George Bush is Not Batman
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.
Never miss an update. Subscribe to Pink Raygun by Email or subscribe via RSS
|
|
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.
On a related note, the more I think about The Dark Knight, the less I like it. I wrote about my complicated feelings over at CHUD:
http://chud.com/articles/blogs/987/Some-Questions-I-Asked-Myself-While-Watching-quotThe-Dark-Knightquot.html
Excellent analysis. I particularly like the inclusion of Batman’s willingness to sacrifice any “reputation” he has to allow the system to reclaim its effectiveness. And the comparison of Bush to Nicholson’s Joker is very apt. No wonder I hate clowns.
Fantastic article!! Batman is ‘whatever Gotham needs’ while GWB is whatever GWB needs!
I hope you send this rebuttal to the Wall Street Journal. You are not alone in saying that GWB is NOT Batman! Or a hero by any other name. The voice of reason needs to be heard by more Americans, hopefully it will wake them from their media induced stupor.
Klavan was right, and anyone who cannot see the clearly intended parallel is intentionally blinding themselves. If one cannot perceive that Bush has steadfastly exchanged his popularity, his “approval ratings” (which are still almost double that of the record low approval ratings that Congress has earned themselves), even his “place in history” (as threatened by so many of his detractors) to do what he feels is “the right thing” then they are fooling themselves.
The general public, the politicos, and the pundits who have made Bush-Hatred a phenomina which will earn itself it’s own chapters in the history books as a perplexing trend which will not ever really be fully understood. They are no different from the ones depicted in the movie, who understand very little and reject those who have the strength and endurance to carry on a fight which is the right thing, but unpopular to those who lack the ability to see the big picture.
I find amusing, and of course, disingenuous the places where no parallels CAN exist to refute the many, many, many parallels which DO exist between the Dark Knight, or the creation of parallels which do not exist to try to villify someone they don’t like so as not to appear as blinded by their own selfishness as those depicted in the movie. So, yeah, Batman picked Harvey Dent to be the face of the “Good Guy”, but what you so painstakingly leave out is, he picked THE WRONG GUY, Harvery turned into a psychopath who was going to kill a child for revenge were it not for the direct intervention of Batman. Batman hid his ugliest choices FROM the public, where the author of this article appears to demand that Bush publicize every decision. She seems to think that Bush is a popularity seeker, which CLEARLY he’s not, and even the absolutely laughable connection between the Joker of Burton’s Batman because they both “handed out money” without understanding the context of the stimulus package as a mechanism through which presidents are expected to deal with the economies of the nations which they preside over, whereas the Joker was a private citizen attempting to buy the loyalty of the masses against those who were charged with administering the duties of their governmental offices.
This “rebuttal” is a poor attempt at refuting what was a very bright observation on the part of Klavan, it failed and collapsed under it’s very own weight, and requires leaps in logic to follow which would make the great philosophers blush.
What you painstakingly leave out is that Batman didn’t pick Harvey Dent. The voters of Gotham picked Harvey Dent. The voters of Gotham picked, in your words, the wrong guy (hey, that sounds familiar!). Batman hoped the guy would be able to do the job, helped the guy do the job, and then when the elected guy couldn’t do the job, Batman did the cleaning up. Batman hid Dent’s ugliest actions from the public in order to maintain what the man had built. The case against the mafia, the efforts at cleaning up the police department wouldn’t have would have fallen apart. Bush doesn’t have to publicize every decision – he just has to make a good one. And maybe he will. There’s still 177 days, 15 hours and 45 minutes (at the time of this posting) for him to do so.
I didn’t say Bush was a popularity seeker – I implied that he was a clown (and really, who likes clowns anyway?), which is a metaphor extending beyond the boundaries of the Burton-verse Joker’s money tossing escapade.
“Bush-Hatred” is perfectly understandable. No president has been universally loved – they’ve all had their detractors. The difference now is that anyone with an internet connection and rudimentary typing skills can get a voice in the public arena. We’ve also been flooded with cable news networks that need 24-hour coverage of pundits talking smack about one politician or another. The hate has always been there- it’s just more visible now. (If you want a different view of the president, change the channel. Surely, there’s a point of view out there for you. Like Klavan’s)
The voters picked Harvey to be the Attorney General, they didn’t pick him to be the “White Knight”, the face of the everlasting good guy, the replacement for the Batman, that was Wayne’s decision, and Wayne upheld that decision even AFTER seeing the faults of Harvey prior to his fall.
Bush DID make several good decisions, and Bush HAS picked out a “Harvey Dent”, his name being General Petraeus.
News from Iraq is incredibly solid, we have caused a full retreat of Al-Qaeda from Iraq, when our troops come home, it will be in Victory, having completed all major objectives, and having brought peace and security to the region, which we had a moral obligation to the Iraqi people to do after toppling their government.
Had we followed the advice of some of the many cowards, we’d have packed up and left Iraq in shambles, coming home with our tails between our legs in abject humiliation, but thanks to Bush, who sacrificed his own popularity, his own personal position with so many people, we remained steadfast, and fought on to Victory, a condition which exists now.
Now the Iraqis are feeling secure enough to begin requesting our withdrawal, they’ll be left as a stable, secure country with an army not in shambles, not ripe for takeover by Iran, but retrained by the best fighting force in the world, and able to stand up for themselves, stabilizing the region, with unprecedented cooperation between factions who have been warring for millennia.
@ Vic – they’ll be left as a stable and secure country once we have a new president who won’t be willing to stay there indefinitely. What you fail to acknowledge is that we had no business going to Iraq in the first place. Bush went to war in Iraq to INCREASE his popularity. Because he had to do SOMETHING in the wake of 9/11 to make it look like he was doing something about terrorism. But instead of focusing Afghanistan, where Osama Bin Laden actually was, or, God forbid, putting pressure on Saudi Arabia where the terrorists involved in the 9/11 terrorist attacks were FROM, he invades Iraq based on faulty information.
You claim that we’ve achieved victory in Iraq. I’m sorry but victory in a war that never should’ve been waged in the first place is no victory at all. Our government made a mess, and now they’re scrambling to clean it up. Congratulations. But they maybe should’ve tried to not make a mess to begin with. Heroes don’t wage wars as distractions from our actual problems. They tackle problems head on, honestly, and with their hearts and minds on the people they’re defending.
@ Lisa – I love your article, and agree 100%.
What disturbs me even more than a Bush article is the fact that Klavan is comparing him to a fictional character. Fictional characters can do anything they please due to the unlimited restrictions of writers in the modern age. This as a whole discredits Klavan’s argument is its entirety.