Author: Keith Vaglienti

Captain America vs Racism

If you haven’t seen it yet, I highly recommend going to see Captain America: The First Avenger. It’s not a perfect movie but it is a fun one and it does a nice job of capturing the spirit of the character.

The purpose of this blog entry isn’t to review the movie. Rather my intent is to address a complaint I’ve been hearing from certain quarters that the movie doesn’t address racial realities of the time period. It’s certainly a valid topic of discussion and it has been the subject of films like The Tuskegee Airmen, Come See the Paradise, Only the Brave, and the upcoming Red Tails. So why doesn’t Captain America: The First Avenger also tackle the issue? Well let’s be honest. This is a popcorn movie. It’s not supposed to be deep or thought provoking. It’s supposed to be an amusing entertainment by which to pass a couple of hours. Trying to delve into the racism that would realistically be experienced by two minor supporting characters beyond the scene where Jim Morita is introduced would seriously sidetrack the movie. It’s sort of like complaining that Babe doesn’t spend enough time discussing animal cruelty.

Moviegoers should understand that the movie is just trying to reflect the comics on which the movie is based. Gabe Jones was a member of the Howling Commandos from the very beginning. Jim Morita didn’t come along until issue #38. Was it realistic to depict an integrated unit in a WWII comic book? No but do you really expect a high degree of realism from a comic book? Today people look at the character of Gabe and they think the creators of the comic book were trying to gloss over ugly aspects of the time period. They fail to see the context in which the character was created.

Sgt. Fury and His Howling Commandos was first published in May, 1963. The struggle for African-American civil rights was very much an issue of the time. The inclusion of an African-American soldier in Nick Fury’s unit was far from an attempt to gloss over racial issues of the day. On the contrary it served pretty much the opposite purpose. Had the men of the First Attack Squad all been white, accurately reflecting the realities of WWII, the book would have drawn no criticism in 1963 and could have completely avoided the issue of race. Making one of the Howling Commandos black, even though it was unrealistic to do so, brought the issue of racism into the book and it was a topic the book dealt with on occasion as Gabe would encounter racists from other units and when he did the other soldiers from his unit would have his back. There was a message there and it was an important message for the 1960s. It was that blacks were every bit as good as whites and the right thing to do was to stand up for them and help them in their struggle for equal rights. Comic books’ handling of race has been less than exemplary at times but the inclusion of Gabe Jones and Jim Morita in the Howling Commandos isn’t one of those times.

Unfortunately that message gets lost in the movie. Mainly because the title of the movie is Captain America: The First Avenger, not Sgt. Fury and His Howling Commandos. Which is why once they’re introduced the First Attack Squad spends all of their time standing around in the background while Cap leads the way. Perhaps someday they’ll make Sgt. Fury and His Howling Commandos and I’m sure they’ll touch on it then, especially since for the movies they’ve gone with the Ultimate version of Nick Fury which was based on Samuel L. Jackson.

What I find most disturbing about the charges of racism leveled at the movie is the degree of ignorance some people have displayed. These people find the inclusion of Jim Morita to be far more offensive than that of Gabe Jones. They believe that all Japanese-Americans were imprisoned in internment camps and none were allowed to serve in the military. This is very wrong. To those who were unaware that Japanese-Americans served as combat troops in the US military during WWII I suggest you familiarize yourself with the 100th Infantry Battalion, the 442nd Regimental Combat Team, and the 522nd Field Artillery Battalion. Note that the 442nd is the most decorated unit for its size and length of service in the history of the US military. These were good men and they deserve to be remembered for what they did.

The Texas Star

Sometimes I’m slow of mind.

I wish I’d known my father better. As a child it seemed like he was always busy with work. That’s often the way it is with people who own their own business. They start working shortly after they get out of bed and keep going until it’s time to turn in for the night. For the rest of us our bedrooms were a place to sleep but for Dad’s bedroom did double duty as an office. He had a desk and drafting table and a shelving unit for blueprints (and hiding Christmas presents). Probably had some filing cabinets in there too though I don’t remember them. When he built his and my mother’s dream home it included an office attached to his bedroom. It’s a claustrophobic little space with no windows and a fluorescent light on the ceiling. Most people would be upset if their boss put them in an office like that but he was the boss and that was the room he designed for himself. Sundays we’d go out to eat, either with Dad’s parents or Mom’s, and then back to their house for a visit before heading home. On the way home, though, we’d often drop by houses he was working on to see how they were doing or drive around residential streets looking at other houses and seeing if anything inspired him.

Food was one of his passions. He’d grown up on a farm where food was plentiful so I suppose it should have come as no surprise that he enjoyed eating, particularly salads. I understand in his younger days, before he started his own business, his co-workers used to joke that he had to bring his lunch up in the freight elevator because it was so big. Always a penny pincher, a result of growing up during the Great Depression, he was always on the lookout for good deals which usually translated into a preference for buffets. Though he wasn’t fat, hours spent waiting for him to finish eating undoubtedly contributed to my own weight problems. While he’d spend a lot of time at the salad bar I was more inclined to go for the desserts as most kids would be.

He liked to travel and so we tended to take trips in the summer when my brother and I were out of school. Dad would spend hours poring over the Mobil Travel Guide figuring out where he wanted to stop on our route. I can remember driving in the family station wagon, caravaning with my aunt, uncle, and cousin in theirs, to Key West and San Francisco and parts in between. There came a time when I was spending my summers at a camp and when they’d pick me up at the end of the session our route home would take us to an amusement park whether it was Six Flags Over Texas, Worlds of Fun, or someplace smaller like Silver Dollar City or Dogpatch USA. Once my brother and I had graduated and were on our own they were able to travel more often and were particularly interested in attending Elderhostel programs.

And that brings me to Dad’s other interest and the reason for this post. He was interested in self-publishing very much like this blog. Only there were no blogs and no Internet when he got bit by the self-publishing bug. Out in the garage sits a printing press and boxes of type to go with it. It’s not his original press but it’s much like it. Today I just type away, run spell checker, and push a button to publish. All very easy. He had to write his copy, set his type by hand, ink it, and run the individual pages through the press. And he did just that. As a member of the American Amateur Press Association he published a journal called The Texas Star. In the 90s he finally got with modern times. Sort of. He’d type his journal up on a manual typewriter and then give the copy to me. I’d then type it into PageStream on my Amiga and print it out for him. I don’t know if he considered it real printing or not but it got the job done.

So it is that it has finally penetrated my slow mind that there is only one name for this blog and that name is The Texas Star. I’ve got a feeling Dad would approve.

Hello again!

Do I need yet another blog? Probably not but for some reason Facebook isn’t picking up updates to the blog I just created on Blogger and my new web host provides a free WordPress installation so I figure I might as well start over.

When I was working on my very first website I briefly considered calling it the Vaglienti Archives. It seems appropriate to revive that name now for this new blog since it’s being hosted on my own domain. Hopefully Facebook will be better about picking up the news feed from here.