Sinister Corporate Global Hegemony of the Dark Knight

What Bush and Batman Have In Common

I'm usually not one to engage in pointless Bush bashing (what would I really say that hasn't been said by everyone under the sun before me?) but I had a few issues with this particular love letter to the current administration that somehow manages to connect the events of its fantastical depiction of supercrime with our current aggressive domestic and foreign policy.

First off, they are partly correct. Both our soon to be ex-president and the Dark Knight do not have much in the way of respect for the constitution or due process as they flout conventional law as a way of keeping us "safe." In a comic book world of supercriminals where every day of the week (and twice on a Sunday) some asshole in a costume tries to poison the Gotham Reservoir, the conventional authorities are not equipped to handle this kind of thing, so of course we delight in the adventures of an eccentric rich guy dressing up in a costume and foiling the crime with his array of martial arts and gadgetry. This makes sense in that kind of logic.

All of the shit in there about Bush making the same kinds of 'hard choices' that Batman does in the movie (like turning every Gotham citizen's cellphone into a 'sonar resonator' that can listen in on their conversations and even 'see' where they are, kicking the shit out of the Joker in the interrogation room, various other violations of the fourth amendment) don't really apply in a world where a single grievous terrorist act changed our way of thinking so that we're on the offense instead of the defense.

The Joker is NOTHING like the Islamist terrorist threat that we're facing in various resource rich regions of the world. The Joker says numerous times through the movie that he's an 'agent of chaos' who pursues anarchy as a means to itself. Al Qaeda at least has some sort of political agenda by way of religion involving kicking us out of what they perceive as places that the U.S. does not belong. And yes, assuming we were to kowtow to this we can assume that they would continue being a bunch of assholes to their own regions as they rip themselves apart in sectarian conflict. We can also assume that they wouldn't be terribly interested in us outside of whether we were buying the oil or not.

So yeah, there's my internet nerd rage, except I'd like to think my target was a bit better than complaining about Sony losing PS3 exclusives to Microsoft.