Folks, I admit I’m old. I was raised on comic books in the ’50s. I remember spending hot summer afternoons sitting on the floor of the air conditioned Rexhall Drug Store (we had none in our public housing apartment) next to the comic book rack by the front door. I relished GI Joe, Superman and all the DC heroes as well as, what I wish would return, Classic comics. That time sated my unquenchable thirst for reading, honed reading skills and introduced me to illustrated classic literature way before my academic peers. So it is with that encoded memory that I went with my oldest son to see the latest Batman movie. As the movie started my son asked me if I ever thought about living through the introduction of color TV (I was born in 1951 – which was the year TV was invented?), flat screens, HD and 3D….and seeing the United States land a man on the moon. I told him I’m still awed by the digitized introductions! I ended up walking out of the movie about ten minutes before the end. “Back in my day” there was no equivocation regarding who the good and bad guys were. These days hollywood seems hell-bent (and I use the term intentionally) on confusing the public -and particularly the youth – about the concept of right and wrong, good and bad. This may sound archaic but the present course will only lead to (what should be evident to most Americans) …..chaos. Having lost friends in combat and having three sons who are infantry Marines I not only dislike seeing U.S. military being killed on the silver screen but, having been a cop, seeing cops being killed en masse. Was I the only person in the theater who recoiled in horror at seeing American citizens mowing down (with automatic weapons) police officers who, another Hollywood insert, only had pistols? What message does THAT send to impressionable youth hooked on video games? It made me think of the speech Charleston Heston gave to a meeting of and entertainment stockholders meeting in which he horrified the resistant audience by reading the words of a famous rap song. All the more so when it’s done by American citizens. I started losing interest in the movie when Bane addressed the captive New Yorkers and turned them into a mob that confronted New York’s finest …..and started killing the police officers en masse. The trigger for me during Bane’s speech was his exhortation to “….hug your children….” while exploiting their percieved societal grievances. I heard that comment during Obama’s speech. It was an interesting exercise in statement analysis between Obama’s speech (always beginning with something about him) and Romney’s regarding the mass shooting in Aurora. But that’s for another day. I’ve dipped my little toe in scriptwriting and know that what the comic book version portrayed aint’ necessarily what survives from hollywood screenwriters’ rewrites much less the film editing. I don’t have a copy of the DC comic that contained the battle with Bane. If someone does I would like feedback on their perspective between the two. Based on several decades of studying communist/socialist insurgencies and participating in more than a few counterinsurgencies during the Reagan years, I perceived the movie as propaganda. The first step in the pyramid of conducting an insurgency is to exploit perceived grievances of the people – ” the hearts and minds”. The second step is to discredit the legitimate authority in the eyes of the people so that they look to the “Party” (Hollywood……or the bad guy) as their saviors. This strategy is contained in Lenin’s pamphlet “What Is To Be Done?” distributed to the Internationals when they asked for specific guidance on how to spread communism worldwide. Lenin considered agitation progaganda “agi-prop” as his most valuable “scalpel”. The Russian military was his last “scalpel” held in reserve to maintain control over the population. Many Americans are already familiar with the list of objectives Lenin published for the destruction of capitalism in America – including attacking the moral fabric. Hollywood is doing a fine job of it. .
