Bad soldier, bad soldier

I was going to make the obvious Princess Bride joke, but Wonkette got there first. Then I was going to make the less obvious Batman-Joker comparison, but N.Z. Bear got there first.

Batman is constantly trying to put the Joker out of business for good. But if you haven't noticed, he generally never quite manages. The Joker is never, ever truly vanquished; he'll always be back for more.

But when the Joker's on the loose again, you don't stop to think "Damn, Batman still hasn't managed to get rid of this guy, we better find somebody else." You don't say "get me Aquaman on the phone." You think about the only guy who actually does something about the Joker, even if it hasn't been a permanent solution: the only guy who's been able to do the clown some damage and set back his schemes a ways.

You put up the damned Bat Signal and hope that Batman answers the call.

Bush is Batman to Bin Laden's Joker. And the American public isn't going to dump Batman just because he hasn't won the final battle with the Joker yet.

Only the proper analogy would be with that scene from The Dark Knight Returns, after the Dark Knight returns and resumes cracking criminal heads across Gotham (p. 33).

[A view of the twin towers in the distance. Talking head debate on TV, "POINT VS. POINT".]

LANA: One almost expects to see the bat-signal striking the side of one of Gotham's twin towers. Yes, he gave us quite a night ...

MORRIE: Sure kept the hospitals busy.

LANA: Yes, Morrie, but I think it's a mistake ...

[The Joker in hospital gown. Tired, worried, faded, old. Just passively watching TV with the other Arkham Asylum patient-inmates.]

LANA: ...To think of this in purely political terms ...

JOKER [eyes widening]: BB...

LANA: Rather, I regard it as a symbolic resurgence of the common man's will to resist ...

JOKER: [pained mouth] BBAT ...

LANA: A rebirth of the American fighting spirit.

JOKER: [the old grin is back] BATMAN.

MORRIE: Ease up, Lana, the only thing he signifies is an aberrant psychotic force.

JOKER: Darling. [Looking side to side, already planning his escape.]

MORRIE: Morally bankrupt, politically hazardous, reactionary, paranoid, a danger to every citizen of Gotham.

LANA: Perhaps, Morrie. Perhaps the Batman IS dangerous. But he's hardly as dangerous as his enemies, is he?

Of course, Batman didn't make the Joker. But the two feed off each other, define each other in the weirdest way. Jim Henley made this point a couple days ago - with regard to Republicans and the War on Terror. Matthew Yglesias made it yesterday. It's unhealthy for the Republicans to self-define as the party of the War on Terror. Incentive structure all wrong. We want it to be easier for us to bring ourselves to end our wars than it is for Marvel or DC to bring themselves to kill off a popular character. (We know the REAL reason the Joker always gets away every time.) And there isn't any particular reason to exacerebate the other guy's sickness by playing along with the whole comic book arch-enemies storyline. Hunt him, yes. Humor him, no. (Doing the latter and NOT the former - well, that's the worst of all possible worlds.)

The scene in Knight is well done, of course - good dramatic irony - because Morrie is a jerk and Lana is sympathetic and Batman really is a hero. Morrie goes on to explain how Harvey Dent shouldn't be blamed because he isn't responsible for his actions. But somehow, incoherently, Batman is still to be blamed for his. So Morrie is a parody of loopy left relativism. But Morrie is also sort of right. His dubious attempts to medicalize justice and morality, to explain away guilt in terms of 'root causes', has its analogs on the contemporary scene. Not in terms of what anyone of much importance is saying, but in terms of what many people think they are hearing. When Kerry says he wants to get terrorism down to 'nuisance' levels, he's only talking sense. (How can you wage war against a tactic that's been around for centuries?) But 'nuisance' isn't quite it, because either there's no terror, in which case it isn't even a nuisance; or there is some terror; and even some terror is morally outrageous; but no nuisance is morally outrageous. Even so, Kerry is right. If you insist on disagreeing, if you insist on misconceiving the practical goal, pretending you are aiming at some endlessly deferred victory so you can suck on your moral outrage forevermore, you're an idiot.

Of course The Dark Knight Returns would be less morally ambiguous if Batman were incompetent and Alfred were Karl Rove. (It would funny to do a Batman mini-series about our hero being sure the Joker is working together with Two-Face, but they aren't. Two-Face does something horrible. Batman beats the crap out of the Joker while soliloquizing, Frank Miller-style. "No more excuses, Joker. It ends tonight. Starting with this nerve cluster." The End.)

OBL sending us tapes is, as everyone has long since noticed, like some sort of super-villain grandstanding nonsense. You can't blame Michael Moore for getting dragged into this. You can't even blame George Bush for providing Moore with the material - the goat fodder. What you can do is decline the invitation to hallucinate that we are living inside a big superhero comic.

Exhibit A. David Brooks fulminating, Lana-style, about the new tape:

Here was this deranged killer spreading absurd theories about the American monarchy and threatening to murder more of us unless we do what he says.

One felt all the old emotions. Who does he think he is, and who does he think we are?

One of the crucial issues of this election is, Which candidate fundamentally gets the evil represented by this man? Which of these two guys understands it deep in his gut - not just in his brain or in his policy statements, but who feels it so deep in his soul that it consumes him?

No, no, no.

Brooks: "We are revealed by what we hate."

Rather, we are revealed by HOW we hate, perhaps. (We all hate OBL)

Vote Kerry.

Comments

[Barbar]

In the 1989 Batman movie Batman did make the Joker.

[Keith]

And the Joker made Batman. But no one can explain Jack Nicholson.

[Timothy Burke]

Basically, you've identified why I found Miller's first Dark Knight series so damned annoying in parts, actually. (The second, let's say nothing of it, so wretched is it.) Here he's got all this good shit going on and he has all the subtlety of a truncheon to the head when it comes to how the good citizens of Gotham see Batman. There are those who gets it and those who don't gets it. They who don't gets it are poo-poo dumbhead mushy relativists who are moral kissing cousins to the Joker. But the whole set-up of the book (not to mention the entire comic book superhero thing in general) makes it utterly, screamingly clear that Morrie, poor stupid asinine dear that he is, actually is kind of right. The Joker is nothing without Batman; when Batman returns, the Joker does too.

Modernity needs its anti-modernity, and vice-versa. OBL is no real anti-modern; there are none such left in the world. We are all in the belly of the beast. In fact, Bush vs. OBL is almost the war of two affectional anti-modernities each of which has buried its eggs inside a modern liberalism like a wasp in a tarantula.

[William D]

The implication fo Brooks' op-ed seems to be that when hate is morally righteous, it comes in only one form. So do you mean that when we hate we need not give it a moral coloring?

Kerry took the opportunity of the tape to criticize the president, who has tried very hard to identify himself in this Batman-Joker way with Osama and the evil for which he is an on-again-off-again symbol, and this shows his lack of moral outrage and also his crass ambition. (Brooks)

The danger with these guys is that neither AL Qaeda nor terorism are really given any significance as perons or events or phenomena in themselves. Everything has meaning insofar as it is part of their moral striving, which is really, in its pursuit, an effort to remake the world such that this sort of moral striving (righteous anger, bold action, tough stances, lying for the good of all) makes sense. I think this is where the problem occurs, where this sort of effrot short-circuits in that the evil, in order to be so, must be dealt with in a certain way, which is not the only way it can be dealth with, and which contributes, though not as a direct consequence of action or planning, to its preservation, but which fall short of containing or minimizing it. The effort to conatin it seems like the effort to control and manage sin - where any such efforts are personal moral struggles, and one is judged how they act in the face of the insurmountable obstacle. This righteous, all consuming anger that Brooks writes about is just self-indulgence - a really shallow and crass moral sentimentalism. These people are essentially drama queens, but with th dangerous addition of the conviction that only a world stage can really express the significance of their struggle with themselves. This is why there is so much difficulty n dealign with Bush's faith, as it is really faith about himself. God, the presidency, the country, and the world are all implicated and given coherence by the manner in which they relate to his struggle to be a good man. Thus, he can't really be said to make mistakes or to need counsel. Weakness of will is not for others to judge, and in such battles there is no meaningful sense of incompetence.

They take action in order to make a world where the action they take has meaning. So they really do require pretty much neverending control over certain aspects of society. I think the unique thing is that they do not put off the pracitcal goal so they can suck on their moral outrage, but endeavour to give that outrage a broad cultural significance. I think this is why people like Bush, some of the anyway, like my mother, God help me. He provides a hope that the private beliefs and opinions of people are possibly valid beyond them, because those beliefs we have about the world in general and out place in it are very difficult to sustain in moments of doubt or indifference and there is no real sense anymore in which one realies on strength to carry them through, or conviction, or assitance, since the belief itself is a sort of personal assertion. So there is something puzzling in the nature of their action which is ostensibly goal oriented, but seems to be impervious to ammendation in the face of failure.

This is similiar to the stance on bioethics - that use fo this technology for non-therapeutic uses will findamentally transform humanity. Others have noted that it would be impossible in some sense that as a result of human ambition and action humans should become inhuman in the sense that they would no longer be human at all. But surely, the role of values and of the evaluation of the individual would change, and this that they posit as assumption and the true characteriation of what is essentially human would no longer be valid in that one could no longer act as if it were true without generating all sorts of inconsistencies. So their action is like the assertion of human nature by their bioethics crew - it serves not as a real assertaion nor then as real action (in the sense that it is orietned toward and ammended in light fo goals) but as an effort to constrain the realm of meanings of action. And the problem is that the action they take is somehow of a radically different kind, and is not so because the time where action assuems its true nature is not yet realized, nor is it thought it will be never realized, or only realizable by an independent, alien agent. So you bascially have two kinds of action engaged in simultaneously by one kind of agent, with no sort of theoretical explanation of how they differ and thus how they can be pursued together without contradiciton. I think this is why Bush is embraced so, because he resolves this problem in his persoal avowal of faith by being steadfast. He is consistent in his belief that he is a man of faith and good intention. So he is a sort of meta-agent that makes things about himself true and consistent by believing them to be true and continuing to act - basically, by being the president. So I think where William Gobson said that the election is about he future of elections he was right in that the development of this sense of moral purpose would require that elections be replaced in some significant way as the manner of our participation in the goevrnment of which the president is the head.

The telling thing about people like Brooks is that he demands to know what risks Kerry has taken in the adoption of a moral stance (of course, other than that thing when he was young). But what risks has Bush taken? He has taken none. He has lied unceasingly about the nature of the problem, its difficulties, its effects, its consequences, and so forth. All this because none of it really matters. It is all about Bush and his conviction to do what is right, where "what is right" doesn't actually refer to anything, not even the form of hs conviction, except perhaps in the hate that he feels. But even this hate, insofar as it is all-consuming, is not really a referant either - just a sort of shorthand for the total comittment Bush feels, which is really just the total comittment to his own moral sense, or more simply, to himself. If it were love rather than hate, though it would certainly make a differecne with respect to the rest of us, it would make no difference to Bush. The effort is not disntiguished by its aims or goals or the character of its ostensible motivations. It is whole because it is him. So it is not right to say that Bush is comitted to something larger than himself insofar as he sees the presidency and its dutty as relevant with respect to his persoanl moral development. The presidency IS larger than himself, but he doesn't seem to think it is.

And that we are revealed by what we hate throws soem light on Brooks inability to really account for the whole Vietnam war thing. Obviously, the Vietnam war was not a proper object of hate - so the virtue of Bush is that he hates the right things, so then it is really not an issue at all of personal conscience and sacrifice, but of toeing the line on what are proper markers of a truly moral life. So, not "do you hate?" but "what do you hate?" Do we all hate OBL? I think there is a similiar issue in the NGO community, especially with regard to horrible things liek child prostitution and trafficking, where the moral intensity clearly helps them get through general government indifference or worse, providing a ground for endurance, but ti is also a liability in that the desire to give their role a mora lcolorign leads to all sorts of anaytical problems in developing strategy. Do we need hate at all to effectively deal with people like OBL? Do we need to hate in more than, or in a way any different, than we feel outraged at anyone who murders others? If we do, I think it reveals something about our own moral requirements and our need for integrity.

I, for one, hate Brooks. He is a disgustingly intellectually dishonest person.

[Joe O]

Batman actually catches the Joker. OBL hasn't repeatedly escaped from guantanamo.

[baa]

Let me echo Tim Burke's irritation with DK1. I would add another grating implausibility: Gotham's citizens are just such contemptible sheep. DK1 presumes that citizens of an American city would be so paralyzed by some loser street gang that they need Batman to save them. Sorry, but if some american city descends into anarchy, order won't be restored peicemeal by italian sterotype bakers wielding rolling pins inspired to action by Batman. Before things get that far, Gothamites would all be packing heat Bernie Goetz style. Or maybe they'll all vote for a law and order mayor. It's been known to happen!

Let me add that I totally support the execution of the joker for crimes committed by two face.

Also, you're kind of reading Brooks uncharitably, don't you think?

[bryan]

in the killing joke batman makes the joker as well.

[jholbo]

baa, I don't really think I am being uncharitable. But I am open to correction. The problem is that, the way Brooks is talking, it's pretty clear that 'gets the evil' doesn't mean anything like 'understands how to deal with terrorism effectively'. Because Brooks is explicitly tabling policy details and other brainy stuff. And it also doesn't mean 'thinks that he's evil', or 'knows that he's evil', because no one seriously thinks Kerry is secretly thinking 'you know, that guy was making a serious point by blowing up the towers.' It's more of a grand nemesis-type drama. But if you prefer having an arch-enemy, but not necessarily having a plan for dealing with him, to having good policies for dealing with your enemies ... well, I'll take the 'having good policies' horn of the dilemma.

But you know me. I'm always just saying that Bush is incompetent. But I really think it's true.

[Russell Arben Fox]

I realize that no one really expects anyone to be convinced one way or another by this analogy, but insofar as you're putting any weight on it at all, I don't know if holds up. Yes, Morrie was right in his belief that Batman's influence "created" the Joker--pulled him out of retirement, inspired him, gave him a target and a reason to live and kill, etc.--and similarly, Bush's fetishizing of the "war on terror" has, as everyone with sense has by now noticed, helped make the war on terror into OBL's greatest recruiting and propagandizing platform ever; to borrow Tim's words, OBL might be nothing if the U.S. hadn't made him into the world's most wanted man. So far, so good. But Morrie was wrong in that he also thought that the genie could be put back in the bottle, wrapped up and put away; he didn't believe the Joker was really a bad guy, assuming he could just get the right kind of validation and support. Batman, however, knew otherwise: the Joker was just going to keep killing until he was dead. Did Batman feel guilty about that? Maybe, but it was a moot point insofar stopping the killing was concerned. All you can do is go one-on-one with the guy until only one is left standing.

So if you really wanted this analogy to go the distance, you'd have to say: it was an awesome tragedy that on September 11, 2001, the U.S. president was willing--like most of the American population, including me and most readers of this blog for whatever that's worth--to get sucked into talk about "war" and OBL's threat to civilization. If only we hadn't played that card, and refused every opportunity to grandstand about America vs. the enemies of liberty, then we wouldn't have the enemy we do. But we did, and we do, which means we might as well stick with the guy who is prepared to sacrifice everything to a nihilistic show-down, since that what it takes.

It should go without saying that I don't think that's what it takes. I do think you can step back from things; the Joker probably could be reduced to merely a "nuisance," and that would be worth doing. We can make a correction in our overreaction. But Frank Miller won't get you to that conclusion, I think.

[jholbo]

You are right, Russell. In a sense it was inadvisable even to start down the Frank Miller path. But I couldn't resist. I certainly don't want to argue that if we just ignore the guy, or label him a mere 'nuisance', he'll buzz off.

The serious point to be made against the Republicans is the one Henley and Yglesias make. Their incentive structure is all wrong. They aren't so much like Batman as they are like the writers at DC. Killing the Joker would not really be in their interests. (Why would anyone vote Republican if there weren't a War on Terror, given that the Republicans aren't even pretending to have anything much to say about anything else these days?) Now this isn't to say that the Republicans are so cynical that they are consciously planning to institute a permanent war on terror so that they can hold onto power. But it's still bad to have it be the case that a light at the end of the tunnel = electoral disaster for Republicans.

Another example. Homeland defense is largely a matter of defending blue states - New York, California and Washington, D.C. Those being the likely targets, no? In general the coasts, which are mostly blue. Defense usually involves spending money. It is hard for Republicans to bring themselves to spend the money sanely, I warrant, because pouring federal money into blue areas is like a sharp stick in the eye for Republicans. Better to fund some pork barrell homeland defense measure in the true red hearthand. So it's not that Republicans are callously planning to let New York go up in a mushroom cloud. All the same, Republican-controlled government is going to be inherently bad at defending New York, due to conflicts of political interest. Severely divided, hence bi-partisan homeland defense would be much more effective.

Another example. Oh, no time, no time ... gotta go teach. Lunch over.

[Timothy Burke]

There's actually something here that really gets at the heart of how people have been talking past each other (both accidentally and with malevolent purpose) since 9/11/01.

In Dark Knight, Morrie and any other Gothamite like him are set up as confused and morally vacuous in comparison to Batman's absolute moral clarity. But Morrie is right about the causality of the Joker: without Batman, no Joker. Morrie is wrong about the morality of the Joker's choices: Batman is not making the Joker commit evil. The Joker and the Joker alone is morally responsible for his own actions. That raises what could be a really great second-order question, one that Miller is way, way too lazy and too busy playing with an ur-fascist imaginary to respond to, namely, if you play a role in causing something immoral to happen, but the moral responsibility for that immorality rests entirely with another actor, do you incur a collateral kind of moral responsibility?

It's really actually quite applicable to OBL and Bush. Bush and more importantly, some of Bush's more intelligent advocates, have always been focused on the importance of moral clarity about the responsibility for OBL's actions. They rest solely and entirely with OBL. I actually agree with this, and I'd also agree that there are people who want to make claims about the causality of OBL who callowly or unintelligently slide from causal arguments about where OBL comes from and how he came to be to arguments that more or less evacuate OBL's responsibility as a moral actor. Rather like Morrie and others evacuate the Joker's responsibility for the commission of evil: to them, he is morally nothing more than the mirror of his causality.

The reason this distinction is so important is this: if Batman confines himself to being the person who *punishes* moral error, then there's no problem at all with his singular focus on the Joker's guilt for the Joker's actions. But if he wants to also address the social question of the Joker's existence, to ask not just "Why did the Joker do that?" (easy: he's evil) but also "Why are there people like the Joker, and can I prevent more of them from being?" then he has to go onto the trail of a larger causality which is much more morally ambiguous. The question in Dark Knight is really not about the Joker but about the Mutants: they appear despite Batman's absence, and arguably because of it. Here Batman can say, "The world needs me: no Batman equals dystopic horror." But he also then has to say, "The world needs more than me: when I'm dead, there's no answer if the answer is me." Hence the pretty decent conclusion to DK1. On the Joker thing, Batman has no alibi or escape: he IS the causality of the Joker. He's just not responsible for the Joker's moral failure, that's all.

On OBL, then, one can say, "OBL is entirely morally responsible for his participation in evil. But OBL is not his own cause, and if we want a solution to OBL that goes beyond punishing him for his crimes, we have to also be able to think about causality in ways that are not bound up solely in the insistence that OBL and OBL alone is the issue."

It's actually a pretty tasty analogy, at least for comics geeks.

[Timothy Burke]

As a footnote, this is the basic difference between Batman and the Spectre (at least in some of The Spectre's manifestations). The Spectre is purely a moral agent: he's totally indifferent to causality. He doesn't care why a murderer is a murderer. It only matters that he committed murder and must be punished for it.

Batman, though, wants both to punish and repair. That's the whole point of the criminals = cowardly and superstitious lot thing. He wants to inhibit them from criminality by scaring the bejeezus out of them, he wants to prevent criminality. This makes Batman's near-total lack of interest in the reasons why people commit crime in most versions of the character totally contemptible. Yeah, yeah, he's got the Wayne Foundation or whatever, but generally in the modern mythos, he could care less about that, really. He only cares about the psychology or sociology of criminality inasmuch as it helps him to solve crimes, not as a guide to prophylaxis. It would be interesting to see a Batman writer really go to town on this theme, to show how Batman's childhood fixation on punishment (understandable) completely bollixes up his adult determination to also engage in prevention and cure.

Rather like at least some Bush voters I know.

[Russell Arben Fox]

Very cool addendum, Tim; you direct the analogy of Bush/OBL to Batman/Joker in DK1 to an excellent end. Batman has to create a broad organization--he even has to get rid of himself (as part of the problem!)--if his campaign against crime is going to do anything except attract more and more unwanted attention (from impressionable psychotics) and misunderstanding (from aimless gang youths) and hostility (from Superman). Brilliant!

[baa]

We all know where this root causes stuff leads: throwing the Comedian out a 40th story window and faking an alien invasion of Manhattan.

On a more serious note, while sometimes naive assignment of moral blame works against prevention and cure, sometimes it doesn't. I don't think we have any idea which course of action post 9-11 would have created more terrorists. We just don't know. Krauthammer will insist that a show of force deters terrorists who seek to attack a "weak horse," Wright will maintain that the anger instilled by aggression recruits more terrorists than are deterred. But why should we believe either of them? In the absence of evidence (our situation) we seem to pick a side based on our preconceptions about human nature. And we know how relible those tend to be.

[washerdreyer]

This is probably a sad comment on my mental state, but I just read this thread almost exclusively to find out what Jacob Levy's opinion on the analogy was. What kind of comic book thread is it without his input?

[jholbo]

I agree that there ought to be a big 'L' signal I can fire up to summon his aid. Hmmm, maybe an email would work.