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The Libertarian Message of Squadron Supreme

Some point dozens and dozens of columns ago, in one particular column (here) I compared Kingdom Come to a work to which it seemed to owe considerably, the Squadron Supreme maxi-series of a decade previous. While obvious similarities join the two pieces, I distinguished their focus, casting Kingdom Come as more of a moral piece about human arrogance, and Squadron Supreme as, clearly, a political work dealing with the interaction of power and the human character.

This left open certain questions. What, for instance, did Squadron Supreme intend to convey as its political message? And, clearly enough, one could distill this idea into a single sentence: The untempered use of power, driven by whatever initial benevolent impulse, must ultimately become a destructive force.

The work, between character-driven interludes sometimes central to and sometimes peripheral to this message, then proceeds to demonstrate how power and its accompanying temptations destroy men, through simple victimization of targets by aggressors, through the corruption of the wielders of power, and even, ultimately, through the corruption of those who see the need to euthanize the monsters men create when they concentrate too much unrestrained power in a single person or system.

Power as Problem

The immediately-previous backstory to Squadron Supreme appeared in the late issues of Marvel Comics' Defenders series, with a series of tales centering around the mysterious reappearance of the deceased Kyle Richmond / Nighthawk.

In untangling this particular mystery, the Defenders discovered, through Nighthawk's own recovered memories, that he came from Other-Earth (or whatever Marvel currently calls the world of the Squadron Supreme), not the earth of the Marvel universe. Furthermore, he occupied a central role in a major global political crisis there.

As Kyle Richmond, and under the influence of the Over-Mind, this alternate Nighthawk had achieved the Presidency of the United States and had gone on to serve as a puppet ruler for global domination, until Marvel's second-string superheroes put an end to all that.

The aftermath of this particular coup, once unraveled, left political and commercial channels disrupted, with food supplies unable to reach starving populations and outbreaks of mob or local tyrant rule common. As with the collapse of an absolute power, the transition left a political vacuum into which a seemingly-endless series of crises erupted.

This also showed an unheeded lesson about absolute power. By creating it, one sets up something that will not endure and will generate massive human suffering (and usually death) when it ultimately fails. Frequently, though, the survivors of similar circumstances often accuse freedom itself, not the moral bill-paying that must follow authoritarian or totalitarian collapse, for what follows.

Power as Solution

Having participated in at least two attempted or successful coups, including a dubious episode with the Serpent Crown and the alternate-universe President Nelson Rockefeller in the 1970s, and again with the Overmind's blunter grab for control of the world at the dawn of the eighties, one might expect the Squadron Supreme to have realized something important about the concentration of power they represented.

In many ways, they served more as a threat than as an instrument of redemption to the people they had vowed, but generally seemed to fail, to protect.

Rather than triggering caution, however, the collapse of the Richmond / Over-Mind rule of the world inspires the Squadron Supreme to action, as they see in the transition from universal mind-control to traveling blight as an opportunity to finally resolve all the problems that have beset humanity since our first appearance.

Laissez-faire notions, perhaps, to them represented a simple kind of excuse-making that rationalized indifference and inaction. One finds in its urge to do, do, do both the noblest and the most dangerous component of the utopian impulse, and the Squadron contrive a plan rich in both elements.

Initial Dissent

A successful detective can much avail himself of insight into the human character, to point him towards what people want to do in order to figure out what they have done. And perhaps, Mark Gruenwald intended Nighthawk to retain as much Batman-like baggage as legal considerations would allow.

Nighthawk, as Kyle Richmond, did the most of any specific member of the Squadron to bring about the crisis into which the world fell after the collapse of the Overmind's plan to conquer it (inasmuch as he became a central instrument, rather than a real actor). This, as well, my have heightened his ability to perceive wrongdoing; if, after having played the role of ventriloquist dummy to a prospective conqueror of the world, he acquired an unwanted self-awareness, in the process he also achieved a greater sensitivity to megalomania.

In short, before anyone else did, Nighthawk got it. "The fate of the world...decided by a power elite. To think that it would come to this," Nighthawk groused in the initial vote the Squadron took before launching on its ambitious plan to remake the world along new social, political, legal, and, of course, ethical axes. Had the scope of their program involved something considerably less ambitious, such as Superman's attempt to contain and redirect the superhuman population of the world in Kingdom Come, Nighthawk's moral triggers might not have fired.

Nighthawk cut to the fundamental problem with attempts to perfect the world in an objection before the assembled superheroes: "What if people will not accept the utopia you give them? Will you force them to take it?" When the Squadron dismissed this objection with all the due consideration one gives to a chain e-mail asking for money before sending it into cyberlimbo, he took his leave, not just from the program but from earlier loyalties that had bound him.

He then began a campaign which would destroy both himself and many of his former friends, but which would first cause him to compromise the very principles that made him bow out in the first place. Nor should we sneer at him with the overused canard of hypocrisy; for him to violate these ethical standards, even unto using some of the very methodology that led him to turn against the Squadron in the first place, represented a considerable and selfless sacrifice. To the truly ethical man, sacrificing one's personal moral credibility to a higher cause can mean as much as the loss of life which ultimately ended the entire debacle.

The Corrupting Effect of Power

President Lyndon Johnson, between doing good deeds that revisionist history would assign to other politicians or bad ones that would form the canon of his biography even during his lifetime, occasionally hit on pieces of folksy insight. Let us, for a moment, ignore the temptation to preemptively dismiss an idea from such a source and, instead, consider the virtue of the following tenet: We should judge laws not on their best possible application, but on their worst.

Such provides, in my opinion, an excellent criterion for judging applications of power in general, whether derived from law or discretion.

Golden Archer becomes the instrument of a lesson about this in Squadron Supreme. Combine the resentment and desperation of a rejected lover with the temptations of machinery that can rewrite the mind of a woman who rejected him, and you have much more of a lure to evil than any apple-mongering serpent in a garden.

Combine motive, opportunity, and power and you can expect certain kinds of crimes to occur in much the same way as you can expect rain when a mass of moist air drops in temperature past its dew point. We see this in private lives as well as public ones; the notions of limited government and division of powers both derive from a presumption of such a model of human behavior. Motive will exist when desires overwhelm character; opportunity can appear anywhere and any time; and therefore power provides an excellent point of entry at which human efforts and systems can attempt to control corruption.

If, then, we rightly label Golden Archer's behavior as of a like kind with pimps who use drugs to ensnare victims to sell into white slavery - and the fact that he loved Lady Lark makes this behavior more rather than less reprehensible - we must also credit to the Squadron Supreme a kind of accessory-through-inaction role in having failed to provide the necessary oversight to the physical contraptions he used to enslave the woman in the first place.

Collateral Dissent

As one of the misfits of the Squadron Supreme, Amphibian occasionally found the fit to the ways of "surface-dwellers" (a bigoted pejorative term that, somehow, characters like Aquaman get to use without evoking much moral disopprobrium from readers) a poor one. And as the Utopia Program, with its forcible reeducation of human beings, proceeded, his confidence evidently eroded.

Golden Archer, for all his personal flaws, did the world a great service by his moral lapse, in that he demonstrated the essential weak point of the selfsame grand scheme he had sworn to advance and protect. He showed that great concentrations of power placed in the hands of those human beings, intended to advance the abstract goal of the "common good," become by definition tools of private ambitions and desires because of the deterministic aspects of the human character. If the inability of the common man to defer his own gratification remained so weak that this failing supposedly justified taking a machine and rewriting his mind to establish politer patterns of behavior, this same inability eventually would have to taint the behavior of the custodians of the brainwashing machines.

Amphibian reacted with a perfectly clear, perfectly rational moral outrage at the revelation of the Archer's psychological (and, therefore, physical) rape of Lady Lark. He therefore turned his sea-bottom musculature against the machines that had done the ill.

At this point, however, he removed himself altogether from the proceedings by returning to the ocean and vowing to have no more with those who walk on the land. Doubtless the inevitable self-congratulation that creates barriers across ethnic lines supported what his insight told him about air-breathing humanity; nonetheless, he had a point. The Squadron Supreme made him sick, and he wanted no more of it.

And here we see another failing of utopian thinking: It ultimately imposes a moral crossroads on men of good will who see where the program fails, forcing them to turn traitor (as had Nighthawk) or defector (as had Amphibian).

The Inevitable Conflict

People will resist those who attempt to take things away from them, whether the latest, bravest new world vision intends to divest them of concrete goods or of intangibles. It generally matters little how fondly the principal actors feel about the real and imaginary merits of their lofty programs; few victims of "ethnic cleansing," for instance, could ultimately comfort themselves in the notion that their own deaths resulted in a more homogeneous nation or a "cleaner" gene pool.

Plus violence serves as the fundamental unit of commerce in superhero comics, so we should expect just about any story - regardless of focus - either to feature or to culminate in a big bust-up of whatever variety, from single duels to four-color mass engagements. Out here in the real world outside of comics, the very act of raising a political topic can incite a shouting match. The political has this power even among people who might freely forgive something like sleeping with their spouses or robbing their houses without resorting to a raised voice anywhere in the transaction; something in the way we hang our self-esteem on the perceived infallibility of our insights may cause this, or perhaps just some deterministic factor like a browbeating center of the brain. Regardless, since superheroes theoretically owe to a human side in their concept, we could anticipate that a political debate - or, better, a political crisis - must erupt in violence.

Nighthawk, having failed to motivate himself to a cowardly act of assassination in the beginning of the series, takes a more honorable tack in the final confrontation which he machinates through the infiltrators he has introduced into the Squadron Supreme during the various episodes of the series. As a footnote, we might think about how Nighthawk defended his honor at considerable cost of his own and other peoples' lives, and just file that under "differences between moral postures and deeds."

The Body Count

In one endgame sequence, more superheroes died than probably had passed on in either DC or Marvel in decades. We need not dismiss this mass fatality merely on the basis of the Squadron's nature as derivative - and thus, potentially, throwaway - characters; the count of what had happened before, dead-superhero-wise, also includes throwaway characters.

Trifling by today's standards of ultra-violence, the number of heroes who died meant something shocking by genre standards. Gruenwald knew how far beyond the norm he had reached in creating stacks of dead heroes like cord wood: He intended this exceptional casualty count to contribute to the overall meaning of the series.

Bad deeds, no matter how we mask them, create a moral and sometimes material price to pay. When the costs fall on someone else, preferably outside of our attention, we claim to have gotten away with these acts; but this does not mean the acts had no cost. Shoplift and you could cost some checker a pay raise. Fool around with someone else's spouse and you could wreck a marriage.

Gruenwald killed off so many superheroes because he intended the costs of the Squadron's political arrogance to appear where no one could deny their reality, close enough that the stink of corpses of one-time comrades could choke those responsible for the deaths. While this represents a distortion to clarify the point of the piece - too many escape the price of their misdeeds, and too many others bear the brunt of sins other men commit - we might note that the atrocities of the twentieth century probably could not have occurred on the scale that they did had their architects had to witness them in all their particulars.

The Squadron sought to reform humanity and arrogate to themselves a discretion more properly invested in gods than heroes via the expedients of simple reeducation sessions (to brainwash criminals to behave better) and garbage collection (to pursue the materialist folly that the tools of crime, rather than the convoluted chorus of human motivations, cause crime). Falling from a height of pretentions of this scale, we can expect that the result might fill a cemetery or two.

If doctors can bury their mistakes in single graves, politicians can bury theirs in mass crematoria.

The damage, however, went beyond physical casualties. Consider the corruption of the principal players, first in the initial wave of composing the program to begin with, then in the various consequent deeds that followed it. Golden Archer, unable to resist the temptations of power, descended to a role not too different from a bar-hopping rapist who drugs women with roofies to remove their volition long enough to achieve his goal. Tom Thumb, by keeping a lid on his suspicions, became an accessory after the fact; and, though Gruenwald did not explore this angle of his illness, one might note that emotional states have an affect on health. His reaction to his role in the Archer debacle might have somewhat accelerated the progress of his cancer towards his own death.

Even Nighthawk, dedicated from the beginning of the tale to undoing or undermining the colossal but entangling moral mistake the Squadron's fantastic plan involved ended up making a number of compromises adequate to place into question the very premise of his moral credentials. He nearly assassinated his friend of many years, Hyperion, in order to abort the totalitarian scheme at the outset. Then he resorted to a campaign of subversion and betrayal, considering that smaller misdeeds might justify themselves by preventing larger ones. He colluded with "Master Menace," a rather generic evil overlord character originally created as a caricature of Lex Luthor and subsequently retrofitted to play a more Doctor Doom-like role in the Squadron's mythos. And, having done all these things, he sold out his last remaining scruple in using the brainwashing technology on Blue Eagle in order to prevent his revealing what he discovered about Nighthawk's plans.

If, in the end, he played leader to a murderous assault against his friends, and, indeed, died in the process, the things that mattered about Nighthawk had mostly died anyway, slain either by the corruption of the Squadron (here his loyalty died) or by the urgency of his redemptive mission (here died most of his other scruples).

The Overall Message

Utopian schemes often ignore the costs they involve, through various intellectual frauds. These frauds range from simple denial ("It won't cause enough trouble to matter") to demonization of the victims of policy ("We had to liquidate them because they stood in the way of progress"). In either case, the dedicated utopian attempts a round of bait-and-switch by selling possibly-unrealizeable benefits at a dishonestly-deflated cost. Yet often the benefits do not materialize, and, somehow, costs creep in, unwanted, like roaches into a tenement. The skeptic might note that the costs always existed, waiting only for the crisis brought on by impractical reformist schemes to make them visible.

Not only does the Squadron's program fail, it fails in a way that shows the cost in human terms - in a very clear count of human bodies hauled away to rest on gurneys in a morgue. And, even among the survivors, the damage remains - the damage of having played the victim in some purportedly high-minded but functionally inhuman program, the damage of having colluded with its perpetrators, or the damage of having run the whole thing. Some such wounds heal, some don't.

Beyond the libertarian ideas implicit and explicit in this work, though, we see a strongly moral bent in this work. For many, striking a moral posture that requires no self-sacrifice suffices as a substitute for character. Nighthawk, however, saw a great evil and gave up everything to fight it, including his friendship, his loyalties, his sense of himself as a moral being, and ultimately his life.

When the virus of totalitarianism infects the minds of those with the power to lead, we can expect such a cost if any have the will to oppose it to the end. And, though Nighthawk lost himself in the process, he knew the cost was a small one compared to the stakes of the game. To the end, he acted towards a goal of the greater good even against enemies who thought they did the same.

Return to the Quarter Bin.
Email the author at ouzomandias@mailexcite.com.

Column 229. Completed 24-FEB-2001.