Some of you may remember an earlier entry I made regarding our online lives and the friends we make (what happens when a forum dies?). I am now faced with making a related post that I really don't want to make, and coincidentally it is tied to the same forum that prompted the last one.

Some time in early February, a post was made on the forum of our local newspaper that asked what we should "do" with sexual predators and the like. Most people with children, like myself, extolled the virtues of dismemberment with a toenail clipper, or some other form of slow, agonizing death. All agreed that these are the lowest forms of humanoid life on the planet. The thread continued for days and stretched out to five or six pages.

None of us, at the time, realized that one of our most vocal friends on this forum was strangely silent. There was an arrest here in Salt Lake City. A teacher, first grade. Parents of more than 10 children have now come forth. As more details of the monster came out, more and more of them lined up perfectly with our absent friend (who, like most, used a "handle" or nickname), including his last posts (and last time online) being shortly before the arrest. Additionally, there was the first-grade teacher thing, where he was from, where he served his Mormon "mission." The fact that he had no children. Many more. Everything lined up, and as more facts about this animal came out, not one of them could exonerate our anonymous associate. One of the friendliest, most straightforward and trustworthy people on the forum appeared most undeniably to be a child molester.

It has been several weeks. He has not returned to the forum. The person we believe him to be sits in jail, unable to post the half million dollar bond. The one pervading thought in my mind is that if we, as adults, were duped for two years, how do our children stand a chance?

On the other hand, the timing may not be coincidental. Shortly before he was caught, he made cryptic reference to some "big changes" coming in his life, and that everything was going to change forever. Did we guilt him into getting caught on purpose? We may never know, but I take some small comfort in the possibility that our discussion may have spared some precious innocents the lifetime of agony.

Captain America represented the pinnacle of human physical perfection. While not superhuman, he was as strong as a human being can be mentality and physically.

Captain America had agility, strength, speed, endurance, and reaction time superior to any Olympic athlete who ever competed. The Super-Soldier formula (Steroids today) that he had metabolized has enhanced all of his bodily functions to the peak of human efficiency. Notably, his body eliminates the excessive build-up of fatigue-producing poisons in his muscles, granting him phenomenal endurance.

Captain America had mastered the martial art of American-style boxing and judo, and has combined these disciplines with his own unique hand-to-hand style of combat. He engaged in a daily regimen of rigorous exercise (including aerobics, weight lifting, gymnastics, and simulated combat) to keep himself in peek condition.
Captain America's only weapon is his shield, a concave disk 2.5 feet in diameter, weighing 12 pounds. It is made of a unique alloy that has never been duplicated.

Captain Americas name was Steve Rogers, born during the Depression and grew up a frail youth in a poor family. His father died when he was a child, his mother when he was in his late teens. Horrified by newsreel footage of the Nazis in Europe, Rogers was inspired to try to enlist in the Army in 1941. However, because of his frailty and sickness, he was rejected. Overhearing the boy's earnest plea to be accepted, A General of the U.S. Army offered Rogers the opportunity to take part in a special experiment called Operation: Rebirth. Rogers agreed and was taken to a secret laboratory in Washington, D.C. where he was introduced to the creator of the Super-Soldier formula.

During the war, he served as both a symbol of freedom and America's most effective special operative. Then, during the final days of the war, he was trying to stop a bomb-loaded drone-plane that was launched when the plane exploded, and threw him unhurt into icy Arctic waters. The Super-Soldier formula prevented crystallization of Captain America's bodily fluid, allowing him to enter a state of suspended animation.

Decades later, he was rescued by newly-formed superheroes and became a cornerstone of the team. His might un-diminished. Captain America remained a The Sentinel of Liberty and justice.

He was revered by other crime-fighters worldwide. But the beloved, shield-carrying superhero, Captain America, one of the finest human combatants Earth has ever known has been assassinated in the aftermath of a civil war, which divided superheroes as the government ordered them to reveal their true identities and register with authorities.

This caused a major rift between superheroes and the Government and resulted in Captain America going underground and forming a resistance movement.

In the end, however, Captain America was forced to surrender to the Government pro-registration forces – but was shot dead by a sniper, on the steps of New York's Federal Courthouse on his way to face charges.

But of course Captain America is a costume, just a Comic Book Character, and his death similar to the death of Superman in 1993, when the leading superhero of Marvel rival D.C. Comics was killed off after about 55 years.

Captain America's assassination secret comes in the aftermath of a seven-issue mini-series. Gerry Gladston, co-owner of Midtown Comics in Manhattan, said Captain America's assassination – and the fact it had remained such a secret, even to some Marvel staff – was "pretty Earth-shattering" and had sent sales soaring already.
The sad fact, was the fans of Captain America, found out about it before the publication ever hit the newsstands as the “spoiler’ was revealed on Yahoo some two weeks prior.

His demise is a blow to one of the men who created him; Joe Simon. "We really need him now." said Simon, 93, who worked with artist Jack Kirby to devise Captain America as a foe for Adolf Hitler. When a country chooses the wrong philosophical guide, you get the spectacle of it going all the way back to 1941 up to the present.

In 2002, Marvel responded to the horrors of 9/11 with Captain America: The New Deal, a series featuring a Islamic Terrorist named Al-Tariq who’s determined to punish the U.S. for its reckless misdeeds. After taking hostages in a small town with a defense plant, the militant addresses Captain America through loudspeakers, demanding: “Tell our children then, American — Who sowed death in their field — and left it for the innocent to harvest?
No one in this comic, neither Captain America nor any of the hostages, ever offers a word of rebuttal to the pro-Islamic terrorist tirade.

In the next installment Al-Tariq insists: “I am not a Islamic terrorist. I am a messenger-here to show you the truth of war. YOU ARE THE TERRORISTS!” Later, Captain America seizes an ID device from around his enemy’s neck — a “CATtag” used by U.S. intelligence. He later confronts the secretary of defense by declaring: “You tried to hang one of these around my neck...The Islamic terrorists I fought in Centerville all wore them — these CATtags.” In other words, Marvel Comics recycled a notion that’s been lovingly nurtured by anti-American conspiracy theorists of all stripes: that our own intelligence establishment somehow orchestrated bloody terrorist attacks against U.S. civilians.

This idea of America the Guilty permeates other additions to the series in which Captain America visits Dresden to receive a history lesson on American war guilt — for World War II! The broad-shouldered hero goes through a searing reverie about America’s controversial fire-bombing of the city in 1945: “You didn’t understand what we’d done here — until September the 11th,” he tells himself. “These people weren’t soldiers. They huddled in the dark. Trapped...And while there was nothing left to breathe there in the dark, they died... History repeats itself like a machine gun.”

Captain America’s post-9/11 understanding of the destruction of Dresden suggested a moral equivalence between the Allied forces in World War II (in the midst of a bloody, all-out global war) and the Islamic terrorists who randomly attacked unsuspecting office workers. Especially in a comic book aimed largely at children and teenagers the comparison (in the hero’s own voice) is both irrational and obscene.

The indictment of the United States becomes even more explicit in a later issue in which Captain America listens to yet another sympathetic rant from a Islamic terrorist mastermind. “Guerrillas gunned my father down while he was at work in the fields — With American bullets,” the militant helpfully explains. “You know your history, Captain America...You played that game in too many places... The sun never set on your political chessboard- your empire of blood.”

To this verbal assault, The Sentinel of Liberty responded meekly, “We’ve changed. We’ve learned...My people never knew. We know now. And those days are over.”

We might expect such blame-America logic from Hollywood activists, academic apologists, or the angry protesters who regularly fill the streets of European capitals (and many major American cities). When such sentiments turned up, however, hidden within star-spangled, comic books aimed at kids, it's more than irrational and obscene.

Now of course The Sentinel of Liberty Captain America is dead. Is there any hope that he might still be alive, perhaps whisked off to some secret location, and nurtured back to health both mentally and physically, with a revival of his original philosophy of reason, truth, freedom, and justice?

I’ve watched the demise of the country through the minds of the writers of Captain America, over the years, and I don’t know…. I hope it…but I doubt it. Like a few lines from Shelleys poem Ozymandias perhaps the country will inevitably share his fate of oblivion in the sands of time.

Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear —
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

As Joe Simon his creator said, "We really need him now." Not what the writers later created, but what he once was.