HOW2B CAPTAIN AMERICA
It's never too late to join the Boy Scouts...

Many people have tried to be Captain America. Or rather, many Americans have tried to be Captain America. To be specific, many American politicians have tried to be Captain America. As the US rumbles on through its presidential primaries season, there looks to be no immediate end in sight to the pontificating and eulogizing that the ordinary men and women of America are going to have to suffer. The trouble is, none of them are much good at it. If you really want to be a super-patriot, you need to be Captain America!

First, the inevitable origin story. Captain America was not always a square-jawed All-American hero, oh no. He was a feeble 9-stone weakling who was turned down for military service. The important thing to remember is that he wanted to go to war. This was no Bill Clinton lily-livered draft-dodging liberal, no sirree. This was your authentic John McCain-style gung-ho eager youth, ready to kill and maim in the name of his country. However, with no Charles Atlas to hand, he was forced to find an alternative method to beef up and get himself recruited. Namely, he needed to subject himself to a crazy science experiment. Yes, Captain America's enthusiasm for bayoneting Germans was so strong, it completely overrode his common sense!

Of course, Cap never actually did officially join the military. He's no more a real captain than Doctor Doom is a real doctor. He was just the mutated victim of a weird science experiment, willfully unleashed on the unsuspecting enemy. If he had been Japanese, he would have been a giant sea-monster eating Dresden. Thankfully, being American changes all the rules. An important thing for any budding Cap to consider is that jingoism is good. All that nonsense about the sanctity of the American flag, and the whole "one nation under God" schtick? You've got to believe all that. You also have to believe that might is right, and people who don't speak English are wicked, debased and godless. Ignore the children with the guns. The Americans are God's chosen people. Got that? Good.

"try to focus on fighting men in fur trim, with long cigarette holders."

While attacking the generally un-American, you must never forget your prime enemy, of course. The Nazis. However, just as the politics of Cap's America is simplified, so the villainy of the Nazis is reduced to more basic terms. Your Nazi foes have to be cartoon Nazis. They have to wear monocles or be hideously deformed, and they have to ride around in giant underwater dragonships and threaten the world with little jars of radioactive mush. Even Hitler is allowed to be bumbling and funny. Just be careful to avoid subjects like intolerance, or violence, or even genocide. You should talk a lot about fighting injustice and tyranny, but you should try to focus on fighting men in fur trim, with long cigarette holders. Any real American patriot should probably be fighting health maintenance organizations and Jerry Falwell, but that's not your job. You'll have to limit yourself to headless geneticist Emil Zola and his amorphous sidekick Doughboy (which, come to think of it, is very similar to Jerry Falwell).

The ultimate way to fight Nazism, of course, is to reject its ideology and refuse to give it a foothold in your culture. So what better way to do that than to make the poster-boy for America a blond, blue-eyed Aryan demigod? Yes, Captain America is the ultimate cultural imperialist, and he has the looks to match! The Germans are all ugly and deformed (or, in some cases, floating brains in glass tanks), but you have to look like something lifted straight from the German propaganda posters. Adolf would be proud!

Once you've perfected the look and the psychology, you need to get chilled. Deeply chilled. Due to the vagaries of Marvel time, it now seems that Captain America may have spent up to 50 years frozen in the Arctic ice. Not everyone can afford that amount of time, and of course, you'd die if you tried. An alternative method is to sit inside a refrigerator, but this is also a bad idea. Since refrigerators can only be opened from the outside, you're likely to get trapped. If that does happen, the chances of you being discovered by dim-witted Eskimos and worshipped as a God are extremely slim indeed. And, once again, you'd die. We would recommend eating three strawberry ice lollies really quickly. It won't freeze you, but it will make your tongue turn pink, and while that's not quite godlike, it is pretty cool.

Years before Batman was getting his boyishly handsome teenage sidekicks killed, Captain America was doing the same, and now it's your turn. Cap has had a string of sidekicks, and only the first one died (while riding on the back of an inter-continental ballistic missile, naturally), so pick someone really crap to be your first sidekick. After that, experiment with token women and token black people, to show off your libertarian, inclusive side. You may also want to have a girlfriend. That's fine. Cap has had plenty. None of them stick around very long, and the reason is clear. Cap is a very pure-hearted guy, and clearly he's waiting to get married before he gets his nice white underwear dirty. You're allowed to have the girlfriend, but you can't have the girlfriend. You also can't smoke, you can't drink, and you probably can't dance (though that may have more to do with the steroids).

 

"You can't smoke, you can't drink, and you probably can't dance"

If you need to make ends meet, and you can't find a bunch of people as deluded as you to form a "How2B" Avengers, and you can't even secure funding from the United Nations (oh, come on! How hard can that be?), then there's very little choice for you but to find a proper job. When Cap wanted to make ends meet, he became... a comic book artist! He hijacked the Spider-Man method of "depicting himself in his heroic identity, in a way that showed a strange affinity and understanding for the subject" (or some such nonsense), and sent in his portfolio. Naturally, Marvel hired him. You want to be like Captain America? Send Marvel a portfolio of your art! Hundreds of people do it every month, and most of them don't even get a reply! This is how you can tell we're operating in the realms of fiction.

Finally, you need the kit. Captain America has experimented with all sorts of kit in the past, from motorbikes to utility belts, but there's only one thing that really matters. No, we don't mean the wings on his head. We mean the shield. The first shield was a fairly crappy device. It was rather unimaginatively shaped like a shield, and worse, it was used as a shield. No versatility there. Recently, Cap has been seen using a hard light shield. You could try using a torch, and shining it in people's eyes, but we doubt it would be very effective against bullets. Besides, shining torches in people's eyes will only make them more eager to shoot you.

The classic shield is the round vibranium alloy shield. It still works for basic shielding, but it's also good for long-range throwing, and occasionally for surfing. Best of all, it's a great big, bright, hideous icon of Americanism! Yes, even when those ugly Germans are shooting at you, you can impress them with your cultural imperialism! Take that, Nazi scum!

So, that's the secret to being a great American patriot. George W Bush! Al Gore! Pay attention! If you want to get the American people on your side, what you really need is a brightly painted dustbin, a garish jumpsuit, and a pair of little wings on your head. But first, you need to spend fifty years frozen in Arctic ice. If you'd care to step this way, gentlemen...

Andrew Wheeler is Editor in Chief of PopImage.

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