In this past Sunday's New York Post, Peggy Noonan came at the Aurora shooting from a "new" angle, the movie was to blame. If Mr. Holmes hadn't had the super villains Bane and the Joker to imprint on then he would not have been driven to kill.

Beside the fact that that this call for censorship in art has a long history, it is only partially true. For example the art critic of the NYT, Mr. Clarence Cook, said this about Thomas Eakins' painting "The Gross Clinic".

"...one of the most powerful, horrible and yet fascinating pictures that has been painted anywhere in this century. It is a shame that the work is hung in a public gallery where men and women of weak nerves must be compelled to look at it. For not to look is impossible." (It is a painting of a man being operated on for bone cancer.)

It's just that Mr. Cook said this in 1875.

For the movies there was the Hayes Commission in the thirties, for comics the Comics Code in the fifties. Thus we get married couples sleeping in double beds in thirties musicals, and the campy Batman of that inexorable TV show.

The real problem, as I see it, is that we live in a post-honor culture. Therefore the concept of the sacrifice unto death that drove soldiers till the rethinking of war after WWI has killed the idea of heroism, and therefore honor, in the West.

Yes, the Joker and Bane are horrible, as Albert says "Some men only want to see the world burn." But they are the natural antagonists of a superhero like Batman. Posit a superhero, you must play him against a super-villain. Batman is just not built to take on the Real Crispy Gangsters of central Brooklyn.

But what of the world we live in. Since the end of the WWII movies Hollywood has not gone in search of a hero from the real world, and definitely not an American soldier. They killed the Cowboy and the the G.I., leaving only room for Batman and the other caped crusaders.

Since the early nineties CAIR and other groups have prevented the use of Islamic villains, as Dr. Said would say it's "Orientalist". All the movies made in the last decade on the subject of Iraq showed the soldiers as unthinking killing machines, or losers unable to get a better life, or victims of one sort or another.

In his book "Honor: A History" James Bowman defines honor thusly; a sense of justice, that when struck, one will strike back. Or as Sean Connery says in "The Untouchables" "If they bring a knife, you bring a gun."

Just one more aside on this subject. I was recently reading an analysis of "High Noon" and weather the subtext was anti-Communist. Maybe yes, maybe no; but through out the text there was no mention of the Grace Kelly character and her Quaker based pacifism. It is her moral scruples to avoid violence at any cost, even to the re-enslavement of the towns people, that is so very important to the moral questions that Gary Cooper has to contend with, mainly the question of his honor.

He made his decision, can we ever again make ours?

JimG33