No use for your old 'library' card

Never covered the Capitol, but must say, I’m missing even the thought of “the library.” Steve Dunleavy would not approve.

Disheartening as it is, the (apparently long-time) retirement of the rolling liquor cart pales in comparison to the shrinking and disbanding of newspapers’ state capitol bureaus.

We are firm believers in the following principle, recited in Jonathan Mahler’s classic Ladies and Gentlemen, The Bronx is Burning:

The Corona story was a natural for (Jimmy) Breslin, who, as his editor Michael O’Neill once put it, believed that politicians needed to be beaten every morning in order to keep them attentive to the will of the people.

So, as we lose traditional coverage of the statehouses, and as the ranks of reporter-watchdogs disappear and the old days leave us behind (for better, in only one way), we’re not left with much, other than The Blogs — both those produced by thinning newspapers (some are written by groundbreaking pros and can sometimes be excellent, but as papers leave the Capitol, so too do their reporters — whether they’re writing for print or online; and many of the rest of their blogs are not so excellent) and the independent partisan ones, which often make my ranting look sane by comparison (thanks, bloggers!). In turn, this only encourages the festering corruption in capital cities nationwide like Albany to stink a little more; except no one is there to notice the stench.

Without Batman, there'd be no … Bush?

Troubling as it is, Boomer mystery author Andrew Klavan, writing in July the Wall Street Journal, has a somewhat convincing argument, comparing the Batman of this summer’s The Dark Knight with President George W. Bush.

There seems to me no question that the Batman film “The Dark Knight,” currently breaking every box office record in history, is at some level a paean of praise to the fortitude and moral courage that has been shown by George W. Bush in this time of terror and war. Like W, Batman is vilified and despised for confronting terrorists in the only terms they understand. Like W, Batman sometimes has to push the boundaries of civil rights to deal with an emergency, certain that he will re-establish those boundaries when the emergency is past.

But while Mr. Klavan sees this as a heroic yet unappreciated connection between the Dark Knight and our 43rd President, the author conveniently overlooks one major point, which I think would actually strengthen his argument (though surely not in a way he intended) — the Joker, as the ultimate terrorist, comes to power as a backlash and in reaction to Batman and his extreme measures — “you complete me,” Heath Ledger’s Joker says (the line gets laughs, but there’s sincerity behind it on the Joker’s part).

Part of the modern Batman backstory is that the strange and extreme criminals the Dark Knight fights in Gotham City are part of an escalation; they’re a reaction to and creation of the Batman himself and his strange and extreme measures. Most (if not all) of the arch-villians like the Joker and Scarecrow (the “freaks” as they’re derided and as they sometimes call themselves and Batman) gradually thrive and replace the more traditional criminals such as mobsters precisely because of Batman — it’s a circular cycle that essentially traps Bruce Wayne into his Batman persona forever.

This theme is present in Christopher Nolan’s two Batman films (with credit due to himself, his brother, Jonathan, and David S. Goyer as writers), and it is also present in the 1996 graphic novel The Long Halloween by Jeph Loeb and Tim Sale, which the Nolans and Goyer draw from in their two films. I’m not as well-versed in the Batman legend as I would like to be, but this may or may not go back to Frank Miller’s take on Batman (there’s definitely some of this in his Batman: Year One from 1986, which Batman Begins also draws upon), or if it goes all the way back to Bob Kane for that matter.

So, let’s see: we have a leader who responds to a terrible problem with extreme measures, with the unintended consequence of creating an extreme response that traps the “hero” into forever fighting a situation that he largely bears responsibility for creating. Yep, never heard that before in real life.