Dennis O’Neil: Batman’s Lethal Force
It is one of the universe’s pointless ironies that the horror in Colorado happened at the showing of a Batman movie. Despite the grimness in the Batman mythos, the character has neither been an advocate of violence, nor an apologist for it.
Not that I think it’s necessary, but let’s put out a few reminders anyway:
The only time Batman used a gun was in a very early story when the character was still in the process of forming.
Similarly: the mature Batman has eschewed lethal force of any kind.
A couple of decades ago, John Reisenbach, the son of a colleague, was shot to death on Jane Street in Greenwich Village – one of those senseless urban crimes that will probably never be solved. At the urging of Jenette Kahn, and under my editorship, John Ostrander wrote a fine Batman story about city streets and guns in reaction to our coworker’s tragedy. The story, titled “Seduction of the Gun,” was later credited with helping to pass anti-gun legislation in Virginia.
A final example: In the movie that was showing in Colorado, Batman has a line forbidding another character to use firearms.
So it wasn’t our fault, and, happily, the only press I’ve seen tying the massacre to comics was in New York’s Daily News, which cited a Frank Miller story in which similar gun violence was committed. But even that piece quoted Brad Meltzer’s observation that Batman has been vocally anti-gun for these many years.
So it wasn’t our fault and it wasn’t the fault of anything the gunman read or saw or played. All extant evidence indicates that normal, psychologically healthy individuals and not prompted to atrocity by anything in the media. And the unhealthy? That’s scary and I’ve experienced occasional momentary uneasiness when I’ve had a hero in something I’m writing use lots of physical force to solve some problem. Was I setting a bad example? I don’t think so. Like it or not, we humans have aggression in our nature – that ol’ devil Evolution again – and if that weren’t true, we probably wouldn’t be entertained by depictions of warriors doing their thing. The earliest stories we have – and a good bit of what’s known as Scripture – are full of bloodletting.
Maybe the tactic for us modern storytellers is not to glorify the violence. Sometimes it’s necessary to use force in defense of self or other, sometimes the skills of the warrior are valuable. And, arguably, warriors are legitimate heroes. But, in our stories, let’s not glory in our characters’ infliction of pain and death. That glorification might be the line between heroism and sadism.
None of this is of any use to the people in Colorado and I’m too cynical to say that some good will come of it all. I don’t believe that much good came from the Columbine massacre or the Gabrielle Giffords shooting or the assassination attempt on Ronald Reagan or the murder of John F. Kennedy or the million gun death that have happened in our nation since the deaths of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy.
Maybe the best we can hope for is that we will stop blaming movies and television for these indescribably sad events and have the courage to begin investigating the real causes. It is a forlorn hope, but it may be the best we have.
FRIDAY: Martha Thomases
Subjective Murderers -Reflections on The Colorblind Killer
Unfortunately, I no longer have access to my original Facebook account. But around the time of the Tuscon, AZ shooting, I wrote a Facebook essay on the motives behind the shooter, Jared Loughner. In my essay, I discussed the relation between Loughner’s philosophy: his belief that words and language have no meaning, and that therefore human rationality does not exist, and his reasons for shooting and killing a group of people. Apparently, Loughner targeted Congresswoman Gabriella Giffords because several weeks earlier, he had asked her at a meeting, “How can government exist when words have no meaning?” Of course, she could not answer him. He shot and nearly killed her several weeks later.
As Ayn Rand observes, “Reason is the only means of communication among men, and an objectively perceivable reality is their only common frame of reference; when these are invalidated (i.e., held to be irrelevant) in the field of morality, force becomes men’s only way of dealing with one another.” (_Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal_, 22) Animals cannot reason or communicate: that is why they have fangs and claws in order to deal with each other.
Philosophical relativists are not as bad as animals, of course; they still believe in logic: as far as it goes. But their premises are ultimately the same. Existentialists, who believe that reality is a subjective experience felt “in the gut”; communists and socialists, who believe that reality differs depending upon one’s race or class, also partake of this ultimately animalistic relativism. And it makes sense that murder (labor camps, executions) have been the inevitable result of these philosophies’ domination of their respective societies.
And it is significant that this latest murderer, The Color Blind killer, James Holmes, was also animated by this same relativistic philosophy: a belief in the temporal domination of the mind over reality. Footage has surfaced of an 18-year-old Holmes at a San Diego science camp, discussing what he calls “‘temporal illusions'” in the mind, which are, he explains, illusions “that allows you to change the past.” As Holmes goes on, discussing the work of his mentor in this field: “He also studies subjective experience, which is what takes places inside the mind as opposed to the external world. I’ve carried on his work in dealing with subjective experience.”
Subjective reality vs. Objective reality: this is what allows a terrorist to call his acts of murder a “fight for freedom”; what allows a rapist to call his acts “love”; what allows a thief to call his acts “harmless borrowing.” And now, according to the headline below: it even allows Holmes to say he now “does not remember” why he is in jail. Subjective reality allows anyone to circumvent the truth, the facts, logic, and to say that something never happened, or that one cannot remember what has happened: which, to the relativist, is the same thing.
http://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/world/why-am-i-here-batman-killer-james-holmes-asks/story-fnd134gw-1226436278467
‘Why am I here?’ Batman ‘killer’ James Holmes asks
Ho hum.
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Unfortunately, in a society consisting of nominally human beings, “reality” is what society determines it to be.
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Saint Ayn had her own little corner of “reality” that was sort of congruent to the Real World.
>>”Unfortunately, in a society consisting of nominally human beings, ‘reality’ is what society determines it to be.”
Reality has no exceptions. Just because a society of headhunters in the South Seas says that human sacrifice is okay, does not make it objectively so.
I have yet to encounter a person who is able to disagree with or debate the ideas of Rand, without making disparaging jokes or nicknames for her.
Her ideas are not wrth debate.
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Aside from that, if you’re calling him the “colorblind killer” because he has red-dyed hair and he said he was the Joker – guess what?
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Reality says you’re wrong, because he never said it.
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I guess anyone willing to believe that Randism is a viable way of life* is also willing to believe any ridiculous thing that seems to support his view of “reality”.
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*That is, who believes it would be if a whole society practised it, rather than the occasional person who brags about how :”rational” he is while living off the fruits of a society that knows better.
Responding to your specific point:
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“Just because a society of headhunters in the South Seas says that human sacrifice is okay, does not make it objectively so.”
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And what makes it “objectively” not so? Because YOU think it’s a bad idea?
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“There are nine and sixty ways of constructing tribal lays,
“And every single one of them is right!”