'Unhappy the land that has no heroes!" declares a character in Brecht's The Life of Galileo. "No," counters Galileo. "Unhappy the land that has need of heroes." What with the play being written in 1938, we are denied the great dramatist's opinion on the land that makes a big show of rushing to the heroic defence of the liberties of fake Kazakh journalists, but you sense he might have deemed it a dolorous place indeed. As for the land that sees its eponymous superhero gunned down on home soil after 66 years of fighting the forces of darkness ... one might respectfully venture that it hardly suggests a country in the grip of mass euphoria.
In the US, it has been a week of such perplexing border skirmishes between the realms of fact and fiction that the cartographers may have been plunged into an ontological crisis. Two days before the blood drained out of Captain America's body on the steps of a Manhattan courthouse, gaining acres of press, a comedy movie character could be found enlivening the pages of the state department's annual report into human rights abuses.
The fictional status of Borat, Sacha Baron Cohen's Kazakh reporter, has already been shown to be curiously indeterminate. He is rumoured to have been instrumental in the break-up of the marriage of the actress Pamela Anderson, who featured as a willing plot device in his filmic journey through contemporary America; meanwhile, his enthusiastic export of the alleged customs of the glorious nation of Kazakhstan has threatened diplomatic incidents. But is it seemly to find such apparent confusion in an official report by Condoleezza Rice's department?
In the document, the Kazakhstan government is criticised for revoking the .kz domain of Borat's website. Despite the character's notching up of a heroic victory by re-registering the site with a .tv suffix, and subsequently cleaning up at the box office, the incident appears to have profoundly discomfited the state department. It seems almost a waste of breath these days to contrast such coverage with notable lacunae in the round-up of global abuses and suspicions thereof - but, for the sake of etiquette, we'll note the absence in the report of even a denial that anything untoward might be occurring behind the electric fences at Guantánamo Bay.
For all the superficial amusement of the Borat quirk, the form book suggests we should be wary when politicians retreat into unreality. In April 1998 Tony Blair refused to have his attention distracted by frivolous exhortations to raise the shameful Chinese record on human rights during a meeting with China's prime minister. The injustice that was his primary concern, to go by his public utterances, was the imprisoning of Coronation Street's Deirdre Barlow (Deirdre Rachid as then was). After mentioning the case on the radio, the PM authorised an official statement. "He believes that it is clear to anyone with eyes in their head," this ran, "that she is innocent and should be freed."
Perhaps we should call this practice unrealpolitik. There is a certain irony that in the week the state department busied itself in such a way, a fictional character laid down his life for a set of soberingly real principles.
Will Captain America's assassination feature in next year's round-up? That he met his demise on American soil suggests he might end up one of those baffling omissions touched on earlier, but his story has a deep resonance. Since 1941, Marvel Comics has drawn the adventures of this superhero, originally conceived as a scourge of nazism, in step with American concerns down the decades. He battled Soviet oppressors in the cold war but, as the Los Angeles Times noted this week, by the 1970s "the credulous square had been replaced by a disillusioned cynic". The comfortable complacency of the baby-boomer worldview gave way to the uncertainty engendered by the Vietnam war, and the comic took off. Captain America would uncover a Watergate-style conspiracy whose "Committee to Regain America's Principles (Crap)" neatly mirrored Nixon's notorious Committee to Re-Elect the President (Creep).
Yet the story has arguably been at its most controversial in recent times, with its allegorical engagement with post-9/11 US homeland security policy and rights erosions. Viewed with suspicion by the authority he once served, Captain America was spearheading a revolt against a "Superhuman Registration Act", and it was on his way to being charged for his failure to accede to sweeping new investigatory powers that he was gunned down.
Traditionally, reports of the death of the American dream tend to be exaggerated. Such is the way of comic books that the Captain may well be revived in sunnier times. But for now, the fact that America is one iconic superhero down seems an oddly more real event than the state department's decision to occupy itself with online discourtesies towards a green thong-sporting comic character: a character who more than most, it should also be noted, shone a light into corners of its culture from which it is presumably keen to divert attention. Unhappy land indeed.
