The Joker Rules: Mere Anarchy is Loosed Upon The World

 

Batman, for me, got left behind with the black and white TV era and Adam West, but I'm aware he lived on in multiple movies, comic books and Madison Avenue renditions.  I might have this wrong, but one of the characters he fought was the Joker, who seemed to have no greater purpose than destruction. Question for the Jorker: What are you against? Answer: What've you got?

The Joker

The Don

The Godfather, for me, was not about the Don, or even his heir, Michael, but about Sonny Corleone, who, learning his brother has enlisted to fight in World War II explodes. You would fight for strangers? For Sonny anyone who would respond to appeals to patriotism is a "sap." And nobody outside the family matters. His family, his tribe is all that counts. The idea of a country is absurd. We see the place this mindset originated as Michael wanders the Sicilian countryside and villages and notices there are very few men around, and he is told that is because they have all been killed in vendettas, fights among the families.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=435mkg6_eGQ

If life imitates art, then lately, it feels as if we are living in the universe of these tales--the Joker has finally seized power, defeated Batman, and Sonny Corleone lives--it is his world now, where all that matters is the deal, enriching your own family and those who fight alongside you for you and yours.

The Joker now tries to take down Gotham by attacking its strongest institutions: the universities, most particularly the most famous, Harvard, and public TV and radio, legacy news organizations, newer news like CNN, the diplomatic establishment, and the military, and medical institutions (the CDC, the NIH, university hospitals, the public health service). And he loves to luxuriate among those erstwhile villains, the Russians (Putin), the Saudi monarchy--who am I to judge just because you dismember a journalist?--especially those who are fighting erstwhile good guys (Volodymyr Zelensky). 

So the hero, Zelensky, is now a pariah and the villains, once again the heroes. Vktor Orban, the dictator of Hungary: hero. Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman, who dismembers journalists who displease him: hero.  

And now, Mr. Putin has erected a statue/wall frieze of Stalin in the Moscow subway, to greet all the commuters--and he has come full circle 1984 style, with the old vanquished and discredited now back in fashion, to be adored again.

Can't wait to see what other creepy crawlies from history are going to be getting their faces on postage stamps next. You know who I'm thinking of.  And for that matter, Mussolini did make the trains run on time. 

And let us not forget his embrace of the version of the Joker who preceded him in Israel, the mutated Bibi Netanyahu, who, whatever he once may have been, has now metamorphosized into someone who claims you can really fight a "war on Hamas" or "a war on terrorism" and defeat an idea--that is the idea of resistance, no matter what its name. And he sells the endless war as a "war" against a discrete enemy, which has gone by many names, most currently Hamas, but even if "Hamas" undergoes a corporate restructuring, there is no doubt there will always be a successor rising from the ashes. It's really whack-a-mole: slam one, another pops up.

Lillian Hellman called her era "Scoundrel Time," and we have certainly passed through that, but currently, it feels as if we have slid beyond that, back to the time where the disease is not confined to the stage at Nuremberg, but has spread out into the thousands of spectators, waving their flags and banners, a contagion uncontainable by any sort of vaccination, untreatable by words or ideas. 

We live now in a world depicted in another movie, "Invasion of the Body Snatchers," the 1978 Donald Southerland version, where there are no space ships invading earth. The "infestation" has no defined borders, just little pods drifting in among humanity, its tentacles reaching out, entwining and replacing us.