Billionaires Will Save the World

Or not.

Let me get this straight: Batman is a billionaire named Bruce Wayne, but when Wayne drops out, everybody suffers. You see, it's what the billionaire does that creates profits, and without profits from his company, the world begins to fall apart--because he doesn't care. When he does care, everyone prospers; when he doesn't, poverty and misery extend over the land, because 'socialists' take over and enforce 'equality,' which in the vision of Dark Knight's Director, Jonathan Nolan comprises expropriation, not creation. And, of course, it's the bad guys who are socialists and egalitarian, and the good guys are for the "free market."

Never knew that's why there are billionaires, did you? They’re heroes, you see, who carry the world on their shoulders: that's why they have so much money!

The "free" market is hardly free, when there are billionaires like the Walton (Walmart) family, who underpay their employees--and their developing nation suppliers--so they can amass the largest (combined) fortune on the planet. The market isn't free, because large agglomerations of capital give firms oligopoly and monopoly power, enabling them to skew market prices to their own advantage, and laws and government "regulations," as well.

By mis-delivery, I received World magazine, which seems to be a mouthpiece for evangelical Christianity. I'll put it back in the mailbox tomorrow, so it can be correctly delivered to its addressee, about a mile and a half down the next road. The above came from World's review of Dark Knight Rising: it fell open to that page when I picked it up.

The review, and editorials and other articles reminded me of the ravings of Salvian, a fifth century priest, who denounced almost anything secular, or of the panegyrists, like Ausonius and Claudian, who recited their paeans to the powerful of their day: rising Senators, as well as the Emperor, "God's Vice-Regent on Earth."

Jonathan Nolan, especially, appears to parallel the fifth century panegyrist who went on for hundreds of verses about the virtues of Emperor Honorius, Heaven born: Honorius was clearly of below normal intelligence; he preferred to play with his roosters (one was named Rome), than attend to affairs of State. While Batman is not an identified present ruler, or candidate for office, it's easy to see him representing someone like Romney, or Bloomberg; his heroism and centrality to making Gotham work is almost a caricature of Romney's whole raison-d'être: I'm so wealthy because I know how to make the economy work.

In a way, that's true: he knows how to make it work for him, but not for the rest of us. He and his kind know how to skew the rules to favor themselves: as he says repeatedly, he didn't break any laws when he evaded taxes. Of course. His class, his fellow wealthy, paid for those loopholes fair and square.