving a rocket boot up Pym’s hinder then and there.

But I digress.

The Pro-Registration side was right, despite Marvel’s best efforts. Yet at the same time they were wrong, as the story never should have been told in the first place. But I’d like to think that Marvel’s learned part of their lesson, in the sense that not every single title got swallowed by Secret Invasion. Spider-Man, the X-Men, and Thor, each of whom had important storylines already going on at the time, were involved only in tangential limited series that had no effect on the main book. If all crossovers were done in such a manner, I wouldn’t mind them as much.