Bush is No Batman
It was bound to happen. When I saw The Dark Knight this past week, I couldn’t help but note the allusions to the war on terror:
- The Joker as the “terrorist” of Gotham
- The technology that allows Batman to listen in to everyone in Gotham
- And the comic-book morality that Batman can, in the words of Alfred, “make the choice that no one else can make”
Who was going to make the comparison that Bush was Batman? I waited for it.
Then on Friday Andrew Klavan from the Wall Street Journal published the piece: “What Bush and Batman Have in Common.”
Klavan argues that Bush is willing to make the tough choices to defend American values similar to the Batman.
Some of the conservative values that the film seems to sympathize with on the surface seem to support Klavan’s argument:
- The world is an evil place
- Sometimes you have to break the rules to fight evil
- Terrorists (such as the Joker) act irrationally
- Torture is ok and a justified means of getting information
- Spying on citizens is also ok (as long as it works and you only do it once)
However, there are several issues with Klavan’s argument. The most glaring is that Bush didn’t go after the terrorist Osama bin Laden. Instead, he used terrorism as a political wedge to invade another country.
Batman went after the criminal.
In fact, Bush and the neo-conservatives don’t really seem concerned about actually preventing terrorism. Rather they use the issue of terrorism to achieve other ends and bludgeon Democrats politically.
For example, you never hear the Bush administration arguing for more Arab language interpreters or for more intelligence on the ground in Iraq or Afghanistan. Instead, conservatives pick the issues where they can make Democrats look weak: torture, illegal spying, and lately, war with Iran.
If Bush is serious about fighting terrorism, he should pursue bin Laden and listen more to his generals (rather than replace them with ones who agree with him) and security experts such as Bruce Schnier.
But actually fighting terrorism is a foot note to the Republican agenda of securing the oil, handing out big government defense contracts to political friends, and politicizing the war.
So unlike the Batman, this is not a moral fight for Bush, but a political one.
Klavan makes a great emotional appeal that we must “defend [our] values in a world that does not universally embrace them.”
Now that sounds great (who would disagree?) and makes for great Republican rah-rah rhetoric.
But when it actually comes to defending our values like privacy, treating others as we would like to be treated, and personal freedom, this administration has seemingly done more to undermine them than any terrorist.
Another way of looking at it is that Bush is more Harvey Dent than Batman. Once his fiancee is killed (the equivant of 9/11), he is willing to throw out all of the rules he used to believe in to pursue vengeance.
Rather than react rationally and within a Democratic system that has worked, Bush similarly discards American values.
As Tim Weaver writes over at Not So Subtle, perhaps Dent’s anger is more like our overreaction to terrorism - our white knight image has been replaced by a politically-fueled quest to “go it alone” and impose our military might where we see fit.
The similarities Klavan draws between Bush and Batman only work (and only then on a very surface level) if you accept the Conservative frame that President Bush is working to protect us from terrorists and if you ignore all the ambiguity in the film.
Look further and also consider some of the moral gray areas of the film:
- Lucius Fox initially refusing to “wiretap” Gotham and then destroying the machinery after the Joker was caught
- Batman deciding not to kill the Joker when he has the chance to run him down on his motorcycle
Topics: Objective Media, A Successful End to the War |