Film as a medium is in a state of decline and it’s the fault of people like me. I don’t turn up to the theater except for big productions like Star Wars and The Avengers. That means that market forces have driven films into being flashy CGI messes. I accept my responsibility for that. I am not perfect, I just don’t have the time and money to turn up for films that I can more easily enjoy on my TV at home. I’m flawed.
In talking to a friend about Flawed Paladins I remarked that taking the whole Dudley Do-Right idea and adding flaws and nuance made MCU Cap one of the best characters ever. I love that MCU cap is an exemplar of the American Spirit who is now at odds with modern American society and government. He’s a manifestation of our WWII American Exceptional Narrative of the US saving the world from insensate evil. Cap is fictional, but so is a good deal of the narrative of American Exceptionalism. Cap is an all-American kid from Brooklyn, desperate to serve his country in the face of unfathomable evil. He sees people being hurt, and he steps up. Like 70 years later, he gets thawed out and he’s appalled by what he sees. He says “When I went under, the world was at war. I wake up, they say we won. They didn’t say what we lost.”
In Cap’s heart, and at the heart of the narrative, is the idea of freedom. I would define this freedom as the freedom of speech and expression, freedom of religion, freedom from fear, and freedom from need. I would posit that modern America runs on religion and fear, is perplexed by freedom of expression, and actively hates the idea of freedom from need. Obviously you need the press and courts and all that other bullshit, but the blueprint is those four basic freedoms. MCU Cap is the personification of the idea of America and his “America is great, but this shit here isn’t America” struggle makes him perfectly imperfect. He has to do what he thinks is right, even if it means working for a group like S.H.I.E.L.D. that he doesn’t trust.
MCU Cap’s internal conflict between his duty as an American hero and the shift in American society after The Avengers [a metaphor for 9/11] is absolutely brilliant. He is at odds with Tony Stark when he hacks S.H.I.E.L.D.’s computers but ends up at odds with Nick Fury by the time he sees what Fury is really up to [a possible metaphor for Snowden/Manning]. Then all that gets pushed aside by the attack on New York. By the time we see cap again in The Winter Soldier, Cap has made a compromise: he is being a hero for America by working for S.H.I.E.L.D. but he is deeply uneasy about the duplicity he keeps seeing. By the time we see him in Civil War, Cap is completely done with S.H.I.E.L.D. (and presumably with being a hero) in order to help Bucky, and they’re coming to get him.
I can’t think of a better criticism of corpofascist America than an all-powerful private army trying to take over the country, and hunting down two of America’s original war heroes in order to do it. Sure, there’s Hydra and Ultron manipulating everything, but the real story is Cap trying to reconcile loving his country, mistrusting his government, and looking out for his best friend, none of which ever truly get reconciled. I can’t think of anything more human than that.
In other posts I have bemoaned aspects of our government, our society, or our political process. I don’t know that I have ever stated that the reason that I hate all of it: the NSA, the TSA, the drones, the torture… Obviously it violates our privacy, free speech, and our freedom from fear. But I also hate all of it because that’s not what America means to me.
My transition to Proxmox has been a rather involved, not so much because Proxmox is hard to set up (it’s not), but because I am tired of slapping old junky hardware together and hoping it doesn’t die, and then scrambling to fix it when it inevitably betrays me. Unlike most dudes with home servers and labs, most of my acquisitions were made years ago to 
In the years since then, I have taken to playing 
chrizzle23.com 
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