Entertainment Weekly has asked our two leading presidential candidates a number of penetrating questions about their pop cultural tastes and preferences.
Asked to name of his favorite superhero, John McCain replied:
Batman. He does justice sometimes against insurmountable odds. And he doesn’t make his good works known to a lot of people, so a lot of people think he’s just a rich playboy.
McCain’s answer reveals a lot about his values and tells us what sort president he would be.
Our Republican candidate for president admires a vigilante who dresses up in a bat suit and, Dirty Harry-style, takes justice straight to the criminal, entirely ignoring the rule of law. Yes, Batman makes a point not to kill his enemies–I doubt a McCain administration would be so kind–and has the support of the local authorities, who (make no mistake) hate the rule of law just as much as he does, but the so-called Batman takes his actions (which McCain calls “good works”) outside the framework of law and “does justice against insurmountable odds.”
Is Batman’s disregard for the laws of Gotham City not the very same neoconservative disregard for national and international law which led us into the Iraq War, which caused our government to give itself permission to torture enemy combatants, which inspired Bush and co. to illegally wiretap Americans after 9/11, which justifies executive orders and presidential signing statements as our primary form of government? It is.
Bush and his neoconservative friends think of themselves precisely in these terms, as political Batmen, defenders of America’s global might who must always operate in a “state of exception” from the prevailing legal institutions. They do the “hard thing” that no one else wants to do, that no one else has the strength of will to do, that is technically illegal–because of the ninny sissy liberal nanny state–but absolutely necessary to our very survival, and in so doing said hard thing, they preserve civilization, they stop the ticking time bomb, they take care of business.
But they’re also humble, you see. They don’t want to take credit for their good–illegal–deeds. They would rather just be regarded as rich playboys and hide their good/illegal deeds behind the shield of executive privilege. If necessary, they will conceal their great benevolence by shredding all evidence that they did anything at all. Swell guys, those neocons.
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In fairness to McCain, Barack Obama replied this way to the same question:
I was always into the Spider-Man/Batman model. The guys who have too many powers, like Superman, that always made me think they weren’t really earning their superhero status. It’s a little too easy. Whereas Spider-Man and Batman, they have some inner turmoil. They get knocked around a little bit.