Microblog Memes

A friend of mine asked me recently, was I gonna go see the new Batman movie with him. I don’t respect the concept of Batman because of what I understand about politics now.

I’mma lay it out for you. Rich dude owns a corporation, has state of the art equipment, and he uses this to beat up on street-level crime. He doesn’t mess with the industrialists, or the super capitalists, the Murdochs, or the Trumps. He really just fucks with the person that’s just on the corner.

Batman is a conservative’s wet dream. Fuck Batman.

Reginald D. Hunter, Have I Got News For You (May 9, 2008)

Always mildly annoyed by this type of meme.

First and foremost: Gotham is fucked. Like... really fucked. Evil secret societies run the place, the water supply is very likely poisoned in various ways, both conventionally and naturally, there's ancient evils buried under the city that have been corrupting it for centuries, a portal to hell in the asylum. We can say "Oh surely a food bank would help" and Wayne absolutely does do that via foundations in both of his parents names.... but all the shit to erase systemic poverty in the world can exist and The Joker, Zsasz, Mr. Pyg, The Court of Owls, Solomon Grundy, and the like are still going to be doing their shit (Not to mention big alien threats like Darkseid.). Likely most of his villains would still be on their grind except maybe Mr. Freeze who actually could have his problems solved by money.

Secondly: You gotta suspend disbelief. Make Superman a transitional power source and no one is gonna read it anymore, even if it would be 'realistic'. Any number of heroes could readily solve a number of the worlds issues. Why doesn't Iron Man put Arc reactors everywhere to power the world on clean energy? How come Storm doesn't get rid of every hurricane before it starts? Why doesn't Ice Man freeze up the poles and cool the planet down? The Flash could instantly deliver supplies to places in need. It's realistic, but it's boring, and boring doesn't sell comics. Okay, maybe Ruins but that couldn't be like... a whole series.

So I'm playing Arkham Asylum and, like, the very beginning of the game you open some doors and shut down electrically powered things by just blowing up the connected panel with a batarang, but then later on you need another tool that blows them up via some kind of frequency overload. If I am still just blowing up the box, why can't I hit it with something or even use my actual explosives? Taking the "bat logic" to game mechanics too. lol

A rich guy dressing up in body armor and going around beating up poor people to fight systemic corruption is the most believable part of the whole Batman franchise. In his original incarnation he had a gun too.

In the recent movies, he, or the Wayne foundation, does give a lot of money to charities in the city, and built the monorail system as well.

In Batman begins, the issue is corruption.

Everyone knows Falcone is guilty but no one has the legal ability to arrest him.

So Bruce Wayne becomes a vigilante in a more Luigi kind of way in which he is willing to risk things cause he has the tools to do it right.

The whole point of Batman is doing all he can with his resources, even if that means breaking the law.

But yeah, we know today that the most effective thing he can do is not even charity, but pay for lobbying

It's extremely spot on that instead of doing obvious things that would better the city they just invest in a bunch of industry and tech instead. Very on the nose. Especially the Dark Knight Rises Batman where he had a clean energy program that was the answer to the energy crisis or whatever they were in but he just didn't do it because he thought 'the world wasn't ready'.

Here's a Tumblr post about how different versions of Bruce Wayne (comic books, animated series, etc.) have donated huge sums of money to charities and other improvements to Gotham City.