George W. Batman

Too much Bat­man good­ness? Never!

So another really inter­est­ing arti­cle I came across while read­ing those rumors is this one com­par­ing Bat­man with Pres­i­dent George W. Bush as “the unpop­u­lar enforcer pro­tect­ing an angry pub­lic from a mon­strous foe.”

While I feel the com­par­i­son is a fair one, the author goes on to talk about how movies with “com­plex” “lib­eral” val­ues that deal more directly with the war on ter­ror bombed out of the­aters, while movies with more pure “con­ser­v­a­tive” val­ues that indi­rectly cover the war are block­busters, and how this is a vin­di­ca­tion of those con­ser­v­a­tive values.

That, I can’t agree with, for a num­ber of reasons -

Like I said before, I can admire peo­ple like Bat­man and Jack Bauer because they are fic­tional. They rep­re­sent an ideal, but no one could live up to that ideal in real life. No one has per­fect instincts and never makes mis­takes in judg­ment. And in real life, the slopes are slip­perier and harder to climb back up after you do make a mistake.

Also, Bat­man doesn’t have to deal with the prece­dent and con­se­quences (good or bad) of any Bat­men that came before him. He can set all his own rules. He doesn’t need to worry about what peo­ple think of his actions, because he acts alone, out­side of the law. Amer­ica can’t do that, we need to work in the open and make sure that other nations and orga­ni­za­tions respect us and work with us.

He doesn’t have to deal with unin­tended con­se­quences because he’s got per­fect infor­ma­tion of all the hap­pen­ings in Gotham and con­tin­gency plans for every pos­si­ble sce­nario. No one has that in real life. We are lim­ited by real-​world logis­tics. We can have thou­sands of spies, infor­mants, and ana­lysts, gath­er­ing moun­tains of human and elec­tronic intel­li­gence, but still not the abil­ity to always pick out the right infor­ma­tion at the right time.

Bat­man doesn’t take the fight to his ene­mies. He stops the bad guys from accom­plish­ing their plans and then hands them over to the proper author­i­ties in hopes that they can be reha­bil­i­tated. If a bad guy gets away and skips town, Bat­man doesn’t chase him down, he just works on pre­vent­ing the next attack on Gotham from who­ever the next bad guy is. In real life, we should focus on pre­ven­tion and rehabilitation.

An argu­ment has been laid against Bat­man that by esca­lat­ing the fight on crime in Gotham with vig­i­lan­tism, he is respon­si­ble for cre­at­ing a new kind of crim­i­nal. The same has been said about America’s “aggres­sive inter­ro­ga­tion tech­niques” in our war on ter­ror pro­vid­ing more recruit­ment mate­r­ial for our ene­mies, and hard­en­ing their resolve in the fight against us.

Bat­man places him­self in the line of dan­ger to make a dif­fer­ence, and holds him­self to an impos­si­bly strict code. He will not kill his ene­mies and will not allow them to hurt oth­ers. No one in real life can make the per­sonal com­mit­ment that Bat­man does. His abil­i­ties and knowl­edge of every­thing in Gotham allows him to pro­vide a per­sonal touch of jus­tice that is impos­si­ble in the real world. And he has the unwa­ver­ing nerve to avoid using guns, let alone nuclear weapons.

Joker him­self said that he was a per­fect foil to Bat­man because they were so sim­i­lar. Maybe we should think about that as we con­sider our real life conflicts.

I like my comic and movie analo­gies to be a step removed from real pol­i­tics. That’s why I was opposed to DC Deci­sions and Sav­age Dragon’s thing. (Col­bert in the Mar­vel Uni­verse, though, I tol­er­ated, though. That’s just more of the usual from Col­bert as far as I’m concerned.)

Give us a good story, and let us choose if and how we want to apply it to our own lives.

Tags: America, Batman, Bush, Dinhternet, Games, Law, Movies, Politics, Stories, Will N, Work