"You can be excused just about anything if you're a hero, because no one asks inconvenient questions. - Terry Pratchett.
There are many ways in which various incarnations of Batman have appealed to people over the years, but central is the trope of counterterror -- the revenge fantasy of the impotent. You see, Batman has superhuman powers. Yes, I am aware that the authors make it very clear that he does not have superhuman powers, but then they depict him doing things which are beyond human capabilities -- hence he actually has superhuman powers. Using his super powers he brings fear to those who inflict fear. He is the victim who has become the righteous assailant. But there is a little bit of a problem here -- if the "hero" is a violent nutcase with an odd costume fetish, why would we trust his moral compass? Why would we rely on his literally self-righteous narrative? In the same vein, why should we take Obama's word that he has to kill people to prevent terrorism when the alleged terrorists cause much less terror and death than Obama? It turns out that people tolerate Obama because he seems to face an evil more unspeakable, more terrible, and yet more outrageous and comical than any evil known to history. It is not al-Qaeda, nor is it Kim Jong-un. It is the same evil that Batman faces.
Nerd Rage-Revenge Fantasy
There is reassurance in the idea of a powerful paternal figure that protects. But when you have been bullied; when you have been made to feel helpless, weak and scared; when your delusions of potency are shattered, maybe you want more than reassurance -- maybe you want VENGEANCE. The tables must be turned. The tormentor must become the tormented. You don't need a father figure any more, you need a you figure. But an empowered you, a superhuman you, a terrifying you. You need the superhuman powers because you face a superhuman threat -- the villains.
The villains are given superhuman power by the scary demon mask which is given to them by magic storytellers known as the corporate media. They terrorise. The mask they wear is the horror mask of primal and basic fear. Criminals and terrorists are not represented as human beings but as crime and terror made flesh. You cannot reason with them. You cannot even buy their forbearance. They will take your money and kill you anyway -- because they are driven to kill. There are no ways of mediating or ameliorating the risk of becoming a victim. You hide behind locks, gates and guards, and you cheer for the preventive violence of vigilantes in or out of uniform.
If you are thinking that they take the horror-villain mask from the fictional murderer of Hollywood and place it on the real murderers of the evening news, you would only be partly right. The horror mask is used, of course, but there are no "real" murderers on the evening news. Instead of a human being the news-media version of a murderer is a cipher a vehicle for the urge to kill, murder itself embodied and made flesh. They are even less real than their fictional Hollywood counterparts and it is the same when the murderers are "terrorists". Proof of the unreality is in the irrelevance of actual guilt. The Central Park Five wore the horror mask, as did Damien Echols, and many other innocents such as those imprisoned and tortured in Guant à ¡ namo. These are all fictional unreal murderers and terrorists (despite the fact that they correspond to actual real people) who epitomise murder and terror. Their alien nature, their irrationality, their opacity all make them much greater sources of fear. But then there is the intriguing thought that one can also fight terror with terror.
Enter the Batman!
The nature of Batman is such that he takes the terror felt by the public and projects it back at the supposed source of their terror. No, he doesn't go around scaring the crap out of studio owners and heads of news departments; that would be too sensible. He terrorises the "baddies", and a central part of the canonical backstory is that he too is a victim, having seen his parents senselessly gunned down as a child. The fear makes everyone a victim, and he is the victim granted the power to fight back.
Out of the dark, just as the tattooed thug is in the act of terrorising (his victim usually a woman), a dark figure drops from above. The tables are turned -- the terroriser is now the terrorised -- a highly gendered process in which the "bad guy" suddenly develops a very high pitched squeaky voice which is decidedly girly. Usually there is also some sort of phallic kerfuffle occurring -- the bad guy's pistol droops impotently, or Batman's weapon is bigger, or disarmament is shown as symbolic castration. All good family fun.
This all occurs in exactly the same way in the world of Obama. The discourse of terrorism is one of the horror mask beneath which is the simplistic fiction of cardboard-cutout evil. Terrorists, like violent urban criminals, are animated by innate animus -- a pure and unadulterated hatred. They hate our freedoms, we were told, and Obama has done almost nothing but reinforce that notion. Terrorists are killing machines. It is in their nature. You cannot negotiate with terrorists because they are all irrational fanatics. And so, like the urban criminals, the only choice is to incapacitate or eliminate them. As Prince Harry put it: "If there's people trying to do bad stuff to our guys, then we'll take them out of the game." (He didn't preface the comment with "Holy Playstation Batman!", but he might well have, because the UK really does good line in being sidekick to a deranged vigilante.)
The fear of the terrorist or criminal actually relies on the deliberate omission of any hint of rational motive or circumstantial cause. There is "no negotiating with terrorists". The only admissible response is the response of the strongman, the Obataman who fights terror with terror. Otherwise people might think that all of this counterterror stuff (which actually creates more terrorists than it kills) is really about deliberately sowing instability and strife in order maintain a US strategic predominance, which is, in fact, counter to the interests of the US people (but pretty good if you happen to be ExxonMobil).
Is the analogy with Batman a fair one? To be strictly honest, while Dick Cheney rather overtly embraced what he himself described as "the dark side", Obama is in a sense more discreet than Cheney or Batman. Part of the appeal of the use of drones is that it seems clinical and detached. Obama specifically claimed "very few" civilian casualties from "very precise, precision strikes against Al Qaeda and their affiliates" in a programme that is "kept on a very tight leash." So it seems like a programme that just gets "the worst of the worst". Just like Guant à ¡namo. The frequency of the drone strikes just goes to show how serious the threats to the US are. It also reveals the vigilance of the intelligence forces who strike at every credible threat as soon as it is detected. It is a bit like a whack-a-mole game. The public can be very reassured by the frequency of lethal action without having to ask themselves irrelevant questions such as: who?; where?; how old?; or, how can some impoverished person from one of the most undeveloped regions of the planet pose a credible threat against a country that spends such obscene amounts on "defense" and "homeland security"?
On the other hand, to give Batman his due, despite his broody weirdness and silly voice, he usually resists the temptation to actually murder people, and he doesn't kill children at all. Obama, by contrast, murders children on a very regular basis, which is not a normal part of the "hero" job description.
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