Is Batman a Republican?

Look, I don't know.  Maybe I am just wasting my breath.  Maybe thousands before me have written about who our childhood heros really are.  There are all those sarcastic lines out there in the culture since the 1960s belittling universities that grant advanced degrees for dissertations on comic books, so perhaps if I do a search of all those dissertations, I can relax and go on to another topic.  Maybe it's already been said.  And maybe the impulse to write about the latest Batman artifact, The Dark Knight Rises, grows out of the massacre of innocents that took place in that movie house in Colorado during a screening of the film.  This story begins with my decison to go see the movie.  I didn't go to be entertained since I don't find puerile, adolescent adventure films anything other than painfully long and boring.  I went because I wanted to see what the heck is going on out there.  By the time I had brushed off the seven-dollar popcorn crumbs, threw open the swinging doors and hit daylight, I knew I had to go into print on this one.

I thought back to the first of these Batman films that I had seen with my youngest son, then about nine years old.  Every seat in the theater was filled, mostly by kids my son's age plus or minus a few years.  Like many parents dutifully escorting a child to a de rigeur event, I enjoyed the inside jokes, the allusiveness of the set design, the campiness of a typical, post-modern cinema comic book aimed, I assumed, at the adults in the audience since most nine year-olds haven't yet gotten their liberal arts degrees.  Yet, bereft of degrees as they may be, something happened at the end of the movie that frightened me because it proved to me they had gotten the real message while I was busy deconstructing the wall paper.  Batman stands triumphant, god-like, atop a tall building while the night sky is illuminated by the projected image of the bat.  In hoc signo vinces!  No sooner did this tableau hit the screen than a guttural, visceral roar emerged from the gathered children.  Dear God, these kids had been programmed!  It was the kind of sound I associated with Hitler rallies or gatherings of some alternative quasi-religious cult.  How had this happened?

Until going to see The Dark Knight Rises, I had not seen any of the other Batman films since the 1989 version I had attended with my son. Well, it is obvious that Hollywood has been hard at work keeping up with political currents over the last almost quarter century since then.  The villain of TDKR is a Darth Vader simulacrum named Bane (a choice typical of the adolescent level of metaphor employed in the film) who is loosely patterned after a grungy Occupy Wall Street "terrorist."   I guess the semiotics of Bruce Wayne in this context would have his nearest analogue in Michael Bloomberg, our billionaire, benevolent-despot Mayor.  Actually, it would be impossible to list here all but a few of the quasi-literary allusions in TDKR, since just about everything--from the pagan chants of ersatz Carmina Burana to hokum Star Wars spiritualism and levitation--has been sunk into this production.  It appears that snickering ivy league snobs, facing diminishing job opportunities in the post 2008 world, when they aren't extending the double-speak glossary for Republican politicians in Washington, are being employed as screenwriters to mess with the minds of our children.   And this stuff is probably benign compared to what kids take in from video games and internet sites most adults (certainly this one) don't have a clue about.

If the years since Bush took office can be credited with one important contribution to our society, it is a blindingly bright transparency about who we really are.  One by one, we are being stripped of our illusions.  When the killings in Aurora took place, I am probably not alone in being reminded of H. Rap Brown's observation that "violence is as American as cherry pie."  We didn't need Bush to teach us that lesson, but the suspension of our constitutional rights and the determination to make government synonymous with evil makes it a lot harder for some of us to overlook the fact that the comic book heros of our youth were basically vigilantes, not as raw as Rambo, Travis Bickle, Dirty Harry, or Charles Bronson's forgettably named Death Wish character, but who in their colorful, seemingly wholesome, other-worldly toon dimension were just as effective in getting across to us that you really can't count on government institutions like police departments to protect you from evil.  In fact, you can't count on government for much of anything.  True salvation comes from sources above and beyond the law.

(Which is not to say that we are not also drowning in TV cops who daily struggle against increasingly evil foes, but few would accuse even the typical Jerry Burkheimer fare, the most refined expression of the genre, of eliciting rapturous roars from their audience.  Gloomy, not inspiring.  The one toon cop who made it to the screen, the venerable Dick Tracy, for all the post-modern trappings of the 1990 film, could not even generate a Dick Tracy II.  Interestingly, New York's finest are, after a considerable period of virtual entombment in TDKR, given their moment of glory in the film, but only after being released by our hero to take place in a full frontal assault on the Occupy Wall Street grunge-orists that depicts them as an army out of the period of Gladiator or Braveheart.  I guess the writers wanted to keep the men in blue on board and thought they would enjoy the scene.)

TDKR's Bane succeeds in penetrating the New York Stock Exchange in a hail of bullets.  When he has succeeded in his assault, he rises to announce that he has set the people free, put the people in power.  He even establishes a court clearly meant to elicit both visually and thematically the court of Robespierre (lines from Dickens' Tale of Two Cities to follow later in the film).  Having dispatched the evil empire, the right is now free to resume its apparently tireless attacks on the French Revolution, a revolution which did a bit more than spill some tea into Boston harbor. 

The one saving grace in all this political stew would seem to be that--given the educational achievement of most American kids--they won't get any of the references.  The danger is that the message will get through anyway.  I don't want to be around when those enraptured roars I heard back in 1989 at the end of the first Batman epic are heard not in movie houses but in our streets.

    

 

The Great Game: Part II

In a prequel to the twentieth century's Cold War shenanigans between East and West, the world witnessed a lengthy period of tension between the Russian Empire and the English Empire over control of Central Asia.  That conflict has been labeled by historians as "The Great Game."  Now that the Soviet "experiment" has collapsed, Russia appears to have reacquainted itself with its old Tsarist roots and once again taken on the trappings of empire.  Its opponent in the region is now the American rather than the British empire.  The conflict between the two empires appears far more dangerous, a far greater threat to world peace, than what now seems the cozy Cold War standoff (MAD or "Mutually Asssured Destruction") whereby the two opponents agreed not to totally annihilate the planet in a nuclear conflagration.  Of course, both empires continue to warehouse thousand of ICBMs, missiles that are still targeted on such places as Moscow and New York.
     RT.com, the Russian news outlet, is daily full of stories chronicling the growing tension between Russia and the U.S. replete with arms build-ups, CIA machinations and op-ed pieces tearing the veil from the United States' presumed preoccupation with human rights and democracy in the region.   While these stories, many of them quite lurid, have been coming out of Russia for months now, the U.S.'s major propaganda outlet, the New York Times, can go for days without drawing much attention to the crisis. 
    Many see the move to destabilize and to bring about regime change in Syria as a necessary preliminary to making a move on Iran.  As far as this game goes, we may well be approaching the endgame.  All that we have seen since the turmoil in Tunisia initiated what came to be called the Arab Spring seems to suggest that the phenomenon should more accurately be called the "Arab Springboard" to the West's ultimate goal of accomplishing its two primary foreign policy goals: the complete domination of the oil-producing world and the encirclement of our two most estimable opponents, Russia and China.

     No effort has been spared in this campaign.  If it meant abandoning old friends like Mubarak in Egypt, delivering humanitarian aid to Libya via "no-fly" zones, (actually zones in which U.S. fighter jets can bomb a nation with impunity), and initiating a sustained propaganda campaign in which Syrians armed by the U.S. were portrayed as non-violent protesters, these were small prices to pay for such lucrative rewards.
     The apparent unanimity in the West (How can one disagree when even formerly pesky France and the venerable Kofi Annan seem to be on board?) blithely flies in the face of any concept of national sovereignty or international law.  The U.S. has claimed for itself--in a psychedlic expansion of the concepts of manifest destiny and the Monroe Doctrine--the absolute right to install regimes compatible with its interests.
     The suspicion arises that one explanation for the appearance of unanimity among our client states is that we have held their feet to the fire, in this case the economic conflagration brought about by Nobel Prize-winning derivatives geniuses.  It is not just the PIGS (Portugal, Italy, Greece and Spain) that teeter on the edge of financial ruin.  England and France live with daily protests against the austerity measures they require to avoid bankruptcy.  At the long conference tables at which national leaders periodically gather, U.S. economists no doubt remind skeptics that half a quadrillion dollars in derivatives out there represent, to use a favored phrase, an existential threat.  We had best show a united front, circle the wagons, and be ready for the worst.  Should the Russians or the Chinese--or even nascent India--achieve parity with regard to assets like oil, the sun may set on the two-century long domination of the West.