“You forgot your thruster.” - Penny Priddy

By Lisa Fary

Andrew Klavan thinks George W. Bush is Batman and says so in today’s Wall Street Journal. Obligatory mocking after the jump.

Klavan says:

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.

Yes, but how many people trust Batman to lay down the emergency powers when the emergency has passed and how many people trust the same of George W. Bush?  Batman gave it up within minutes (he even destroyed the means so as to ensure it wouldn’t be used again) - we’ve been dealing with warrantless wiretapping, executive privilege, and contempt of Congress for seven years.  I can’t see Batman screaming, “Executive privilege” every time justice comes knocking on his door.  

In fact, Batman does the opposite.  He tries to turn himself in to be held accountable for his actions.  (And BTW, Batman’s warrantless wiretapping actually achieved its goal.)  

Oh, and Batman stopped the established authorities from secretly torturing a guy for information. I’m just saying. 

Batman is the individual who fights the necessary war because the established authorities either can’t do it or won’t do it.  In Batman Begins, the authorities wouldn’t fight the fight - every level was on the take and so corrupt that the League of Shadows was able to infiltrate at will and come crushingly close to destroying Gotham.

Batman, at least in Christopher Nolan’s films, doesn’t want to be Gotham’s go to guy.  He doesn’t want to be responsible for Gotham’s salvation and he certainly doesn’t want to save it via illegal means.  He tries to give it up and pass the responsibility of protecting Gotham on to a legitimate crusader, Harvey Dent.  I have yet to see George W. Bush make a similarly noble attempt. 

Klavan goes on to say:

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.

When heroes arise who take those difficult duties on themselves, it is tempting for the rest of us to turn our backs on them, to vilify them in order to protect our own appearance of righteousness. We prosecute and execrate the violent soldier or the cruel interrogator in order to parade ourselves as paragons of the peaceful values they preserve. As Gary Oldman’s Commissioner Gordon says of the hated and hunted Batman, “He has to run away — because we have to chase him.”

What Klavan is missing is why Batman has to be hunted.  It isn’t because Batman was violent and cruel in order to uphold what’s right and therefore is hated by the masses. 

In The Dark Knight, Batman says in no uncertain terms, that he is whatever Gotham needs him to be.  To save Gotham, Harvey Dent’s accomplishments as District Attorney had to be preserved, his image as Gotham’s White Knight had to be preserved.  To maintain order and to move forward, Gotham needed Batman to take responsibility for Dent’s crimes onto himself, make himself the enemy so that Commissioner Gordon and good, just people like him, could carry on Dent’s work for a better, untarnished tomorrow.  

Why? Because saving Gotham should be on the up and up.  It should be done through legal means.  That was more important to Batman than keeping his own name clear.   More important than being remembered in history as a savior.

George W. Bush is not Batman. At best, he’s The Joker, and not even the awesome Joker appearing in The Dark Knight. He’s Jack Nicholson’s Joker - a wisecracking, egotistical clown throwing money (economic stimulus checks, anyone?) at the masses to distract them from his true intent: dismantling society as we know it and remaking it in his own clownish image.  

Andrew Klavan and his like can stretch as far as they want - George W. Bush will never be a hero.  Heroes do the right thing. 

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Lisa Fary’s early exposure to classic Battlestar Galactica in 1979 is largely responsible for her lifelong interest in science fiction and her childhood ambition of being an intergalactic space cowgirl. She thinks diagramming sentences is a fun alternative to Sudoku.