The Chosin Few vs American Sniper

Hollywood is so fixated on superheroes and victories that it ignores the most highly dramatic war stories - even if they happen to be true.

If Hollywood - leftish or rightish minded, it matters not - ever made a well done film about the key battle of the Korean War - Winter 1950's Battle for Chosin Reservoir - I'd see it in a Wilshire Blvd minute. And I hate to watch war movies usually.

Partly my interest is personal --- the bad news from Choisin was so depressing to my parents that they went home and defiantly made me.

It was a sort of demographical nose-thumbing against the incoming Chinese Communist forces currently overwhelming the UN forces high in the mountains amid bitter cold and wind.

My father had just given up his career in the university tenure track to volunteer once again with the overseas Canadian Armed Forces.

But Chosin deserves to be much better known  to all of us.

Partly for the sheer drama of very large forces on both sides fighting full out for a brutal 17 days straight - and fighting as much against Siberian cold and starvation as against each other.

Chosin marks the only time the West ever invaded a communist country and the first and only full war clash between China and America.

But mostly it should be remembered because there is a direct line between the Allied retreat at Chosin and the long term massive buildup of cold war nuclear weapons, first among the west and then matched in the east.

If the world had ended in one big bang in 1962, Chosin could take a bow.

(President Truman in fact first publicly warned the world he might use the A-bomb, on the very day the Chinese unexpectedly surrounded the American (and a few British) Marines at Chosin.)

Chosin still looks far too grim for Hollywood - too much like WWII's Eastern Front in the winter to suit So Cal's sunny mood.

No flashy superheroes here - just Willy and Joe winning by merely surviving, hanging in there, enduring .....

'40s Gotham : birthing Superheroes & Noir ...

One can think of Golden Age Comic Book Superheroes as Breen Office pre-approved but Golden Age Film Noir as Breen Office pre-disapproved.

During WWII, Hollywood was not taken over by Allied government censors , contrary to expectations.

Instead Hollywood (Breen Office) censorship methods simply took over the Allied governments.

The bright uplift that Joseph Breen always strived for within the small - virtual - world of major Hollywood  films became something Allied governments tried to fairy dust over all of their nations' activities.

Allied war efforts certainly killed many neutral and occupied nation civilians - hundreds of thousands of them in total.

But you would never see the Allied propaganda efforts boast about these deaths in the way the Axis did about their complete destruction of civilian Lidice's entire population and houses.

But Allied  newspapers and books remained surprisingly free to comment about everything but immediate military operations .

As a result , the front pages (& Hollywood 'war' movies/comic books) had huge but empty war stories , all about Breen Office uplift and how the fiercely determined Allies were united in seeking a quick end to all forms of discrimination.

But those newspapers' same back pages had plenty of tiny but fact-filled items on examples of Home Front profiteering, slackers and racists.

By 1943, this dissonance had led many left leaning film people to start turning out film noirs that hinted at this moral disconnect....

One can't be postmodernist (or religious) and still believe in Golden Age Superheroes

The era of Modernity (1875-1965) was the Golden Age of Superheroes almost by definition : the fictional kids' comics simply mirrored the grownups' view of how the world really worked.

But eventually most of even the grownups really grew up and saw that the world's problems couldn't be solved by simplistic violent solutions - and Silver Age comic book heroes evolved in lock step at the same time.

But climate deniers and other elderly wealthy deniers of limits to humanity's powers to bend reality to our every whim are really not much different than the hundreds of millions who claim they simply enjoy new style superhero books and movies as fiction,  but really accept old style superhero thinking at some level of their brain.

Claims that this or that war (including the 'war' on excessive atmospheric CO2) will be won in days, weeks or months is a clear example of thinking that superhero simplistic solutions can actually work in the real world.

Both groups' superman thinking are actually helping to kill this planet's climate - deny it as they may.

Faith communities should not accept super hero media as harmless fodder for immature minds - not if they have agape love for the rest of fellow humanity , no matter how hair brained so much of that humanity seems much of the time ....

What superheroes are not : not inventors, discoverers, doctors,firemen , teachers , thinkers

Mother Teresa --- with an assault rifle

It is well known that all the superpower violence of the superheroes is designed only to save us from bad guys -- what could possibly be wrong with that moral stance ?

Saving an "us" who is not totally good but not really very bad either, from bad guys who are totally bad .

Well for starters, one might reply  that in the real world the good and bad guys rarely morally divide up as neatly as all that , under all circumstances.

Again, we might ask how do the superheroes marvellously manage save us with all that superpower violence without that same violence being lethal to human lives ?

They do seem rather like a fairy tale version of the real world US Air Force.

They superheroes are like super-efficient military pilots who somehow always destroy German - Japanese - North Korean - North Vietnamese - Iraq et al war factories ... without ever killing any nearby civilians or factory employees.

And even as fairy tale heroes, the superheroes are also heroes of the narrowest sort.

These superheroes are never heroic firemen or doctors, never inventing or discovering something that helps make human life better.

Nor heroes who inspire us by word and thought - never a public teacher (in the formal sense) or a public intellectual.

Never a saint - never selfless love for humanity even at the cost of their own deaths (no agape love).

Because the superhero is always very moral without ever being very mortal - which rather takes the sting out of their acts of bravery on our behalf.

Moral Flaws in the Superhero Model

The superheroes' original creators keenly wanted to do the right thing - fight all the bad people of the 1930s - but they failed morally.

They were physically and culturally small people in a world that exalted the big.

Big physically fit people, big battleships, big tanks, big bombers, big nations, big corporations , big hydro dams and on and on.

Tragically the superhero creators accepted their era's mantra that 'bigger was better' ---  even if in a a highly selective way.

To these comic book creators, 'bigger was better' was reduced or restricted to 'bigger is potentially morally better in practise' .

Because they felt that big goodness is the only practical way to defeat big badness.

And their super bigness was a solo super powerful America defeating the Axis all on its own.

But imagine a 2014 NATO response to a 1939 German threat to invade Poland.

Now we'd see two dozen nations, virtually all much smaller than Germany (but collectively much bigger) all vowing to go to war together, unless Germany backed off.

This is a viable alternative to the DC universe's solo superpower approach--- and the way that WWII was actually won.

WWII America - even allied to England and Great Russia - could never have defeated the Axis if the rest of the world had remained a hostile Neutral to their cause : from Canada to Liberia to the Free Danes, the small nations all helped.

And remember that the badness the superheroes combat is always highly visible, unsubtle, overt.

Morally easy stuff.

They concentrate on defeating bad guys robbing a poor grandmother with a gun on a public street corner.

Never do they work against the subtle and complex systemic circumstances that made her poor in the first place.

Or that led so many others to consider being a violent robber knocking off harmless old ladies as a better job than years of occasional part time work at minimum wages.

I think there are other ways to be a hero than obtaining the super powers that make inflicting violence risk free.

Dr Dawson's tiny team of misfits and unfits is set in the same 1940 Gotham as the original superheroes but it offers an alternative example of what a non-DC Universe, with un-super heroes - might look like ...

Manhattan Natural : wartime Gotham's un-super heroes ...

At a time (WWII) when comic book superheroes , usually operating in a make-believe Manhattan, were saving the world every day and enthralling North American children and youth , lesser known but equally larger-than-life actual heroics were taking place in a real Manhattan.

But these valiants bringing natural penicillin lifesaving to the world against government blowback were hardly Superman or indeed any sort of superheroes .

If by the term 'superhero' we mean someone strong in body as well as mind.

They were un-super heroes if ever than phrase had meaning.

They were more like a badly aged Clark Kent , still mild and meek  but now weak and crippled .

They never numbered more than a handful :  misfits , unfits and just plain rebels.

They were aptly described by the official historian of their arch enemy  , Vannevar Bush's OSRD , as "4Fs, women and the Grace of God".

Henry and Marjorie Dawson, Floyd Odlum, Dante Colitti, Thomas Hunter, Charlie and Miss H --- they hardly had more than a handful of really good limbs between the seven of them.

'Unfits' the whole lot of them - the very 4Fs of the 4Fs - yet real life heroes despite all that .

Perhaps we could still make use of their story - as a sort of role model - by making a series of comic books or graphic novels about their wartime exploits ...