Friday, December 09, 2005

Moonbatman Begins.


This comes out of an interesting discussion around “Peak Stoopid” last month, about the shape and scope of the future.

And sleep-deprivation.

To wit, is “hope” merely butt-dancing in a pair of Pollyanna Panties as we fall to our doom? Is despair warranted, or a self-fulfilling prophecy? One what firm plot of land can a thinking person plant their feet and make a stand that is at once pragmatic and principled?

You may or may not have seen “Batman Begins”. I have. I liked it, and Liam Neeson quibbles aside, it works as an origin myth, action movie and superhero flick.

And if one were inclined in that direction, one could also see it as a Lost Liberal Parable for the 21st Century.

Thomas Wayne, who “nearly bankrupted Wayne Enterprises fighting poverty during the Depression” as the only-dimly-remembered Good Liberal Father (or perhaps even a genuine Compassionate Conservative, a species long gone extinct in our dark lands.)

A city that has lost faith in its own vision of itself.

A government where good men still exist, but corruption has so riddled its bones that even if the wanted to clean it up, “in a town this dirty, who's there left to rat to?” When the President and all of his Men are rotting this nation from the head down, that sentiment could not be more apropos.

A child left orphaned by murdered Liberal Father, lost and insane with rage at a world beset on all sides by bad guys, who control everything and who killed his ideals.

A villain whose WMD is Fear, and whose seductive ideology is familiar to every Neocon, bigot, Fundy and witch-hunting pimp, and every other mutant strain of Reality Rejectionist, Cheney Regime Dead Ender, and self-hating, closeted GOP Sodomite.

It’s sold to children under without a warning label or an NC-17 rating at GOP Media outlet stores everywhere the trade name of theological or cultural imperative. It is pumped into our groundwater like fucktard fluoride by Regnery Press, the AFA the Murdoch Empire and a hundred others.

Stripped of its pink BoBo icing, its nothing but a brutal philosophy that demands a holocaust. A civilization-purifying auto da fe. The same, shopworn drivel that every closet-fascist keeps on the bedside table for inspirational, pre-dozing-post-wanking reading after he’s done jerking off to the Turner Diaries and Photoshopped Ann Coulter porn.

That a Higher Order demands that Gotham and everyone in it perish as a necessary sacrifice to preserve the precious bodily fluids of the Righteous.

Here’s what it comes down to: Do you believe our Gotham – our nation -- can be saved or not? If you don’t, your heart and words will move in one direction, and if you do you will find yourself on a very different path.

A new America won’t exactly take the same form that it has taken in the past – our profligate use of our natural bounty has seen to that – but even without a looming oil crisis, we would be changing. Every few years we get to itchin’ and bitchin’, burst our seams and change; it’s in our DNA.

It is, on some level, a matter of faith, but emphatically not a Creationists cowering fearful superstition. This is a matter of informed faith. Of looking at our problems and knowing that the way to fix them is the way problems usually get fixed; by saturation-bombing them with smart, passionate people.

So where do you find such people? By the million?

Locked in the shabby minimum-security passion-flattening factories called Public Schools, that’s where. Human beings genetically identical to the men and women who founded and built this country – voluntarily and at under the bondsman’s whip. As the saying goes, the weak died along the way and the cowards never came.

And these are their grandkids.

If the resources to save our Gotham were gone, or if a meteor were screaming unstoppably down from heaven to kill our planet, then I’d relax into a nice, boozy fog of hopelessness. I’d get out my “Better Dead” list, start with a certain grade school teacher and work my way down chronologically.

But all is not lost.

Far from it; the tools of our salvation are all around us.

They pack our schools, begging to be taught how to be heroes. They work in our factories, eager to innovate and create a magnificent future with their hands and heads. They turn off the teevee and sigh and wish their nation could be a great and good place, and are afraid they have lived to see the first days of our long and ugly fall.

We will change and morph and become something else, and it will be painful and frightening and terribly hard work, but to misquote a science fiction writer whose name eludes me at this early hour, it’s raining soup and we don’t yet have enough God damned sense to make buckets.

Yes we’re flawed. We do bad things. We have several million idiots and bigots and Christopaths who really, really, really want to turn us into a lawless oligarchy run by Jesus Christ, CEO.

So what?

Almost every problem we face is man-made, not some inexorably glacial force of God or Nature that is driving us to extinction and which we cannot stand against. We worked our way out of a Depression. We rose up, crossed oceans and crushed fascist empires that were on the verge to cover the Earth. And no man is owned as a slave here anymore.

We can make buckets to catch the future as it pours down on us.

And we will.

33 comments:

Douglas Hoffman said...

Great post -- very interesting take on the Batman mythos, and a stirring call to arms.

My favorite mythic hero/crusader: Travis Bickle from Taxi Driver. Clearly schizophrenic (based on his dialog and actions) yet ultimately lauded by the people.

Quote: "All the animals come out at night - whores, skunk pussies, buggers, queens, fairies, dopers, junkies, sick, venal. Someday a real rain will come and wash all this scum off the streets."

Mister Roboto said...

I guess I'm kind of torn in terms of the optimism/ pessimism paradigm. Spiritually, I know that the optimism is better, but I also know that fossil-fuel-fertilized-and-powered industrial agriculture and its attendant "Green Revolution" has resulted in a planet that is three times over its absolute maximum carrying capacity for human beings. Such a situation tends to lead to a rather unfortunate condition known as a "die-off", in which about 90% of the population of a species bites the dust. I know, we're an intelligent species who should be able to manage our die-off in such a way that it won't be a catastrophe, but sometimes it really seems as though we are acting in deliberate defiance of that intelligence in these the final days of cheap fossil fuels. And I worry that a lot of those bright kids who could help us pull through the harsh and scary future will just end up as canon-fodder in pointless resource-wars that everybody will enthusiastically support as the PTB engineer more "terrorist" attacks to whip up that good ol' red-state fascist patriotic frenzy.

Douglas Hoffman said...

I hope you don't mind, but I've linked to you this morning, and included a brief quote from your post. If that's not okay, let me know, and I'll yank it.

driftglass said...

douglas hoffman,
Be my guest and many thanks.

loveandlight,
All valid concerns & I worry about them too. I just worry that too much worry causes a paralysis that stops us from preventing some of the worst that is coming and saving what is best about us.

Phoenix Woman said...

Mithrasmas!

Anonymous said...

Great post, yet again.

Of all the things about the Movement Conservatives that piss me off (and they are legion) the one thing that drives me most to despair has been the relentless undermining of faith in our public institutions and our ability to believe that our problems are tractable through government coordination and planning.

We are surrounded by miracles of heroic stature: everything from the Constitution of the United States, to the Hoover Dam, the Interstate Highway System, the Apollo project moon landings, and the Golden Gate Bridge testify to the vision and will of a people who dared to strain at the limits of the possible and a build a better future for their children... employing brains, brawn, blood and dollars. Hell, even the Mephistophelean Manhattan Project, in all its satanic majesty, testifies to our ability to make wonders - even nightmarish ones - happen as a people.

And after this efflorescence of American positivism, for the past 25 years we have had to witness a revolution of lowered expectation, foisted upon us by ideologues who profit mightily whenever the government privatizes its rightful function, asserting that "government is the problem, not the solution"... despite the evident successes of daringly conceived, and well planned and administrated government programs all around us.

So here we are, left reading David Brooks' columns about the erosion of faith in public institutions, and by golly, how simply horrible that is...

After years of pooh-poohing the notion that we can use the machinery of government to engineer solutions to the mounting problems around us. After placing faith in the invisible hand of a private sector that at every opportunity for profit betrays and abandons its employees, pensioners and communities, after sucking at the teat of the taxpayers.

And after years of willful mismanagement of the instruments of government. Republicans regard government the way a tick regards its host - using it to enrich themselves upon the moneys paid into public coffers for the public weal, by appointing unqualified cronies and yes-men at every level of office. By appointing cats to regulate the canaries. But there's no real sense that they can make the government work for the people - the idea is inimicable to them.

We've got to keep fighting these bastards.

I won't give up until I'm dead.

jurassicpork said...

I've just made what is perhaps my last blog entry. Please go to my blog to read why. I guess this is what they call sharing grief.

So to anyone who cares, there won't be any assclowns of the eeek this sunday or for a while. I just don't feel like being funny or critical of anyone or anything. Which is a shame because there's a lot of good shit going on right now but my heart just ain't in it.

Anonymous said...

Driftglass - you have a fantastic gift. Thankyou for sharing your words so generously.

Are the PTB purposefully steering this Titanic for the iceberg because they presume that they control access to the lifeboats and can thereby shed the great majority of steerage passengers and afterwards enslave the rest?

Could they be as wrong about this as they were about Iraq?

BitterHarvest said...

"It is pumped into our groundwater like fucktard fluoride by Regnery Press, the AFA the Murdoch Empire and a hundred others. "

Hilarious.

Regnery Press is my fave. The printers of "Fidel: Hollywood's Favorite Tyrant," "The Final Days: The Last, Desperate Abuses of Power by the Clinton White House,"
"Icons of Evolution: Science or Myth?," "Leftism Revisited: From de Sade and Marx to Hitler and Pol Pot," "The Myth of Heterosexual Aids," and the best of them all:"Unfit for Command: Swift Boat Veterans Speak Out Against John Kerry."

Mister Roboto said...

sentiment lemming:

Yes, and yes.

Drifty:

I grok. I wish I could agree completely.

Anonymous said...

Positive Vibration!

June Doe said...

I often blog about my day to day silliness, my memories, and whatever else comes to my mind. There are a few of us, very dear friends that watch and read other blogs. This is our history unfolding and being recorded in waves of 0's and 1's. I have often discovered that I get a certain amount of shit for some of my posts. My friend sent me your post on why we should never fuck with writers. I've been reading ever since. Thank you for your smarts. I feel better knowing that you are out there, too. Talking. That's good. That's a man-made solution. Yeah, it sure is.

Tuli said...

Time will ease your pain. It will not eliminate it, only ease it. As I read your post I started to tear up and think of Camilia Cat who died over 25 years ago.

She was the runt of the litter so I knew that her days were numbered when I brought her home. Though no one else would buy a runt Bluepoint because of her life expectancy, she and I shared eleven wonderfully close years. She knew I was sick before I knew I wasn’t feeling well. She talked me to death, bad choice of words, as only a Siamese can. She never left my side. I miss her to this very day.

And you will miss Shana forever as well.

Family is Family and Life and Death are existential, which I happen to think is actually rational.

Come back when you can.

Tuli said...

My previous comment was meant for JP.

Driftglass, as more often than not, is right on target. I have taken my stand in Gotham. I am seriously depressed, and outraged, and will not give up. That is why I started blogging. It gives me the opportunity to not only get it off my chest, but hopefully pass along information.

I am a fan of Paulo Freire who wrote "Pedagogy of the Oppressed." Information and critical analysis based on our own experience is essential to learning and changing our lives. It is also essential to contributing to the changing of the lives of our fellow citizens and country.

Yes, “We can make buckets to catch the future as it pours down on us.”

Thank you Driftglass for making my day more positive.

Anonymous said...

I am so with you here it is unbelievable. However, I must imbue a CAVEAT; I do not believe in this country and furthermore don't believe it's technological might makes it the best choice. I do believe in the children of this nation and all nations to overcome our simplistic world view.
They are the ones that will clean up our mess; indeed. I have faith only in this. I have no religious faith, no nationalistic faith, no faith in my fellow "grown-up." I have faith in one spot and one place only; our children. If we have done our job educating them then we will be redeemed. I despise my generation and the generation before; "the good generation." Fucking twits thought beating Hitler was the best thing since sliced bread. I abhor these assholes.
They should just die off. Strutting monstosities of a failed economic system. If we don't perish because of universal armeggedon or environmental meltdown we still have these clowns to contend with.
I hope my children and yours will be prepared...

Bob

jurassicpork said...

Thank you, Tuli.

vicbastard said...

Where do I buy that comic book?

rah.

BadTux said...

The deal is that democracy, if it is to work, requires that the majority of people give a shit. And in general, the majority of people don't. As long as it's not an utter disaster immediately attributable to the folks in Washington D.C., the majority of people simply don't care who rules them. I mean, c'mon. Richard Nixon was elected not once, but *TWICE*. You're tellimg me that a vile, evil little man like Richard Milhous Nixon (to quote the late Hunter S. Thompson, "Nixon was so crooked that he needed servants to help him screw his pants on every morning") could get elected not once, but *twice*, if people really gave a shit? Not no, but FUCK no.

The only thing -- the ONLY thing -- that ever makes the sheep look up and start participating in democracy, is national disaster. That's it. And the good news, or bad news, if you will, is that we are swiftly approaching that point. The federal government is printing money with all the fervant abandon of a Weimer Republic finance minister in order to cover the bills, the massive sucking sound of jobs being outsourced have hollowed out our economy into an unsustainable real estate Ponzi scheme, the health care system is at the point of collapse, and then there is the freakin' 500 pound gorilla of all national disasters going down in Iraq right now, sucking our nation's wealth and power into a tarpit of death and destruction without end. So it looks like, any moment now, the sheep will look up.

The question, then, is whether we will be ready when they do, ready with a dream, a plan, that can move this country forward, instead of a dream or plan that is just enough to put the sheep back to sleep but not enough to take this nation to the next step in its national destiny. The tired old Democratic party hacks in 1976, the last time the sheep looked up, had no real dream to move the country forward, meaning that the evil vile people took over again in 1980. If we are to avoid a repeat of that, we must start, *today*, to talk about the dream that is America, to dream big, dream mightily. Alas, I fear we have forgotten how to dream in these past thirty years of blindness...

- Badtux the Cynical Penguin

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