By Miguel Murado

The United States seems to be losing the war in Iraq not just in reality, but also in the realm of fiction. In that world of imagination, the Americans have just suffered an important casualty: none other than Captain America, killed recently by a sniper fire in the last issue of the famous comic.

It’s really a bad sign when the war on terror is being lost even in the pages of comic books, where superheroes have the advantage of their superpowers, supposedly far more efficient than, say, UN resolutions or the International Law, let alone the US Army.

Actually, Captain America did not die in Iraq, and yet he is another victim of that war all the same. It seems that the editor was receiving loads of letters from readers asking him to send him to Baghdad, to finish off the Iraqi insurgency there, like he once did with Nazism and Communism (that was a piece of cake). But, at the same time, many other readers were suggesting the opposite: sending Captain America to fight Bush’s policies. Confronted with this dilemma between mobilisation and insubordination, between drafting Captain America or make him join the ranks of the opposition, the editor took no trouble: he asked the draughtsman to draw a sniper to bump the Captain off; and that was that. If only political decisions were so easy to make and so easy to implement in the real world… But they aren’t. Humans still retain some odd rights denied to cartoon characters.

I admit I’ve never been a fan of Captain America. As a child, I didn’t like superheroes in general (and that includes Batman, the Incredible Hulk and that failure of a journalist, Superman). Superheroes defied both my incipient childish rationalism and my strong sense of ridicule: All those guys dressed like characters out of the Tarot cards, with their colourful cloaks and masks, enjoying superpowers drawn from elements that didn’t exist in the periodic table of elements (Kryptonite, what the hell is that? Thought I, an eight-year old). I guess, what I instinctively detested was the arrogance of brute force, the concentration of excessive power in just one individual. My animosity toward Captain America, as I see it now, might have been some sort of unconscious naïf anti-Franco stance (I was living in Spain).

And yet, as so often happens with many real deceases, this imaginary death of a toon urges me to stand up and pronounce some kind words for the departed, the old vet who, always seeking to represent the spirit of America, has finally succeeded in doing so by becoming a metaphor of the dilemma in which his country is mired right now, in that war that once was unnecessary and now has moved to unsolvable. In the Realm of Fantasy, it’s almost as if the US had already withdrawn their troops.

(Miguel Murado is a former Middle East correspondent and current political analyst for the Spanish newspaper La Voz de Galicia)

Miguel Murado
La Voz de Galicia,