Erstwhile Urban Wanderer

August 19, 2009 – Mother nature is a surefire cure for human hubris. Free photos inside!

By Dave Eriqat

Western side of Mount Cuyamaca, from about 6,500 feet elevation. On a clear day one can see the ocean, perhaps 40 miles to the west (to the left in this photo).

Having an urge to take some scenic photographs, I headed up to Mount Cuyamaca yesterday, but I didn’t end up taking the kind of photographs I set out to capture. The hazy atmosphere, the summer-baked vegetation and the burned out forest weren’t very conducive to taking panoramic photographs of the landscape. Instead I ended up taking photographs documenting the welcome rebirth of a devastated mountain.

I have hiked this mountain countless times during the past thirty years. Way back in the early 1980s the mountain boasted a lush, dense, shady forest packed with wildlife. I still recall seeing whole families of deer during a hike back then – fathers with huge antlers, smaller mothers and bunches of little ones. Even today, with the forest all but dead, there are incredible numbers of deer, squirrels, lizards and even mountain lions. Yesterday I saw as many deer tracks on the trail as human footprints.

Eastern side of Mount Cuyamaca. Almost thirty years ago the occasional dead tree was an anomaly. Today the occasional living tree is the anomaly.

In the early 1980s the forest was so dense that one could walk much of the five miles or so to the top of the mountain under the shade of trees. I recall a hike after an ice storm hit the mountain. In the early morning sunlight each individual, ice-coated pine needle looked like a long crystal. An entire forest of such needles sparkling in the morning sunlight was awe inspiring, and I have always regretted not having a camera with me that day.

For the last couple of decades, however, the forest has suffered one assault after another. Two decades of dry conditions, bark beetle infestations and in 2003 and I believe 2007 as well, disastrous fires drove the final nails into the coffin of this once lush forest.

I look at this devastated mountain today, recall its former glory and lament the loss that’s occurred just within my lifetime. At the same time, I cannot help but wonder how many thousands of times the forest on this mountain has been erased and reborn in this manner. Assuming such drastic upheavals occur every ten-thousand years, then the forest has likely been erased and reborn a thousand times in just the last ten-million years, an exceedingly brief epoch compared to the age of the earth. Knowing that the forest has died out and been reborn thousands of times before makes the loss seem more palatable.

Even in death there is haunting beauty. The pale and charred skeleton of a once mighty oak tree.

I was fortunate to hike here in the winter of 2002/2003, just months before the big fire in October of 2003. It was perhaps the last time there was any semblance of a forest remaining. The sky was so dark at midday that it seemed like twilight. The snow was over a foot deep everywhere, which made hiking rather taxing. And there were abundant mountain lion tracks up and down both sides of the snow-covered trail, which added to the foreboding ambiance. Nevertheless, it was a highly memorable hike.

Today, even amid the death and destruction of what looks more like a war zone than a forest, amid dead trees that stand like so many charred headstones, life is thriving. With the tall trees no longer blocking the sunlight, the smaller plants have a chance to grow, including an impressive number of new pine trees which are already three feet tall.

Rebirth of the forest, including numerous new pine trees

Death and rebirth

Young pine trees where I once enjoyed seeing a crystalline forest

I’m somewhat surprised to see the pine trees growing back so quickly. Who knows, maybe by the time I’m ready to depart this earth the forest will be almost back to what it was when I arrived on this earth. One thing is for certain, should the human species exit stage left, mother nature, in her eternal wisdom and limitless patience, will keep the show going on without us.

A busy little bee doing its part to rejuvenate the forest

August 16, 2009 – As if that’s really news.

By Dave Eriqat

I really don’t enjoy writing about negative topics (I was once called “Mr. Negative” for foreseeing the present economic malaise; another time I was called “Mr. Complainer” for asking a bartender in an Irish pub to put a larger head on my next Guinness), but I just ran across a stunning, damning report that I regard as compelling evidence that the U.S. is a fascist country.

Definition Of Fascism

First of all, what do I mean by fascist? The word is fecklessly thrown about these days to describe anyone or any organization that’s overly authoritarian, which is not to imply that the U.S. is not authoritarian, even totalitarian as well as fascist. In fact, I believe that fascism can only exist within an authoritarian climate that inevitably devolves into a totalitarian one. I use Benito Mussolini’s definition of fascism:

Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power. – Benito Mussolini

Mythology Versus Reality

For decades we’ve been regaled with the mythology that the U.S. economy is based on small businesses, that small businesses are the engine of job creation. (I confess that until I read this report, I believed that myth too.) At the same time, it’s been increasingly evident, even to a blind person, that the liaisons between the state and the corporations are strengthening, and that their combined interests are increasingly contrary to those of the people. The report to which I refer above soundly lays to rest the fiction of a U.S. economy based on small businesses. A single chart pilfered from the report and shown below succinctly summarizes the findings in the report.

Similar charts depicting the data for smaller businesses run by self-employed individuals and larger businesses with up to 500 employees are more or less the same, showing the U.S. at or near the bottom of the list of countries surveyed. What these charts indicate is that, contrary to the myth we’ve been fed for so long, employment in this country is dominated by large firms and corporations. In addition, it’s been known for some time, again, contrary to the mythology commonly presented, that the U.S. offers among the lowest class mobility among these same nations. In other words, contrary to commonly held beliefs, the notion of a person in the U.S. working hard and making a “success” of their self is more fantasy than reality, limited to a very small minority of the population. The rest are firmly locked into their station in life on a perpetually spinning hamster wheel. Finally, income disparities today are worse than ever in U.S. history and worse than anywhere else in the world. While I have not researched the facts behind the growing income disparity, I suspect it has much to do with the systematic elimination of small businesses, including family farms, and the consolidation of smaller firms into larger ones that are “too big to fail,” not to mention outsourcing (a practice only large corporations engage in).

Relevance

What bearing does the make-up of the U.S. employment picture have on the U.S. being a fascist country? For one thing, fascism is almost inconceivable in a nation comprised of myriad small firms. It’s only feasible in a nation dominated by a few large companies, such as the half dozen or so companies that control nearly every form of “mainstream media” in this country, including television, radio, newspapers, magazines, books, music, films and videos. Think about it: six or so individual CEOs effectively dominate the full spectrum of information that’s disseminated in this country, the internet standing out as an exception for the time being, although it’s under dire threat. In such an environment dominated by a handful of huge corporations, a government interested in controlling the message received by the populace (e.g. “catapult the propaganda”) need only make such arrangements with a handful of individuals. If, instead, the media market in this country were distributed among hundreds of companies, the government would face a much greater challenge getting all those companies, headed by diverse and individualistic personalities, to sing its tune. This is the basis upon which bloggers are being demonized today. They represent precisely this sort of diverse, uncontrollable information outlet that rankles the fascist establishment.

Besides the handful of corporations that control the media in the U.S., there are a handful that control the banking system, another handful that control the energy system, another handful that control the food system, another that control the retail system and another that control the health care system. Literally a few dozen corporate CEOs control the bulk of commerce in this country.

Fascism In Action

Fascism is clearly on display in the “health care reform” bill moving through the digestive tract of Congress. Since fascism is a symbiotic relationship between government and corporations, each must benefit from the arrangement, although usually not in the same manner. The government will get from the new law what it covets the most, which is power: among other things, to decide what health care people will receive, how much they will pay, perhaps even when and how they will die. Corporations will get what they covet the most, which is money.

It’s quite clear that the health insurance companies had a hand in crafting this proposed new law, and no wonder, for the law mandates millions of new “customers,” forced literally under threat of violence from the government to purchase health insurance. Forced participation is simply the next logical step after government-protected monopolies have run their course and no more customers are willing to purchase a company’s product or service.

Pharmaceutical firms evidently had their hands on the nascent bill as well, an assertion which seems to be supported by a memo exposed on the liberal Huffington Post, which one might have assumed would be an avid supporter of this ostensibly socialist bill. The memo indicates that the bill demands trivial, vague and ultimately unenforceable concessions from pharmaceutical firms while prohibiting the government from taking any action to reduce the cost of drugs it purchases with our tax dollars. It’s a perfect example of the fascist symbiosis at work: the government gains the power to dictate what drugs people have access to, and the corporations enjoy unimpaired profits.

Another example of fascism in action is the so-called prison-industrial complex, in which what are effectively slave laborers toil away in prisons run for profit, manufacturing goods or performing services to the profit of other corporations. The government gains increased power to imprison people at will, even for picayune reasons such as “three strikes” laws or petty drug use, while corporations profit from building prisons, operating them and exploiting the labor of those incarcerated, no doubt kicking back a not insignificant portion of their profits to politicians in the government in order to keep this system going. (These kickbacks take the form of “legitimate” campaign contributions, financial conflicts of interest and probably illegal bribes.) The truly sick part of this system is the complicity of people seeking jobs at these prisons, who apparently have no moral compass telling them that locking up their peers in order to earn a living is wrong. In addition, perhaps because of the deteriorating economic situation, I hear more and more intelligent people advocating harsh treatment of prisoners, never even considering the possibility that some of those people don’t even belong in prison in the first place. Why, just yesterday one person I know made the appalling declaration that people in prison should be put on a boat with holes drilled in it and sent out to sea. Such attitudes are indicative of fundamentally authoritarian personalities, people who harbor an innate fondness for authoritarian government, utterly incognizant of our heritage of physical and intellectual liberty and due process. I’ve come to the conclusion that these people who support the prison-industrial complex have been successfully brainwashed by the government and its fascist allies, particularly those in the media. (The person who made the appalling suggestion above is an avid watcher of the TV show COPS.)

Finally, there are all those proliferating automatic red light and speeding cameras operated by private companies that share revenue with the governments that authorize their installation. Again, government gains control over the people, while corporations profit.

Fascism And Psychopathy

As I’ve stated in past essays and in many comments I’ve littered all over the internet, I believe there’s a small percentage of people – say 5%, for a nice, round number – who are natural born psychopaths. The simplest definition of a psychopath, as I use the term, is one who lacks a conscience. That is to say, a psychopath is one who logically looks after his or her own needs, irrespective of the harm they cause to others. They are utterly incapable of empathizing with their potential victims and thus mediating their behavior to minimize such harm. All that matters to the psychopath is his or her own well-being.

Does that attitude sound familiar? Doesn’t it sound like the attitude displayed by so many corporate executives and politicians? It ought to, because I believe – and this may sound outrageous – that the vast majority of politicians and corporate executives are psychopaths. Our system, not just our economic system, but our entire hierarchical civilization itself is geared toward psychopaths. Nice people simply do not rise to the top of the economic or political systems; only cold, calculating, dissembling, ruthless, remorseless people do, that is, psychopaths. And the higher up the hierarchy one rises, the more likely they are to be a psychopath.

So we have at least two parallel systems – politics and business – for which psychopaths are ideally endowed. It should not be at all surprising that the psychopaths running each system have a natural affinity for one another, as well as a compatibility of ideals and methodologies, thus facilitating the establishment of fascist relationships. (For two interesting essays on this subject, see Word gets around: Twilight and the trick of the psychopaths and Truth to Power: Psychopaths Rule Our World.)

Conclusion

What is the solution to fascism? We’re presently on the same course as the most famous case of fascism, Nazi Germany, which is that of self destruction. Given enough time – not much more, in my opinion – we will self destruct, economically, militarily, morally. Self destruction, however, is not the most pleasant way to arrest this cancer.

The simplest solution to fascism, and the one most repugnant to politicians and corporations (gee, I wonder why) is to eliminate all private political campaign contributions. Such campaigns should be financed entirely by the taxpayers, which will make the elected politicians beholden to the voters, not the corporate lobbyists. The U.S. Supreme Court – not exactly an impartial body, for as a branch of the government it’s implicitly part of the fascist system too – has absurdly ruled that corporations are “people,” entitled to all the protections afforded by the Constitution, including the right of free speech. The same court has also ruled that campaign contributions are a form of free speech. One can immediately connect the two rulings to understand the problem we face today: the wealthiest entities control the political system, while the rest of us who vote are irrelevant. To some extent I agree that campaign contributions are a form of free speech, but the harm caused by this practice is so demonstrably egregious that it must be stopped, even at the expense of the corporations’ free speech. (Frankly, I disagree with the Supreme Court: corporations are not people, and I would not shed a tear if they lost their “right” of free speech.)

A second solution to fascism, which doesn’t violate today’s ridiculous election rules, but does require a more activist, engaged populace, is to prevent psychopaths from getting into positions of power in the first place. Most people simply cannot accept that one in twenty of their peers has no conscience. Most people, myself included, want to give everybody the benefit of the doubt and assume that they are decent, moral people, like themselves. And for 95% of people, that’s a safe assumption, but to make the mistake of assuming that all people are like that is to bury one’s head in the sand. The fact is, and it’s been amply demonstrated, that there is a small percentage of people who would literally sell their own mothers if they could profit from it, and these people are natural aspirants in the realms of business, politics and the military. If we can get “normal” people to accept that fact, they can be more wary of those they elect to office, making at least a modicum of effort to prevent psychopaths from getting into office. Fascism is a two way street requiring the cooperation of two bodies: business and government. While we cannot control who rises to the top of the business world – unless we want to appoint a dictator to supervise corporations’ leadership and executive compensation – we can control who rises to the top of the political world, and those people are in a position to not only shun fascist ties to corporations, but regulate corporations for the benefit of the country as a whole.

A third solution, which I have long advocated and is both voluntary and non-violent, but which requires the greatest change and effort of all, is to decentralize our civilization, restructuring it into a network of small, semi-autonomous communities. Small communities, small businesses, small political systems are incompatible with fascism, and if communities are small enough – unfortunately, they have to be as small as one-hundred inhabitants – even psychopaths cannot thrive. In my reading about psychopaths I’ve learned that above all, they fear discovery, that is, until they attain a powerful enough position that they no longer care if they are discovered. In small communities where everybody else knows them, psychopaths simply cannot conceal their actions or their personalities.

Sadly, I doubt there will be much change in the status quo. One need only look at ten-thousand years of human history to see this same pattern repeated ad infinitum: civilization being established, thriving for a while, devolving into despotism and self destructing. Rinse and repeat. Maybe I should just have another Guinness.

Update – 17 August 2009

This essay helps make my case that our business climate is geared toward large businesses and against small businesses. A key quotation from the essay reads,

Though most will deny it, I suspect there is a deeply seated anti-small business value system now at work in the U.S. While large corporations are wined and dined with huge tax credits–please come to our state, we’ll pay you millions to move!–small business is left to shift for itself, receiving nothing but pandering PR about how “we value small business” served up with ever-higher taxes and regulatory burdens.

Yep, that about sums up the business climate in the U.S.

Update – 20 August 2009

This video is delicious and disgusting at the same time (is that even possible?). What’s disgusting is that Mr Obama criticized Mr. Bush’s sweetheart deal with big pharma in the Medicare drug benefit legislation a few years ago, and then did exactly the same thing! What’s delicious about this video is that it’s the product of “progressives,” who are apparently beginning to see the light about the “messiah.”

Update – 20 August 2009

Wow! Here is a passionate indictment of the U.S. fascist system by the esteemed Paul Craig Roberts, titled Americans: Serfs Ruled by Oligarchs.

Update – 22 September 2009

Well, here’s a “duh” moment if I ever heard one:

On September 16, Dan Rather, the former anchor of the CBS Evening News, warned that today’s news is shaped by very powerful corporate network owners who “are in bed with powerful political interests” that are influenced by government regulatory interests. (Source: Former CBS anchorman warns of corporate influence over news)

Nevertheless, coming from an “insider,” this is a compelling observation. I wonder why it is, however, that all these ex-insiders see fit to spill the beans after they cease to be insiders. I suppose the obvious answer is that they have too much to lose while they are insiders. Perhaps a more charitable explanation is that they just don’t see the corruption when they’re immersed in it.

August 9, 2009 – I never thought I’d actually see it happen, but when all other civil options are exhausted, what’s left?

By Dave Eriqat

At long last, people are slowly beginning to realize that they are under full scale assault by the powers-that-be, who are attacking the peoples’ food, finances, health and freedom.

So far the people have behaved admirably, perhaps even with stupefying placidity, and tried to work within the system to effect change, but I sense that their patience is running out, that they are nearing the last straw that will finally cause them to throw up their hands and shout NO!

Working Through The System

Although the assault on the populace is decades old, dating at least as far back as the 1970s with Nixon’s escalation of “war on drugs,” if we go back just a few years we see the first indication of any sort of backbone within the populace. The 2006 Congressional election was a turning point in the public’s mood, their vote clearly reflecting a desire to get the heck out of Iraq. The politicians running for office at the time gave vague assurances that they were inclined to end the war, but once safely ensconced in office, their steady diet of campaign contributions from smarmy lobbyists secure, the newly elected legislators capitulated and abandoned the notion of withdrawal, and in fact even increased funding for, and supported expansion of the wars. The wishes of the people, who admirably performed their civic duty at the polling booth, were utterly ignored by their “representatives.”

Calling Their Congressmen

A few years later, in 2008, people were up in arms about the first major financial system bailout, which was proposed during the Bush Administration. The people, who are frequently characterized as stupid (including by me), saw through the lies of the government and its corporate partners and recognized the bailouts for what they were: the public socialization of losses suffered by private, politically connected entities. People did the right thing and dutifully “called their congressmen,” as they have so often been urged to do. Some congressmen admitted that public opposition to the bailout was 100:1, yet in the end Congress voted for the bailout anyway, totally ignoring the wishes of the people they supposedly represent. Is it any wonder? The people don’t pay the campaign bills of the politicians; Wall Street does. So who are these politicians going to listen to?

It should have been clear to anyone paying attention that the bailout bill, a 451-page monstrosity that few people in Congress actually read before voting for it, was planned long in advance (a bill that size, full of legislative minutiae cannot be written in a few days, as we were led to believe). Congress perpetrated a fraud on the people by introducing a phony, two page bill, which it then voted against in order to appear “resistant” to bailouts, only to introduce the massive bill days later, which it swiftly voted for. The people had no say in this blatant robbery, even though they are left holding the bag. This larcenous precedent set by Mr. Bush merely laid the groundwork for even more grandiose thefts of public money under his successor.

Public Protest

Escalating their political activism, the people have taken to protesting in the streets, only to find themselves cordoned off in “free speech zones,” well away from the political venue that is the target of their protest, or summarily arrested, sometimes even “preemptively” in their own houses before they can travel to the venue. For the most part, people are no longer permitted to protest in public, despite the Constitution’s First Amendment, which reads:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press, or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Notice the part about “the right of the people peaceably to assemble”? Or how about the part about “to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.” In true despotic fashion, Mr. Obama has recently set up an e-mail address [now disabled] to which people can report their aggrieved peers. It’s no longer safe or even legal to engage in public protest in the U.S.

In Person Activism

One of the few remaining venues in which people can still vent their frustrations in public is the so-called town hall meeting, in which legislators graciously grant an audience to the people they ostensibly represent.

This summer, legislators are justly getting “an earful about government run amok.” The people are opposed to the “cap and tax” initiative which will increase the cost of living across the board, to the benefit of people and corporations involved in trading carbon credits. The people are opposed to “health care reform,” which they correctly recognize will increase health care costs while decreasing the quality and availability of health care. Say what you will about “stupid” voters, but when it comes to issues affecting their pocketbooks, they can see with crystal clarity. The people are worried about mandatory vaccinations and actually doing something about it. Yet despite all these legitimate concerns, the legislators seem genuinely baffled by the peoples’ resistance to the proposed legislation. It’s as if the legislators are so isolated in their rarefied world of wealth and privilege and donor pampering that they no longer have anything in common with the common man.

No doubt, these baffled legislators will not take away any sort of revelation from these town hall meetings with their constituents. Once they get back to Congress, back into the groove of wining and dining and pampering by political operatives, they will forget all about their recent unpleasant experiences with their constituents and vote along corporate lines, as usual. The people have no representation any longer and a few are starting to understand that, even if they are not quite ready to acknowledge the logical consequence of being taxed and controlled without representation: revolution.

Last Resort: Armed Rebellion

When the people no longer have any representation, yet seemingly bear all the costs and affronts, what choice remains but to rebel? So far, even the abjectly poor live pretty comfortably in this country, so they still have too much to lose by rebelling. But just wait until the economic collapse kicks into high gear, which is coming. Just wait until food shortages kick in, which I believe is also coming. Just wait until armor-wearing soldiers are pounding on peoples’ doors, demanding to inject them with useless vaccines that threaten the peoples’ very lives. Just wait until people are living in tents or being rounded up and sent to internment camps. Once enough people have nothing left to lose they will rebel, and once that happens many people who are fed up with the fascist system in place today will join them, even if merely by offering covert support.

The threat of genuine, armed revolution is why the Second Amendment is under such fierce assault today. It’s why internment camps are being set up and the Army National Guard is hiring “internment/resettlement specialists.” It’s why the government wants to keep tabs on us any way it can, such as with this new GPS mileage tax baloney being propsed. First of all, the current gasoline taxes are already essentially a tax on mileage, with some variation due to the differing fuel economy of individual cars. Secondly, if they wanted to implement a tax based on mileage alone – a dubious plan that would reduce the incentive to drive fuel efficient cars – they could simply require people to report their odometer reading when they register their car each year and the state would tax them accordingly. The only reason for using GPS to keep track of mileage is to record every place a car is driven and possibly even to determine if one is speeding and issue speeding tickets by means of satellites. Automated ticketing is the wet dream of every cash-strapped bureaucracy, as evidenced by the proliferation of automated red light and speeding cameras that spew out tickets, generating profits for both government and corporations.

Since “our” legislators no longer heed our votes, take our phone calls, permit us to protest in public or hear us (they listen but they do not hear) when we speak to them in town hall meetings, what course of action is left? The only thing government seems to understand anymore is force. I believe the day is coming when the people will turn to the only option left to them. By the time that possibility becomes palpable, the U.S. will be embroiled in World War III so as to deflect peoples’ attention from our economic problems, militarize the country even further and kill off as many potential revolutionaries as possible before they can foment insurrection here at home.

Update – 10 August 2009

In this two-part video, Gerald Celente echoes my long-uttered assertions that:

• People have no representation anymore

• The U.S. is becoming a fascist country (I believe it crossed that line a while ago)

• And, to quote Mr. Celente, “when people lose everything and they have nothing left to lose, they lose it”

He closes by saying, “we need a revolution.”

Update – 13 August 2009

More from Gerald Celente in this article, titled, The ‘Second American Revolution’ Has Begun.

Update – 17 August 2009

Some good news for a change. The White House has retired the offensive tattletale e-mail address, flag@whitehouse.gov, due to citizen outrage. We can be heard if we want to be.

August 8, 2009 – A movie review.

By Dave Eriqat

I hope this review of the movie The Dark Knight doesn’t offend anybody, but let me say it right up front: I thought the movie was trash. Last night I watched the movie because so many people, both those known to me and those online, declared it a great movie. Yet, while watching it last night I found myself alternately hoping a story would emerge and hoping the movie would end, several times my twitchy finger even coming close to fast forwarding through the needlessly long movie to get it over with.

The characters were uniformly dull and apathetic, not to mention utterly unlikable, if not downright unsavory. Even when the district attorney’s “squeeze,” as the Joker called her, was blown to bits it didn’t cause me even a momentary pang of sorrow, especially since the supposed love affair between her and the DA was one of the least convincing in cinematic history.

Not even Batman himself was appealing, and I found myself muttering, “Do it, do it,” urging him to follow through on his threat to turn himself in to the police, which would have added a much needed intriguing twist to an otherwise limp and lifeless movie. (Anyone who has read my writings long enough knows how fond I am of “authority” figures, so my wishing that Batman would turn himself in to the police reveals the depth of my disappointment with this movie.)

To say there wasn’t much of a story is being charitable. One could have stuffed this film into a blender, put it on high for several minutes, reassembled the film and watched it with no almost discernible degradation of the “story.” Or, to put it another way, one could watch different segments of this movie at different times and in any order and walk away with the same impression as watching the whole thing from start to finish. The movie was more or less a disjointed collection of de rigueur, but shoddy action sequences sprinkled among an equally disjointed collection of insomnia-curing scenes of contrived emotion and solemnity. Although my viewing companion was actually falling asleep during most of the film, I was kept awake by the drive to identify a single frame of film that would make me care about the story or any of the characters. Such a frame never did flash across the screen.

Now, I’m no great fan of the Batman genre to begin with. I believe I’ve only seen perhaps three of the movies in the last twenty years, and none of them were memorable. When I was a kid, of course, I watched Batman on the television, “Same bat-time, same bat-channel,” but it was merely cheap entertainment. I never desired to be Batman, nor ever owned any Batman-related paraphernalia. Nevertheless, it just so happens that I saw another Batman movie some months ago, titled simply enough, Batman. Although the movie was made in 1966, at the same time that I was watching the television series, I never knew of its existence all these forty-plus years until I watched it recently, and I have to say, that old Batman movie was a far more entertaining movie than The Dark Knight. Batman had a simple plot, not unlike the preposterous plots in the early James Bond films, before they too became pretentiously complex, and a cabal of villains that were, well, likable and even classy. Who wouldn’t be charmed by Cesar Romero’s Joker? By comparison, who wouldn’t be repulsed by Heath Ledger’s Joker? I have seldom laughed so hard as when I watched the movie Batman, because it was so ridiculous and campy, but that was deliberate. For example, in one scene – if memory serves – Batman is hanging on to a rope ladder suspended from a helicopter and has a rubbery, great white-like shark attached to his leg. No problem. Batman simply whips out his handy-dandy can of bat-shark repellent, which he had the foresight to place in his utility belt, sprays the toothy monster and it falls back into the sea, leaving not even so much as a tear in Batman’s tights. It’s terribly amusing, but the creators of that movie had no delusions of creating a cinematic masterpiece – they were trying to create entertainment, and succeeded.

Maybe it’s the times. Maybe people born in the last twenty years or so see The Dark Knight as an apt reflection of the ambiguous, morally relative times in which we live today, while I, having been born decades earlier, still recall a time when moral absolutes prevailed and life was truly pleasant and carefree. Or maybe it’s just me. Maybe I’ve finally become the curmudgeon I’ve always longed to be. There is at least one noteworthy thing I can say about this movie, and that is that it moved me enough to write a review of it.