- Sep 22, 2013
- 4,956
- 250
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This is an urbanization-Utopianism tale inspired by the modernism-calamity film King of New York.
There's no reason we can't 'escape' Orwellian fears with good-old-fashioned 'toystore storytelling.'
Cheers,
====
Bruce Wayne was an Ivy League student (Yale University) fascinated by criminal insanity and how the insanity defense challenged humanity's conceptualization of civics management and legalese tolerance. "The trick about insanity is that everyone wants to talk casually about the simply 'notion' that everyone is at least a 'tad' insane!" Wayne would say to himself as he read through case-studies in law books about intriguing cases involving the insanity defense (including a sleepwalker-homicide case in upstate New York!).
Wayne decided to become the urban vigilante 'Batman' (fashioning a mask and cape to make himself look like a bat!) and prowled around his home-city of Gotham on weekend-evenings, looking for evil-doers to thwart so that Americans did not feel that the insanity defense was an 'escape clause' from culpability for crimes! Batman found two masked goons assaulting a Gotham policeman in the alley and quickly used his tranquilizer-darts to sedate him. The Gotham Gazette hailed Batman as the 'real comic book superhero,' and Wayne was very pleased.
Wayne completed a dozen more heroic 'vigilante deeds' over the course of the year, and he still read over his criminal insanity textbooks and case-studies (and graduated with-honors from Yale!) and investigated 'eerie' cases of insanity-defense controversies (so he'd feel more prepared about odd goings-on in cases involving thugs/goons he'd helped apprehend as 'Batman.' Wayne would stare at his own reflection in the mirror for hours on end and say things to himself such as, "I am the knight of Gotham who protects the layman from the forces of anarchy!" One night, however, Wayne had a troubling dream in which he imagined that very strange individuals (who were his 'mirror-opposites'!) came to life in Gotham to challenge him.
Batman was very nervous that his dream was some kind of 'premonition' of some kind of odd truth regarding the intellectual (and moral!) challenge of wrestling with the law in modern urban environments (such as Gotham) and dealing with insanity-defense controversies. Batman asked himself, "Could the mind's contemplation of criminal insanity give 'birth' to criminals who 'exploit' our basic anxieties regarding the general 'ambiguousness' of psychiatry itself?" Batman got the eerie feeling that as he thought these things, the strange 'mirror-image' adversaries he dreamt about while sleeping...were somehow (and somewhere!) coming to life.
Wayne picked up the newspaper one Sunday morning and started reading the headlines. He was drinking his usual cup of Starbucks coffee in the dining room of the mansion he inherited from his rich parents (before they were killed in an alley in Gotham by a criminally insane evil-doer who was later given the death-penalty). Wayne was content that he was doing what he could to 'combat evil' in Gotham as the new CEO of Wayne Industries (another 'title' he inherited from his father). However, that morning, while reading the Gotham Gazette (as his maids and butler Alfred were cleaning the mansion), Wayne/Batman nearly had a heart-attack when he read the oddest 'omen-notice' (a terrorism-submission which would send him on a pro-democracy 'crusade' for the remainder of his natural life):
"We are not Batman. We represent a new coalition of Devil's Advocates, here simply to ask the 'good hard-working citizens of American cities' the very sane question, 'Does commerce/consumerism (e.g., eBay, Wall Street, Wal-Mart, etc.) make human beings more...dishevelled?' We'd like to be known as 'the Gotham Uglies,' and we want to challenge Batman to convince America that 'optimism' can solve the psychological problem of real greed (e.g., Enron). Batman is a patriot, while we are anarchists, so who is the judge of sane 'liberty daydreams'? Let the people of Gotham decide which is 'cleaner' --- 9/11 oriented terrorism (a sign of globalization-politics frustration) or American Dream storytelling (perhaps a 'relic' of civilization propaganda)...?"
====
There's no reason we can't 'escape' Orwellian fears with good-old-fashioned 'toystore storytelling.'
Cheers,
====
Bruce Wayne was an Ivy League student (Yale University) fascinated by criminal insanity and how the insanity defense challenged humanity's conceptualization of civics management and legalese tolerance. "The trick about insanity is that everyone wants to talk casually about the simply 'notion' that everyone is at least a 'tad' insane!" Wayne would say to himself as he read through case-studies in law books about intriguing cases involving the insanity defense (including a sleepwalker-homicide case in upstate New York!).
Wayne decided to become the urban vigilante 'Batman' (fashioning a mask and cape to make himself look like a bat!) and prowled around his home-city of Gotham on weekend-evenings, looking for evil-doers to thwart so that Americans did not feel that the insanity defense was an 'escape clause' from culpability for crimes! Batman found two masked goons assaulting a Gotham policeman in the alley and quickly used his tranquilizer-darts to sedate him. The Gotham Gazette hailed Batman as the 'real comic book superhero,' and Wayne was very pleased.
Wayne completed a dozen more heroic 'vigilante deeds' over the course of the year, and he still read over his criminal insanity textbooks and case-studies (and graduated with-honors from Yale!) and investigated 'eerie' cases of insanity-defense controversies (so he'd feel more prepared about odd goings-on in cases involving thugs/goons he'd helped apprehend as 'Batman.' Wayne would stare at his own reflection in the mirror for hours on end and say things to himself such as, "I am the knight of Gotham who protects the layman from the forces of anarchy!" One night, however, Wayne had a troubling dream in which he imagined that very strange individuals (who were his 'mirror-opposites'!) came to life in Gotham to challenge him.
Batman was very nervous that his dream was some kind of 'premonition' of some kind of odd truth regarding the intellectual (and moral!) challenge of wrestling with the law in modern urban environments (such as Gotham) and dealing with insanity-defense controversies. Batman asked himself, "Could the mind's contemplation of criminal insanity give 'birth' to criminals who 'exploit' our basic anxieties regarding the general 'ambiguousness' of psychiatry itself?" Batman got the eerie feeling that as he thought these things, the strange 'mirror-image' adversaries he dreamt about while sleeping...were somehow (and somewhere!) coming to life.
Wayne picked up the newspaper one Sunday morning and started reading the headlines. He was drinking his usual cup of Starbucks coffee in the dining room of the mansion he inherited from his rich parents (before they were killed in an alley in Gotham by a criminally insane evil-doer who was later given the death-penalty). Wayne was content that he was doing what he could to 'combat evil' in Gotham as the new CEO of Wayne Industries (another 'title' he inherited from his father). However, that morning, while reading the Gotham Gazette (as his maids and butler Alfred were cleaning the mansion), Wayne/Batman nearly had a heart-attack when he read the oddest 'omen-notice' (a terrorism-submission which would send him on a pro-democracy 'crusade' for the remainder of his natural life):
"We are not Batman. We represent a new coalition of Devil's Advocates, here simply to ask the 'good hard-working citizens of American cities' the very sane question, 'Does commerce/consumerism (e.g., eBay, Wall Street, Wal-Mart, etc.) make human beings more...dishevelled?' We'd like to be known as 'the Gotham Uglies,' and we want to challenge Batman to convince America that 'optimism' can solve the psychological problem of real greed (e.g., Enron). Batman is a patriot, while we are anarchists, so who is the judge of sane 'liberty daydreams'? Let the people of Gotham decide which is 'cleaner' --- 9/11 oriented terrorism (a sign of globalization-politics frustration) or American Dream storytelling (perhaps a 'relic' of civilization propaganda)...?"
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