On Cap Looking Back

One of the things I've always found interesting about Captain America (616 version) is that for all that he's a throwback and a relic and the living representative of values we tend to overlook and take for granted or dismiss entirely, the character is usually not very nostalgic for the time period he left behind.

I mean sure, he misses Bucky. And certainly he's often at a loss in the modern world, be it looking for a job or place to live, or just getting accustomed to new social mores. But it occurs to me that even in those situations, he's usually too busy trying to think of ways to deal with it rather than thinking wistfully back at what was lost.

And it occurred to me that this actually makes sense to me. Because all things considered, Steve Rogers would have no reason for nostalgia, what-so-ever.

I mean, consider it. What does he have to remember fondly? He was born in 1921 (according to Brubaker anyway), which means he was eight during the Crash. Then you have the Great Depression, starvation, poverty, illness, death (for example the amusingly Dickensian melodrama that is his mother's death from lack of medicine), ethnic prejudice (it's kind of interesting that, as an Irish brat in NYC, Steve wouldn't have been considered "white" by a lot of people), even more sexism and racism and all sorts of other things.

And then you have the Nazis and the War.

Considering it like that, what in the world would Steve have to be nostalgic about?

I doubt it would be old-fashioned values. Steve is a good guy raised with good values, but a former tenament brat from Brooklyn*'s going to have a real good notion of the seedier side of humanity.

Less crime and violence? Um. Brooklyn* street kid. IRISH street kid. Racial tension, economic tension, all that. Heck, think West Side Story with less ballet.
(I can imagine Steve chuckling at the notion that some guy could run through Spanish Harlem calling "Maria" and only ONE girl answers.)

Hard working people? Maybe that one. But then, during the Depression, it's not like anyone could really afford leisure time. Well, maybe the Rockefellers. But the average Joe? You gotta work to survive.

It's particularly interesting to me since I don't think the Golden Age Cap comics ever really went into his backstory that much, beyond the "how he got his powers" part. I may be wrong, but I suspect most of the backstory we have now is a Silver-to-Modern Age invention. They COULD have given Cap a more Clark Kent-ish farm boy backstory, and explained the 4F thing as some sort of grotesque illness. But instead they went with the most Dickensian backstory possible (inner city, Depression, alcoholic-and-possibly-abusive father, mother-dead-of-the-only-enough-medicine-for-one fiasco, and so on and so forth) in a way that makes it seem pretty unlikely that Cap could ever look on that time period with anything resembling nostalgia. Clark Kent, sure. He could go with the rose colored glasses and wistful mis-memory, but Steve? Not so much.

It's as though Marvel writers specifically made a Captain America that HAS to look FORWARD for solutions to our problems rather than backwards, and that's no bad thing really.

(It does make me want to see Steve Rogers verbally bitchslap one of those Family First nostalgia-mongers into next week. With his mad speechifying skills? It'd be glorious)

(ETA to add: Depending on the origin story, replace "Brooklyn" with "Lower East Side Manhattan". I think most of the points still stand. :-))