Exploring the MCU: The Drums of War

• Steve Rogers, aka Captain America, has literally been through war and back. He knows what it means to lead and inspire selfless, brave men and women for a greater good and indeed he himself has lost almost everything dearest to him because of such selflessness. He has also witnessed firsthand, time and again, how the most virtuous of actors in good faith can still be twisted and perverted by the need for power or control and how ever larger institutions of said control can fail so catastrophically…so morbidly. As a direct result he is beginning to see through the facades. He is beginning to realize that he has been a little too good at taking orders from such institutions for a little too long, that he has often been too ready and willing to be the ‘consummate soldier’ when, after a certain point, he was really only being used as a blind prop by these power structures. However a more deeply rooted part of Steve has also begun to worry, whether he would ever admit such a thing or not to his peers, that perhaps he does not understand this busy, ‘new’ and ever more complex world as fully as he thought he needed to in order to be the great hero he is expected to be. Being a good man was never the question. Rather, by the time Bucky stood revealed as the Winter Soldier, Steve wonders if certain of his compatriots had been right all along to think Rogers naïve or out of his depth and if, in all the turmoil since his awakening, he has in fact grown much too distrustful where it should matter the most. Where does Steve belong then, and what is there truly to believe in…? Therefore, he recedes into his stalwart military shell, the freedom fighter – the place most familiar – to try again.
• Tony Stark, aka the Iron Man, is a genius bar none – a prodigy – who is in awe constantly of what is possible and who since his escape from being prisoner of war has dedicated his life to protecting everyone within his ability to protect if as much to soothe his own personal traumas as to finally make his parents proud in becoming the superhero ‘par excellence’ – in creating a legacy all his own. Moreover, since his second near death experience hurtling through a wormhole in New York and after multiple brushes with otherworldly things few others have touched, he has glimpsed what wonders and horrors both await humankind beyond this tiny, vulnerable rock we call Earth. Hence Tony believes above all else that work has to be done. However, Tony also spent his life living in the shadow of his father – a legend of a man almost as untouchable as Captain America, up against neither of whom he ever thought he could truely measure until only recently, and who ultimately left his son a legacy of emotional distance and personal insecurity as much as he did unbridled innovation and will. This in turn has bred its own cycle of anxiety and even desperation in Tony and a large part of him fears now that he was indeed too close to becoming the power-addicted, arrogant megalomaniac everyone kept saying he could become in his refusal to acknowledge that he will never be that ‘perfect’ hero he thought he could be…that he genuinely wanted to be after he finally began to understand the stakes involved. But how then is he supposed to be a hero to begin with, and what can his special purpose possibly amount to…? So, he recedes into that tinkering builder, the grand planner – the place most familiar – to try again.
• In short, Steve inspires because, as Coulson states in his dying moments at Loki’s hand aboard the Helecarrier, Steve has conviction – he is intuition at its purest if at times too accustomed to a certain stoicism and rigidity as well. Tony is raw nerve – as much heart and soul as intellect, but more deeply unsure of himself and emotionally fragile as a result. In short, they are Yin and Yang though neither man knows it.
• But where did all this begin exactly…from what astounding legacy did two such indomitable figures come forth at all? For the most part, it begins with the same man who lay so large a shadow over super-human events decades on by the time of his sudden death: Howard Stark. Long after the Super Soldier miracle had changed the face of science and politics for the USA, and well before Tony would finally arrive on the public stage as heir apparent to his family’s power and influence, Howard’s longtime business partner Obadiah Stane had begun to accept…angrily…two facts: that he would not be able to persuade or cajole Howard into the weapons trade, and that he could not disabuse Howard any longer of this profitless notion of peaceful energy applications from so-called ‘alien’ devices such as the Tesseract Cube. Therefore Stane began to desire the Starks taken off the playing field almost as vehemently as HYDRA or any number of competitors and underworld actors had by this time as well. In point of fact, who better to do his dirty work for him than Russian HYDRA itself – coveting the Tesseract after it having been in the hands of the US government for far too long as it was, harboring still thoughts of vengeance against Howard for the Vanko debacle and exile in years past, and captivated most of all by the prospect of creating ‘supermen’ or women all their own. Whether Stane himself was HYDRA or merely a weapons-dealing interested party in all this, who knows…
• …however, more to the point, S.H.I.E.L.D had to have already provided plans and samples of a re-engineered Super Soldier serum to the US military by this time in order for the infamous ‘Gamma’ program to have ever gotten off the ground much later under the eventual purview of General ‘Thunderbolt’ Ross. One may presume that, as with so many modern wonders, Howard was the brainchild of this new serum after decades of arduous and exceptionally secretive experimentation and trial, and that the newest vials of said serum being transported by Howard and Maria just before their murder were a very rare thing indeed. In which case, what better way for HYDRA to deal S.H.I.E.L.D. and the world powers a grave blow than by stealing what few samples of their fabled Super Soldier serum remained extant while also eliminating the only person left in the world who had been able to break Dr. Erskine’s code and who therefore was the key to replicating any more of the serum ever again. Once the Starks had been assassinated and the newest samples stolen, all it took was the Gamma program to reach its disastrous end years later in Banner’s transformation for the Super Soldier program to effectively cease being of any wide-ranging use or import to world governments. A move well worth the gambit and the sacrifice in HYDRA’s long game…thus also ending an era of genius that, after Erskine was killed and Steve Rogers thought dead and lost to the world nearly a lifetime ago, had been spearheaded by no one else more directly and brashly than Mr. Howard Stark.
• Of course, if it was Howard and Steve who had ushered in the first great era of fantastic science and uncanny heroes on the public stage, how fitting it is that the prodigal Stark himself would in large part catalyze the next two great waypoints of super-human history: first by donning the infamous ‘iron suit’ and re-birthing the very notion of an Age of Heroes for a very different world, and then years after by helping shepherd the newly unveiled Sokovia Accords into diplomatic action after the world’s initial love affair with said heroes had begun to reach its sobering conclusions and real world tolls…
• Lest we forget, the Sokovia Accords themselves were created neither by Stark nor Rogers nor any Avenger nor super-human at all. They were not drawn up by S.H.I.E.L.D., or some cloaked ‘world council’, or by only one government or by ten governments or fifty. The Accords were drafted and delivered to our heroes by the United Nations as an ultimatum of more than a hundred legitimate world governments at once, and rather publicly at that…including a U.S. President and Administration still reeling from abduction and near assassination only a few years earlier by Aldrich Killian, ‘enhanced’ director of A.I.M.; including a General Ross still half a decade later shell-shocked by the wrath of Hulk and Abomination on our very own U.S. soil for which he and an unchecked US military must claim as much responsibility as any scientist playing at God; including an already war torn Sokovia left for all the world’s humanitarian efforts in an even more lost and pitiful state, many of its citizens would say, than when the Avengers entered their lives in the first place; including a pacifist King of Wakanda whose greatest natural resource, vibranium, was stolen and used towards only the latest attempt at humankind’s extinction and who just weeks ago lost a contingent of social justice workers during the newest in a very long line of superhuman-related debacles and decimations that have escalated in trauma since the skies (as well as the awareness of all humankind) were irrevocably opened up above New York City. Who then, after all this, were any of the Avengers to say they are entirely outside the law of those uncertain and anxious multitudes whom they had promised to both respect and defend to their utmost ability? Who were the Avengers to say they were that far above or apart from the rest of humanity…?
• That Zemo had chosen this moment in the course of human events to commit barbarous terrorism by killing hundreds of diplomats and peace advocates in one fell swoop, said King of Wakanda among them, framing the one man who as it was had already more sins for which to atone than he could possibly comprehend and thereby setting in motion a plan more heart-wrenchingly and brutally effective in splitting our champions into lonely islands of disarray than anything Ultron or Red Skull could have ever dreamt up, was a stroke of genius itself. Nevertheless, the framed man at the center of it all, Bucky Barnes, the man whose soul seemed most hanging in the balance after two years of hiding and soul-crushing shame, seemingly endless self-recrimination and fresh weeks of evading capture with his truest friend and compatriot Steve Rogers, this man is the first to ask what Rogers himself had gone to great pains and lengths in avoiding all along. THE question. After all of HYDRA’s crimes, after all the subderfuge and cruelty reigned down upon the world by their directives and games and obsessions with dominance, after even S.H.I.E.L.D. crashing down upon itself underneath the weight of its secrets and shameful war-mongering in this ‘enlightened’ Age of Heroes and, perhaps most importantly, after finally acknowledging the uncertainty and existential fear from the world populace that have gone hand-in-hand with the super-heroics of this world’s champions ever since Tony made is raucos debut and all of which having led directly to the Sokovia Accords themselves…was Bucky Barnes and he alone worth all of this? Was one man worth such fear and hurt piled upon betrayed trusts and acrimony strewn amongst the very icons Bucky as Winter Soldier had already so deftly helped to devastate in decades past…none of them more intimately and insidiously than those two giants of our age, Steve Rogers and Anthony Stark…?
• For Tony…it was in those long, empty, bitter years following his parents’ deaths at Winter Solider’s hands that it became so easy for him to forget that he did love his father, despite himself and even if only out of barely acknowledged awe at times in his early life. Tony had even begun to gain a new kind of respect for the man since putting on the armor and revisiting what Howard had meant to the world and to S.H.I.E.L.D throughout a lifetime that Tony had in his rebellious and youthful fervor ultimately resented or ignored. He may never be able to completely forgive Howard for not being the attentive, mentoring father Tony had needed him to be for so long in his formative years, yet in his soul and in his way Tony still wished for his father’s approval as deeply as he ever could. Therefore to see his parents’ murder at the hands of a brainwashed Bucky played out in front of him by the mad and vengeful Zemo, catastrophically shattering any fictions Tony had been told by others or had chosen to tell himself his entire adult life since the so-called ‘accident’, was a deep and devastating blow like no other. More than this, he had never harbored illusions about Howard’s work, the enemies his father had made, personal or professional, the danger his father had lived with every day of his life. However, his mother…his mother…need not have paid that price. This was the twist of the wretched knife finally which Tony could not bear and why, when he finally got the truth from Rogers, a truth Steve should have well known the second he gained this knowledge was never his to leave festering between them…in other words when finally Tony could contain those decades’ worth of hurt, rage, resentment, disillusionment, swallowed goodbyes and wasted chances no longer…it was his mother’s death alongside Steve’s betrayal of trust that Tony made very clear both men knew he was avenging.
• All this is to say: given the extent of Steve and Tony’s personal losses and sacrifices throughout their lifetimes leading up to this moment, given what each by now considered their greatest hopes for ‘making right’ in their respective worlds – after Red Skull, after Bucky, after Pepper Potts and Peggy Carter, after the Chitauri and Ultron, after HYDRA, after S.H.I.E.L.D., after Winter Soldier, after Howard and Maria – the battle lines between the two men had been long ago drawn. In the Sokovia Accords, Tony saw the last bastion of a human-directed convention for transparency and accountability that was distinctly diplomatic compared to any single governmental agency or ‘strongarm’ defense the world had seen previously in relation to super-human affairs exactly because it lay solely in the hands of those very same individuals whom Cap and Iron Man had sworn themselves to defend. For Tony, this was Earth’s inhabitants re-claiming some responsibility for the fate of their own lives from the whims of gods and monsters (self-created ones included) and, if champions were to be champions, this should have been a peaceful inevitability rather than fraught with in-fighting and division amongst them. On the other hand, in the Accords Rogers saw the potential for yet another slow, labyrinthine apparatus of power becoming inevitably too far removed from the very same people who had wished it into existence, and therefore yet another grave opportunity for the Accords’ misguided or catastrophic abuse and failure as well. There is always going to be another Red Skull or HYDRA or Chitauri Army or Ultron waiting in the wings and no one knows the depravity and potential for power of those foes as well as people like Cap and Iron Man. However, if Captain America himself would not be allowed to exercise his own expertise and judgement in protecting even the one man who was the closest he had left to a brother…to any family…in this world, just how worthwhile could these laws be in protecting the rest of our world to begin with…?
• Nonetheless, other questions had been begged by the Accords to which even the Avengers proved incapable of providing answers: would HYDRA have been able to fester underneath the skin of S.H.I.E.L.D. and the US government for so horribly long had such a framework for world-wide scrutiny and supra-national checks and balances existed from the start? Would Winter Soldier have been able to wreak any of the havoc he did had such an apparatus for information-gathering and sharing amongst nations been at our disposal all along? Or rather should we be asking: would Bucky had to have lived the nightmare of being controlled and used as a plaything – all agency and moral self-awareness brutally stripped of him – and thereafter with the pain and horror of knowing how his actions as Winter Soldier had helped to infect the world with yet more death and mayhem with no recourse for atonement? Would Howard and Maria – amongst countless other victims of HYDRA and every other secret cabal held unaccountable throughout the ages – had to have been ruthlessly assassinated by a tortured Bucky Barnes, and that even before the Starks could begin to put things right with their only son, the genius rebel and ‘lost cause’ who would never again be able to obtain the forgiveness and understanding for which he had so desperately longed since he can remember? In fact, we can never know the answers to such questions. And by the time Zemo appeared out of nowhere to blindside our heroes with his brand of hate and pain, both Tony and Steve had paid the price a hundred times over for their beliefs and the choices of others in their lives, whether good or ill. Therefore however noble…however right…either man believed his own intentions to be, the reality could only cut too deeply…

See Also: A Keen Eye for Newspaper Clippings… (Stane and the Starks)