I love me some Ed Brubaker Cap. Hell, I love anything Brubaker writes.

To give some background here, “Two Americas” was heavily influenced by a storyline in Captain America #153-156 (note, also a 4-issue run), where writer Steve Englehart retconned the “commie-smasher” Captain America from the 1950s as an impostor named William Burnside who had rediscovered the Super-Soldier Serum and undergone plastic surgery to turn himself into a dead-ringer for Steve Rogers. Burnside, along with a replacement Bucky, turned out to be mentally unstable – his anti-communism turned into full-blown paranoia, where he was convinced that everyone in the country was a secret commie. Also didn’t help that both he and Bucky turned out to be massive racists. The story was an interesting meta-reflection on comics continuity and changing politics between the 1950s and the 1970s. 

So how did Brubaker riff off of Englehart? Well, basically he updates Burnside by dropping him into modern American politics and showing how much Burnside (an actual crazy person, remember) is simpatico with the current hard right in America. He’s recruiting from among Tea Party activists (yes, Marvel tried to say that “Tea Bag the Libs Before They Tea Bag You!” was a mistake, but A. it’s not like those sentiments weren’t around in 2010, and B. “No Government in my Medicare” is also on the signs and that sign was out there in 2010), into a Bundie-type militia movement aimed at overthrowing the government and bringing back “real America.” Burnside says quite clearly “there are a lot of other militia groups just like them living off the grid out there in the real America, just waiting for a leader to rally around…This country’s at war, and most of you don’t even know it…I’m talking about right here in America.”  And so Bucky Barnes and Sam Wilson have to stop him from blowing up Hoover Dam as his “shot heard round the world.”

The storyline was a tad controversial (I say only a tad, because really it only pissed off Tea Party folks who didn’t like getting called racists, even though racial attitudes are the best predictor of Tea Party support) at the time, but honestly it’s pretty damn accurate (if somewhat exaggerated for superhero comics purposes). If anything, I think Brubaker was a bit too generous in his argument that Burnside was driven by the decline of America’s industrial heartland since the 1950s, and by keeping the discussion of racism w/r/t Sam Wilson to a minimum. The original Burnside was both a paranoid anti-communist and a virulent racist, and we shouldn’t shy away from it.