Batman and Evil

Ben Domenech
Ricochet
7/20/2012

…I wasn’t a fan of comics. I was a fan of Batman. Because Batman, unlike the others, really understood evil in all its varied forms… and because he was, from my childlike perspective, the only hero who inhabited the real world. You’ve read the pieces about how much it would cost to become Batman – the millions one could spend on building this or that, the training, the equipment. The point is that he’s a hero who inhabits a place that is very familiar. His retreat is to the darkness of a decaying manor and a darkened cave, not a fortress in the Arctic or the Halls of Asgard. There’s a great series of comic books, Gotham Central, about the cops who work the city, which feels closer to Homicide or The Wire than a story about superheroes. Batman rarely appears, and they resent it when he does. And that seems right somehow, in the same way the darkened alleys of that crime-ridden city felt true to life. The crimes he battled were sometimes large, but often small and intensely personal. The evil he confronted had more colorful masks, more theatrical schemes – but the nature of it was recognizable as agents of chaos and terror seeking to expose the lie at the heart of the social order…

…Batman’s standard of victory, then — the very idea of “winning” — becomes very different than those of other heroes. It is to stand between the chaos of evil and civilization and bear the brunt of what comes, even knowing it will eventually be more than one man can bear – that it will claim his life.  Yet this is one of the reasons Batman provides a far more relevant example of what heroism means in this cynical and dangerously insane age: his humanity is established by the fact that he knows his quest is doomed, a lost cause from the start — but even equipped with that knowledge, he refuses to quit, to ever give in, or give up. He runs to the sound of the guns…

Read the complete article at Ricochet.

We loved this poignant essay and found it to be a fitting tribute to the victims in Colorado, the police and responders working overtime tonight, and to you…if you, like Bruce Wayne, are a mere mortal who is resolved to never, ever to give up.

H/T An American Housewife in London

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