Bush = ...Batman??

Testing your gag reflex....

Andrew Klavan, a right-wing suspense writer, compares Bush to the Batman of The Dark Knight in a WSJ op-ed and typically loses his head completely. A bite - you can read the rest yourself if you've got a bucket handy - just to be getting on with:

There seems to me no question that the Batman film "The Dark Knight," currently breaking every box office record in history, is at some level a paean of praise to the fortitude and moral courage that has been shown by George W. Bush in this time of terror and war. Like W, Batman is vilified and despised for confronting terrorists in the only terms they understand. Like W, Batman sometimes has to push the boundaries of civil rights to deal with an emergency, certain that he will re-establish those boundaries when the emergency is past.

And so on. "Hero worship" hardly seems to explain Klavan's incipient love affair with W's, well, manliness. More interesting for the general observer, though, is his defense of right-wing simple-mindedness and his easy rejection of the idea that anything in the modern world is, you know, complicated. As he explains it, it's not.

Leftists frequently complain that right-wing morality is simplistic. Morality is relative, they say; nuanced, complex. They're wrong, of course, even on their own terms.

Left and right, all Americans know that freedom is better than slavery, that love is better than hate, kindness better than cruelty, tolerance better than bigotry. We don't always know how we know these things, and yet mysteriously we know them nonetheless.

The true complexity arises when we must defend these values in a world that does not universally embrace them -- when we reach the place where we must be intolerant in order to defend tolerance, or unkind in order to defend kindness, or hateful in order to defend what we love.

To the hopelessly simple-minded Right, the above graf qualifies as deep thinking and "true complexity" except that there's no need to panic because a comic book character has simplified it all beautifully for you and the answer is: torture the evil bastards.

Topsy-turvy, as usual. Bush as Batman? I think not. Batman fights the evil villains who torture, lie, steal, and start wars so they can hijack another country's resources. Bush isn't Batman.

He's the Joker.

(Via The War Room)

Comments

[eRobin]

I was waiting for the Right to claim Batman as a pro-BushCo movie. I knew while I was watching it that all sides would be able to claim the movie as a defense of their worldviews and actions. To me, that says that it defends none of them. It does, however, make the point that people are fallible and often act from fear instead of love and that it's society's job to resist those impulses when they occur or at least work to rein them in. I think that the movie is hopeful on that score. I could go on and on b/c I really did love the film and what I thought it said to me but then I'd run the risk of sounding like the dope you cited (although from the left, with a side of Buddhism) and so I'll refrain.

For discussions about art, I like to go to the source. Here's the director, Chris Nolan, on a related question:

The film implies that Gotham's latest wave of psychos exist partly because of Batman, not in spite of him. His presence has unintended consequences in the same way that the U.S. presence in Iraq has consequences.

At the end of the first film we introduced the idea of escalation. Batman creates this extreme response to crime in Gotham—putting on a mask and jumping off rooftops. Well, what's that going to inspire from the criminals he's fighting? Batman has changed the world, but not all for the better. The use of force against an enemy is a tricky and fascinating thing to have in a story. And the film tries to make the point that everybody loses in these situations.

[mick arran]

Oops, you lost me. I've been reading the Right and now it's all too complicated for me to follow. All I know is: Violence, Good; Use of Force Against Enemy, Good; Use of the Word "Loses", Bad. Very Bad.

[eRobin]

And from crazy RightwingLand you went to Worst.Album.EverWorld? My goodness, why are you punishing yourself??

[mick arran]

I didn't mean to. I thought it would be R&R. I was wrong.