I assure you that Adam West did the Batusi on purpose.
The star of ABC’s swinging and silly 1960s “Batman” series – which celebrated its 60th anniversary earlier this month – played the Caped Crusader with deadly seriousness. He drank tall glasses of orange juice in seedy dives as he infiltrated an underworld of bank-robbing clowns and bird-obsessed mobsters.
Across three seasons, West’s straitlaced detective and the corny, pun-loving Robin (played by Burt Ward) bumbled through their campy adventure serial, never once wavering in their commitment to fuddy-duddy justice. Their squareness was a constant punchline to the show’s freewheeling pop-art setup. It wouldn’t have worked if the stars winked even once.
Future takes on the character weren’t kind to the kitsch of Ward and West. Alan Moore and Frank Miller’s comics, Tim Burton’s blockbusters and a return to television as an animated noir made the ‘66 “Batman” seem like more and more of an anomaly.
In the aughts, Christopher Nolan’s alley-dwelling Navy Seal drove an MRAP over any remaining goodwill West’s Batman may have had. The world’s greatest detective no longer had the space to be silly, draped in Global War on Terror anti-flair and calling in airstrikes on the underclass of Gotham City. That early network iteration wasn’t just a different take, it was an embarrassment to the character. To the Nolan fanboys, the “Batman” television series’ creators made West carry shark repellent and throw onomatopoeic punches because they didn’t understand what it meant to be Batman.
Resistance liberals have a similar problem engaging the Trump administration on its own terms.
Scandals that plague the Trump Cabinet are weighed in op-ed pages for the damage that they do to the reputation of the office, not their inherent illegality. When the Department of Homeland Security trots out a terrifying slogan that implies coming retribution from the administration’s secret police, all anyone can talk about is its parallels to Nazi Germany. The president is called a hypocrite for his friendship with the leader of a sex trafficking ring, as if “pretender” is the worst p-word you could throw at a friend of Jeffrey Epstein.
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To be clear, extrajudicial killings in the Caribbean aren’t bad because they diminish America’s reputation. ICE agents shooting and kidnapping American citizens isn’t bad because it calls to mind some historical or fictional fascists. There’s no 5D chess to suss out, no meta-narrative at play and no economic anxiety to soften the blow. The fascists are here and they’re harming their enemies because it’s what they like to do.
It might not make for a catchy sign at a “No Kings” protest, and you probably won’t get to dress up like a character in a sci-fi dystopia, but stopping MAGA requires a reckoning with the Trump administration that is, not what it could be.
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