On Batman - and being a citizen of a free republic

We have obligations, even to criminals. We're forgetting them.

Why so serious?

Last week, flying to Qatar (more on that later), I rewatched The Dark Knight. If you haven’t seen it, or have forgotten it, you should too. It presages our growing political nihilism in a way that is almost painful.

The Dark Knight is based on the Batman series, of course. But calling it a comic-book movie is like calling Shohei Otani a baseball player. Its brilliant acting does not hide its bleak worldview. It insists the line between civilization and madness is paper-thin and that in fighting monsters, we must not become them.

Maybe you already know where I’m going with this.

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(And maybe you won’t like it. Subscribe BECAUSE I’m challenging you, not despite it.)

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In the movie’s most iconic scene, the Joker — played by Heath Ledger in what would be his final completed role — mocks Batman for his “one rule.”

Though neither man says so aloud, the rule is that Batman never kills his enemies. He captures them and hands them to the police for arrest and justice. But police officers in Gotham City have repeatedly proven unreliable and corrupt. Worse, the Joker tells Batman the citizens he’s fighting for do not care about his strictures:

To them, you’re just a freak. Like me. They need you right now, but when they don’t, they’ll cast you out, like a leper. See, their morals, their code, it’s a bad joke, dropped at the first sign of trouble.

They’re only as good as the world allows them to be. I’ll show you. When the chips are down, these, uhh, these civilized people, they’ll eat each other. See, I’m not a monster. I’m just ahead of the curve...

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(It’s no joke)

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Movie villains are notoriously prone to call themselves heroes, of course. But the Joker isn’t really making that argument. He’s erasing the boundary between hero and villain.

And the movie repeatedly endorses the Joker’s view.

Most explicitly, it captures the collapse of Gotham’s district attorney, a happy warrior who becomes a nihilistic killer after the Joker murders his fiancée. “The only morality in a cruel world is chance,” he says, as he flips a coin to decide whether his victims will live or die.

Even the movie’s slightly more optimistic final scenes find little difference between criminals and law-abiding citizens — and suggest police are easily fooled into confusing the two.

The fact that the Joker was played by Ledger, who died of a drug overdose before The Dark Knight was released, leaving his two-year-old daughter Matilda fatherless, only adds to its weight.

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The Joker would very much approve of the Trump Administration’s recent and continuing attacks on ships that are supposedly running drugs in international waters.

Let’s call those attacks what they are. They are unjustified. They are illegal.

They are murder.

I made that case a month ago, and the recent revelations of the “double-tap” strike in September that killed survivors clinging to a wrecked ship have only strengthened it.

We are not fighting a declared war, and these drug traffickers — if in fact they are drug traffickers and not fishermen we’ve killed by mistake — are not terrorists. Not by any definition. Not in their means or their ends. They don’t have political goals. They aren’t fighting a religious war. They aren’t interested in causing terror among civilians. They are civilian criminals. We ought to catch them and punish them.

But turning low-level drug runners into shark bait is neither right nor just. It is a blood sacrifice to the pretense of a drug war.

Worse, it comes as President Trump has pardoned the former president of Honduras, whom American jurors convicted last year of taking multi-million dollar bribes to help traffic 400 tons (yes, tons) of cocaine to the United States.

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(This press release is still up on the Department of Justice website. For now.)

SOURCE

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I understand why so many Unreported Truths readers are desperate to deter and punish drug traffickers and drug use. You can’t imagine how well I understand.

And I agree the United States should do much more to discourage and stigmatize the use of recreational drugs, whether those drugs are procured illegally or prescribed by doctors. After all, the drugs that killed Heath Ledger — oxycodone (Oxycontin), hydrocodone (Vicodin), diazepam (Valium), temazepam (Restoril), alprazolam (Xanax) — are all prescription drugs.

But we cannot fight justly by violating the most basic laws of war. To do so is a tactical, strategic, and moral catastrophe. Killing defenseless civilians stains our military and our nation.

There’s nothing funny about these attacks, despite what Pete Hegseth seems to think.

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(This is not a serious man. The Secretary of Defense should be a serious man.)

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This shouldn’t be a partisan issue.

The attacks must stop now.