I finally caught up with The Dark Knight Rises over the weekend, and you can imagine my surprise when I found myself watching Dr. Zhivago instead. I’m referring to the sequence after Bane’s Occupy Wall Street criminal rabble takes Manhattan, Fifth Avenue homes are looted, and show trials are conducted in front of a kangaroo court.
Andrew Klavan has a typically thoughtful take on the subject in today’s Wall Street Journal:
Later, after Bane’s revolution has destroyed the investment class with mob violence and show trials and thus plunged Gotham City into chaos, Catwoman and her fellow thief enter a ransacked house. “This used to be someone’s home,” mourns Catwoman, her conscience awakening. “Now it’s everyone’s home!” exults her unrepentant colleague, gloating over the ruin.
The world of the film is our world, and the direct opposite of the world imagined into being by our intelligentsia. Here, free markets and investments, while creating super-wealthy men like the philanthropist hero Bruce Wayne, also create a rising tide of money that lifts the rest of us. Meanwhile, the forcible redistribution of private property is identified as theft, the forerunner of disorder and despotism.
In other words, same old same old — if insanity is defined as doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result, what are we to make of every murderous Regressive movement from the French Revolution to the October Revolution to Mao and Pol Pot? All of them began in resentment and ended in oceans of blood. In fact, one of the worst things about being a Regressive is having to ride the tiger that eventually eats all of them. In Dr. Zhivago, the idealistic Pasha becomes the feared zealot Strelnikov who in turn becomes another of Stalin’s statistics. In this Batman installment, Bane’s raging Id and his secret controller’s lust for revenge are both defeated by heroes who understand where the truth lies.
Aside from its losing flirtation with violent revolution in the streets of Chicago in 1968/69, the American Left has mostly worked its destruction by the “peaceful” means of infiltration and co-option. But when your only principle is rage and destruction, change for the sake of violent change with nothing to replace what’s been sacked and looted, it’s tough to keep ahead of the curve. And it’s impossible for you to see the future you profess to serve — even though the rest of us know how this movie must end.
