By Tom deignan

What’s behind the superhero’s anger? Irish pride, of course. Allow me to explain.

Earlier this month, it was announced that Captain America, created to wage war on Hitler and Stalin in the pages of 1940s comic books and later the subject of movies, TV shows, cartoons and even pop songs, was going to be killed off.

Naturally, when such a figure passes onto the comic book cosmos, obituaries are written. According to several Captain America remembrances I read, he was born with the name Steve Rogers on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Fittingly, his birthday was July 4, 1917.

Then came the shocker. It turns out that Captain America go figure was the son of Irish immigrants.

In the first four issues of Adventures of Captain America: Sentinel of Liberty, released in late 1991, Captain America’s creators told Rogers’ story before he became a patriotic superhero. Lo and behold, his parents, Sarah and Joseph, were born on the other side of the pond.

This certainly gives fuel to those who like to look at the Irish melting pot experience in the U.S. as a relatively easy and painless process. How much more assimilated can you get than Captain America!

And so, that got me thinking, what would this superhero, this Captain Irish America, do around St. Patrick’s Day? Seek out wrongdoers who besmirch his culture, of course!

That’s where Target, the department store mega-chain, comes in. At least in the eyes of some Irish Americans, Target has slandered the Irish race with their latest line of holiday clothing.

Target has put out a line of t-shirts just in time for St. Patrick’s Day. One reads, “I survived the Murphy/Kelly Family Reunion, March 17, 1988,” and is illustrated with a pair of boxing gloves.

Another shirt informs those who read it that the dude who is wearing the shirt is a “Green Beer Taste Tester,” while still another celebrates a fictional “6th Annual St. Patrick’s Day Race for the Beer.” According to the Target website, these shirts are “a witty gift for your favorite Irishman.”

But according to Margaret McPeake, co-director of the Irish Studies program at the New College of California in San Francisco, these are “overtly racist stereotypes of the Irish.”

In an opinion piece written for the San Francisco Chronicle last week, McPeake writes, “How does a national retailer have the freedom to use racist stereotyping at a time when similar assaults against other ethnic groups would be denounced roundly as infringements on civil liberties?

“Many Irish Americans have been cut off from a sense of their ethnicity and heritage through assimilation and cultural amnesia. A process of reversing Irish American forgetfulness about who they are, where they come from and what it means to participate in the degradation of one’s culture, is a necessary step to impede the larger society’s continued reception of images of drunken Irish buffoonery as an acceptable exception to the rule against ethnic stereotyping. Irish Americans need to stand up and be outraged.”

So, I guess Captain America would go after Target’s insensitive t-shirt line. While he’s at it, however, he might as well also go after those who take their Irishness a tad too seriously.

After all, one image that has been shown numerous times in my local newspaper is from the Staten Island St. Patrick’s Day parade. The photo captures two drunken louts pummeling each other, one wearing a shirt which reads “Dublin,” the other a shirt with “FDNY 3 Truck” written on it.

I wonder if those shirts are available at Target?

Anyway, I recall that Marvel Comics used to do a series called “Team Up,” which paired popular superheroes for one issue. Why not an annual Captain America and St. Patrick team up?

Once a year the dynamic Hibernian duo could go out and fight cultural crime, disposing of those who take their culture too seriously and not seriously enough.

They could take care of those folks who tend to ruin St. Patrick’s Day for the rest of us.

(Contact at tomdeignan@earthlink.net)