Emails #30: Virtue and Sacrifice

01-07-10 RA

It is okay for Cap to be afraid. It is human. A natural reaction to his horrific surroundings. Better yet, since he shows fear, real fear and then overcomes it, his courage and heroism are both more natural and human. Two things that allow him to persevere are his faith in God and his faith in American democracy. He is not the wisecracking hero full of quips as he guns people down. It is his strength of character that wins the day rather than his strength of arms. His heroic qualities were evident even as a young Steve Rogers. The Super Soldier Serum did not make him heroic. It certainly didn't make Red Skull heroic. And don't think about softening the religious angle. It is essential to Cap's character. Maybe he had a family member who was a pastor or deacon, someone who was very much against the war and Steve joining it. There must be opposition to everything the hero wants to do if only so that he can choose to overcome it. It is in his choosing that some sense of what could have been creates the sacrifice, the trade off, the loss that is his heroic backdrop.

On the eve before ship out...
"You hear the kid, you'd think he was going to wade into the Gerrys single handed. He does fire up the troops though."

A growing crowd cranes to hear Steve Rogers as he reminds them why they need to fight and what they are fighting for. Steve Rogers is passionately expounding on the constitution to the enlisted men.

Cut to...
A crowd forms around the man who would be Red Skull. He is yelling rhetoric about German superiority and the virtue of sacrificing for the fatherland all in German.

A government of laws, and not of men.
-John Adams

The natural liberty of man is to be free from any superior power on Earth, and not to be under the will or legislative authority of man, but only to have the law of nature for his rule.
- Samuel Adams