The Dark Knight.

May 1, 2011 at 12:10 A.M. One letter was removed from the text since my previous review of this work and spacing will be affected, again. I will do my best to keep up with corrections. I will attempt to correct the spacing problems from public computers. Sadly, "errors" will continue to be inserted in this text on a very regular basis, perhaps illustrating my argument in this review.

April 4, 2011 at 10:32 A.M. Attempts to post a new essay "N.J.'s Child Molesters and Thieves" is being blocked from my home computer by New Jersey government agencies, I believe, in a blatant censorship effort. Later today, I will attempt to post the essay from multiple public computers in Manhattan. It is a federal crime to violate the civil rights of any person targeted for government harassment.

April 3, 2011 at 10:39 A.M. Forced association with persons I know to have cooperated with my enemies, usually behind my back while smiling to my face, is deeply harmful and unwelcome. This is a matter which requires a face-to-face resolution, Mr. Rabner.

March 31, 2011 at 7:48 P.M. "Errors" were inserted in this text that was posted earlier today. I am making necessary corrections from a public computer because I am unable to post on-line from my home computer. New Jersey police and legal officials, I believe, continue to commit computer crimes against me in order to obstruct my on-line writings. I wonder why they're nervous? ("What is it like to be censored in America?")

Hero or Villain?

Evil is impossible to describe to persons who have little or no experience of the phenomenon. After a week of reminders of the sadistic pleasures in cruelty felt by persons indulging in computer crimes against me and seeking to destroy my writings, I am struggling to come to terms with the emotions overwhelming me this morning. I am often forced to live in the psychological equivalent of Auschwitz. What baffles and wounds is not the actual conduct aimed at hurting me, but the irrationality and absurdity of some people's bizarre hatred of what must always elude their understanding.

Evil is a void or absence of feeling for others which can also become something more affirmative or positive. I describe this additional quality of malignancy as pleasure or delighted fascination at the intricate and subtle spectacle of a victim's agony. Victims must be made to obey the torturer's will. Power, obedience, feeling important is crucial to the evil-doer's psyche.

The greatest dread experienced by deluded and suffering souls is that they will be made to accept their own insignificance and mediocrity. To aspire to be better or hope for anything good is to suffer from "delusions of grandeur" for evil persons relishing their status as "bottom-feeders."

If bad persons can hurt someone smarter or morally better than they are, then this, somehow, equalizes things by diminishing or appropriating the envied gifts or talents of victims. The murderer makes his or her victim an "equal" because we all will die. Dead persons are intersubstitutable. We're all the same as corpses. Nobody is better than anyone else. Murderers are already dead in the way that Eichman was dead long before his execution. ("'The Rite': A Movie Review.")

Christopher Nolan's Dark Knight is a good movie, better than I remembered, though less good than this same director's magnificent recent film, Inception. The effort to explore these cosmic issues of good and evil in terms of archetypes of hero and villain within the vocabulary of America's pop-culture does not succeed. I do not believe that Batman -- or any similar cartoon-like setting as distinct from a mythical space -- can serve as a sufficient scaffolding for the weighty dilemmas surrounding the problem of evil. ("'The Matrix': A Movie Review.")

One goal of this movie is to challenge the tidy Hollywood notion of clear-cut heros and villains, even as the need for and mutual dependence of both sinners (villains) and saints (heros) is recognized. Indeed, all saints are sinners. All sinners are potential saints. "Christ and the devil are brothers," Carl Jung insists. ("'Inception': A Movie Review.")

The meta-issue is simply too large for this movie. However, there is enough of the core set of problems placed on screen -- thanks to an amazing performance by Heath Ledger demonstrating what is meant by dangerous acting -- that a good discussion is possible in terms of this text. I offer only a hint of such a discussion and not a full review of this movie.

I am experiencing too much pain to devote the attention necessary for a full review essay of this movie at this time. ("'The Constant Gardener': A Movie Review.")

"Deep down we're all predators."

The most fundamental conflict between Batman and Joker is about human nature. The Joker's dismal view of humanity is shaped by a history of abuse early in his life that is disclosed at the opening of the movie. This is not a view of persons that the director regards as normal or healthy. I agree that the Joker is sociopathic and irredeemably evil. This pathology is explicable, as I say, and all-too common in our century.

When the child's world of what should be protective adults is a kind of theater of cruelty, then the adult monster emerges as an expert in torture. Torture becomes the language or medium for social interaction in all relationships with others. When combined with abandonment issues, poverty, misery, loss and social isolation or stigmatizing -- the necessary ingredients are present for criminal behavior.

Some child victims will spend their lives seeking out monsters to hurt them, as they were hurt during childhood, in a deformed quest for the love they should have received from sadistic parents or other abusers. It is only genuine love which can break victims out of such a cycle of self-torture.

The "eat-or-be-eaten" mentality of criminals makes all others -- including children or desired bodies -- ripe for exploitation and, in some extreme cases, destruction. Sex is associated with cruelty of various kinds or body parts apart from persons, as individuals. Hence, the delight in violation evident from the "error" insertions at these blogs. Also, beauty and goodness are desired and still offensive to such monsters. The reality of these values and their own painful lack resulting from missing these values combined with hunger for genuine love must be denied and suppressed by evil-doers. This hunger is deviated into the possession of wealth and sex slaves, power and pleasure define the limits of what is desirable for evil persons. ("Judith Butler and Gender Theory.")

Hurting another human being distracts the suffering criminal from the "lack" that he or she is -- a lack which can only be filled with love. Guilt for harm done is minimized by demonizing the victim as "unethical," worthless, disgusting, a "whore," meat puppet, or "rodent" as Nazis described Jews. (See my forthcoming essay: "How Does a Jew Become Mengele?")

Freud and others have seen human beings as predators, aggressive, killers under the thin veneer of a fragile civilization, engaged in a "war of all against all" that is life. Talk of goodness, justice, beauty or love seems naive and sentimental to tough-minded thinkers eager to violate or dominate and destroy others. Like Prince Myshkin in Dostoevsky's The Idiot, the person concerned to be good is simply wrong, for evil-doers. There is no such thing as "good" apart from self-interest we are told by Dr. Phil.

Batman offends the Joker as a fraud who must be insincere. No one really believes in love (that's just sex) or goodness (that's just self-interest). It is all about power. If you impose enough pain on people -- maybe by hurting their children? -- you can make anyone into a monster of criminality, or close to it. As a result, it is O.K. for the Joker to be who and what he is: People are shit. Why not revel in the condition of befoulment?

If you can feel so little that the only way that you can be alive is by hurting another person, then you will find yourself constantly drawn to the sexual thrill of another person's agony. To encounter a victim whose goal is to remove the pain of the suffering soul that produces the cycle of cruelty is to create the drama of love as catharsis. Christianity and all ethics of love are concerned with this real possibility of healing through a sacrificial offering of the self. This is to externalize what Cynthia Freeman and many other scholars describe as the other-regarding capacity for love that is associated with women, primarily, in many places in the world. ("The Soldier and the Ballerina.")

"What would I do without you?"

The Joker makes it clear that he does not wish to kill Batman: "Why would I want to kill you? I don't want to kill you. What would I do without you? You complete me." (See ""Jerry McGuire.")

The dialectical partners in the twisted or reversed-form of the dialogue of love -- which is the dialogue of hate -- require each other for the tensions of civilization to play out. Antisemites need Jews; homophobes need gays and lesbians; racists need minority groups to exploit. Batman is perfect for the Joker. He cares. He reacts to the evil dilemmas presented to him, out of concern for others who suffer, despite his own flaws, even as the Joker is totally oblivious to the invasions and violations involved in presenting these choices that devastate people's lives. ("An Open Letter to My Torturers in New Jersey, Terry Tuchin and Diana Lisa Riccioli.")

The Joker's constant disappointment is that people are not as evil as he would like them to be in order to be validated in his own despicable actions. This suggests to the Joker not that he is wrong about human nature, but that most people are dishonest about who they are and what they want: "They're only as good as the world allows them to be." Mr. Garcia? Alex Booth? Terry Tuchin?

It's all relative for the Joker. The Joker refuses to see that, because our moral judgments must be subtle, cautious, nuanced and tempered always with the realization that we may be mistaken or unethical ourselves (Mr. Rabner?), given our own inadequacies and imperfections, we are nevertheless required to make moral judgments. Evaluations are tentative and never fully adequate because they are offered in relation to and imply objective and true values that alone make them meaningful. ("Why I am not an ethical relativist" and "John Finnis and Ethical Cognitivism.")

"Deep down" some of us will always refuse to be predators. We suffer with and for the other, sometimes for many years in our arenas of human cruelty. It is evil that is concerned with pleasure and pain balanced in utilitarian calculations made with regard to the lives of others.

Goodness is to accept suffering as the cost of loving flawed and broken persons, as imperfect as we are, yet still capable of feeling, striving, struggling to make things better. We love other persons who are not to be hurt, deliberately, for any instrumental reasons and much less for the pleasure of the person doing the hurting.

With enough love, pains disappear not as some kind of sexual gratification but as compassion or identification with the other. A person overwhelmed with suffering -- especially early in life when she cannot understand what has been done to her or why she was hurt -- may seek to live the life of another person who can share in her pain in order that she may bear or transcend it.

Women's basketball is beautiful because of the cooperation between team members, especially in defensive play. I argue for a kind of women's "team defense" with love and against evil. The writings of Maria Pia Lara and Simone Weil are my sources for this observation. Gravity and grace. ("For Floria Tosca -- With Love and Squalor.")

The Joker will never be free of his pain by forcing others to hurt as he does. Loving that shares in suffering is invitational. One must choose to love another person enough to share in pain, even if it means death. For sadly deluded tormentors, all such altruistic emotions are false. Everything is will to power, desire for consumption, greed because these are the only qualities discovered in themselves. For this reason evil persons sicken us. ("Neil M. Cohen, Esq. and Conduct Unbecoming to the Legislature in New Jersey.")

"The only morality in a cruel world is chance."

In a post-Holocaust world run by men, like the Joker -- whose religion is power -- reason, laws or rules, justice, order are endangered. Social life and international relations become a jungle for the manipulations of the powerless forced to make doomed bargains: your dignity or your pain; your love or your mind; hunger or obedience to our will; slavery or suffering at our hands.

Sanctions, embargos, conditioning in behaviorist dungeons, Auschwitz to Guantanamo, become the models for the options in human life. Constitutions, human rights, legal principles become lies to be ignored when it suits the purposes of the powerful. ("Law and Ethics in the Soprano State" and "New Jersey's 'Ethical' Legal System.")

Batman refuses to accept these alternatives while recognizing that the struggle against evil may require some accomodations with our own highest standards without abandoning those standards entirely. The claims that justice has nothing to do with government, politics is about power and not what is right, or that all rules are meant to be broken conflict with America's core values.

We are constantly forced to make tragic choices. The most tragic and unacceptable choice says: There is no criteria for selection, everything is relative, do what is greediest, best for you, and forget fairness or justice and the welfare of others. This nihilistic alternative is not American enough for me nor for Mr. Nolan: "We are to love our neighbor even to the point of welcoming sorrow. ... [we] must make ourselves vulnerable by identifying with ... suffering neighbors." Gary A. Anderson, "All Too Alienable," in Commonweal, April 8, 2011, at p. 21. A review of Nicholas Wolterstoff, Justice: Rights and Wrongs (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2011).

I suspect that Mr. Obama and Secretary of State Clinton agree that we must strive to do the right and good thing not because this is the easiest option, but because it is difficult to be who and what we are and must be in the world despite our many failures to achieve our ultimate goals.

We are "The United States of America." The American Constitution is not about "chance." This document creates an intricate structure of rational principles and doctrines for the government of free persons -- offering one another real equality and respect as persons -- where government is constrained by human rights in terms of how and what it can do to us. ("Manifesto for the Unfinished American Revolution.")

"Can we be good people in a bad world?"

We must be good people in a bad world. We must insist on remaining human. Even the person who has tortured and raped me, or hurt my family members, gets due process of law. Terrorists get trials. If convicted, they are sentenced in accordance with laws. We will not become what our enemies are. We will not torture people. We will not hurt children to make a point to their parents about obeying our will. We will not deny food, medicine, water to old people and children in any country because we dislike a government leader. I will not hurt a person to make him or her "agree" with me. I will not make anyone a slave. I also will not be a slave. ("Freedom for Mumia Abu-Jamal.")

We must continue to love those deemed loveless or "unworthy" of concern. I have been told that a person I have cared for over 37 years "is not a woman you love." For some "animals" she is a thing that men use and throw away. Any woman (or man) is capable of conduct that would horrify those whose comfortable lives do not impose tragic choices upon them. Choices like the desperate dilemmas we face every day between food or items we need and the requirements of our children and ALL of our loved-ones for shelter and care or a quality education.

If there is a single piece of bread then we will share it with all who are hungry. No one is left out. Persons are not laboratory animals to be used to illustrate theories or ethical choices dramatizing flawed views of human nature, as Dr. Mengele supposed, they are a locus of rights and responsibilities who must remain infinitely valuable and autonomous. ("Terry Tuchin, Diana Lisa Riccioli, and New Jersey's Agency of Torture" and "What is it like to be tortured?")

In living with the familiar effects of evil in my life, as one more powerless person in this world, I turn to creative efforts to communicate my reality, visse d'arte -- efforts and creative texts which are always in danger of being destroyed by those who fear truth. ("How censorship works in America" and "What is it like to be plagiarized?" then "'Brideshead Revisited': A Movie Review.")

"It is so easy to panic, to give up in despair, and to stop feeling. It is much, much harder to see around the unknown curve, to see beauty in ugliness, to see creative possibilities in apparent failures, to guess by means of intuitive wisdom just what the unborn thing we call our future will grow into. But this ability to transform despair into optimism is the mark of greatness. The great dignity of man, as Pascal, Sartre, and others have said, is his capacity to transcend his nothingness: to reach into his orphic depths and respond creatively. The coward pretends to indifference; the opportunist and psychopath, by equating fleeting problems with the human condition, turn despair into an instrument of terror; while the pragmatist, by subsuming virtue under order, uses terror to initiate a process which leads inevitably to the judicial condemnation of the innocent."

Despair is not necessary or inevitable:

"The creative person neither seeks to profit from despair nor indulges in pseudo-humanistic mythmaking. He [or she] senses instead the vast, urgent hunger of [persons] everywhere to become more human."

Lionel Rubinoff, The Pornography of Power: An Inquiry Into Man's Capacity for Evil (New York: Ballantine, 1968), pp. 214-215.