Upon reading Andrew Klavan’s “What Bush and Batman Have in Common” (WSJ 7/25/08), the reader may question whether the writer is being serious or not. My initial impression of the article was of astonishing wonder. I figured that this article was bitterly cynical yet was offering a humorous commentary of our nation’s collective exhaustion of President Bush’s ethos. George Bush as Batman; hey that’s kinda funny. But boy was I wrong! Granted, by the end of my initial reading, I did think, “Maybe this guy is laying it on pretty thick, but then again I don’t write for the Wall Street Journal, so who am I to question his stylistic choices?” But sadly, Mr. Klavan is not trying to be cute, something I learned after a quick Google where I discovered that Mr. Klavan is in fact, “for real”.
I couldn’t believe it. I didn’t want to believe it. The combination of the ridiculous clichés, “[H]ounded to the gates of Hell”, the old-hat complaints of limp-wristed Hollywood Liberals, and the downright silly comparison of President Bush’s plight to Jesus Christ’s crucifixion, may lead one to think that this article is not from The Wall Street Journal, but rather, some stoner’s comment in a discussion forum on Politico. When does Godwin’s Law kick in to effect? If the article ran longer, I would expect a comparison of ________ (Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi, etc, etc, etc…) to Adolf Hitler. I guess Klavan makes up for it by successfully using the phrase “Islamo-fascism”.
It is Klavan’s tone that makes it impossible to take the article seriously…he sounds like my grandfather when he complains about, “how those fucking liberals are destroying America!” But somebody must be taking him seriously, just as I’m sure that my grandfather’s bridge club takes him seriously. Personally, I was ready to take Klavan seriously, I was ready to see the connection that he was trying to make, but all I got out of it is: Batman does tough guy things, and so does W, America doesn’t like tough guys because hand-wringing liberals control the media, and as a result those damn liberals have made America hate George Bush.
George Bush made tough decisions because he had the foresight to understand that he was doing the right thing; after all, God told him what to do, and you wouldn’t question God’s will, would you? But maybe it wasn’t God that talked to Bush; perhaps He was really only W’s sidekick Cheney? But who was the Dark Knight’s sidekick, I didn’t see Robin anywhere (Too gay?), I guess it was Morgan Freeman, I mean he did help Batman spy on the whole city. So if Batman is W, Morgan Freeman is Cheney, the Joker is Osama bin Laden, Harvey Dent is Donald Rumsfield (hmm, not quite right, maybe Andy Carr?), then who are the wimpy liberals? Maybe they’re the Joker’s army of the mentally challenged? It’s only appropriate because liberals are the only ones who care about them anyways, but it doesn’t quite add up because Batman doesn’t execute them.
Klavan’s not-so-subtle comparison of the Joker to Osama bin Laden is not quite accurate either. In the film, the Joker promotes anarchy as a way to show that mankind is inherently selfish; the Joker signifies a lack of morality, rather than a particular type of morality that lies in contrast to Batman’s. But, to be a namby-pamby relativist, Osama bin Laden does not seem to be that simple. Yes, he has stated that his goal is the destruction of “Western ideals”, but his morals lie with Islamic extremism, not anarchy. Bin Laden has morals, even though they are wrong ones. George Bush has morals that are largely right, yet they were wrongly executed. Klavan only sees things in black and white; you are either right or wrong -- Klavan would never admit that bin Laden had any sort of motivation. His terribly misguided beliefs are best exposed in his passage where he says:
“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.” (Klavan 2)
This is a hopelessly naïve view. If you asked any man or woman on the street what they thought about the above sentence, they would most likely admit that they prefer freedom, love, kindness, and tolerance over the opposites, yet our history as Americans, as well as our history as humans, says the opposite. We as humans have a history of doing wrong things with the belief that we are doing the right thing. Perhaps I am a hopeless cynic and I harp on our past mistakes, but I cannot believe that we “mysteriously” believe these things. We as a people largely believe things that we are told to believe, and we have a history of excommunicating, executing, or imprisoning those who believe differently. Klavan’s article seems to promote this osterization of “the others”.
What does Klavan’s perfect world look like? In his world, people are free, people are loving, people are kind, and I guess people are tolerant. But I can help but think that tolerance would be a lost trait, as there would be no opposing views to tolerate. His world sounds eerily similar to a hippie love-fest where everyone holds hands and sings kumbaya, but I get the feeling that he wouldn’t see it that way. In his world, Batman is Christ-like, in that he had to sacrifice himself so that we could reach a better place. But I can’t buy into W. as Batman if that means that the invasion of Iraq, the implementation of the Patriot act, the bumbled response to victims of Hurricane Katrina, the attempt to make global warming a non-issue, and the rabble-rousing of politicizing gun ownership, abortion, and rights for homosexuals is a way for us to reach the promised land.
I do not see President Bush as a bad guy, nor as the idiot man-child that Oliver Stone portrays him as. I see him as a human being, as someone who is inherently good, as I believe that individuals on their own are “good.” But Bush was someone whose attempt at making the world a better place failed. President Bush failed as a leader because he inspired hatred, intolerance, fear, and mistrust in people. I will insist that this was unintentional, I am not a person who thinks that the Republican Party is out to destroy America (nor do I think that they are a destroyed party, but that is for another time), but I believe that it is the twisting of history’s motives that can destroy any sort of collective good that was produced. Because of this, I can only see Klavan’s article as the sort of fantastical storytelling that comes with say, a superhero movie.
Jack Gustafson
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