I Wear the Black Hat: Grappling With Villains (Real and Imagined)

  Now, it would be wrong to casually discount the legitimacy of Ali’s feelings on these issues. His courage cannot be questioned. Ali always went all the way: When pressed over his unwillingness to fight in the Vietnam War due to his pacifist Muslim beliefs, he flatly stated, “Even if it means facing machine gun fire, I’ll face it before denouncing Elijah Muhammad and the religion of Islam. I’m ready to die.” He was not speaking metaphorically. Part of the reason we want to forgive him is that he spoke with so much electrifying conviction. But few people are willing to recognize just how out there Ali was in the 1970s. Before the 1975 fight in Manila, Ali bragged about attending a Ku Klux Klan meeting; he met with the KKK’s leadership because they agreed on the issue of interracial marriage (both sides saw it as an atrocity). The meeting was set up by Ali’s financial (and intellectual) backers, the Nation of Islam. This detail cannot be tossed aside: Muhammad Ali met with the KKK because he thought they had some good ideas. That’s as radical as radical gets. Today it’s common to hear members of the media bemoan how we don’t have athletes as politically aware as Muhammad Ali, and that’s totally true. But how, exactly, would ESPN react if someone like Cam Newton casually mentioned that he shared some common ground with the Aryan Brotherhood? It would be (ahem) “a problem.” But this bizarre historical footnote has not damaged Ali; in fact, it generally seems more interesting than troubling. No one factors it into Ali’s iconography, in the same way that Beatles fans choose not to accept the long-standing rumors of John Lennon’s abusive relationships with women. In many ways, it illuminates the core of Ali’s media brilliance. The reason his ill-advised missteps were eliminated from the conversation is not that Ali managed to convince the white working class to support Frazier; it’s that Ali made the intellectual class of white America believe that siding with unenlightened pro-Frazier rednecks meant they were retrograde intellectuals. Ali presented every idea — good or bad — as essential human truth, and he succeeded through sheer force of personality.

  Everyone knows history is written by the winners, but that cliché misses a crucial detail: Over time, the winners are always the progressives. Conservatism can only win in the short term, because society cannot stop evolving (and social evolution inevitably dovetails with the agenda of those who see change as an abstract positive). It might take seventy years, but it always happens eventually. Serious historians are, almost without exception, self-styled progressives. Radical views — even the awful ones — improve with age. What Ali managed to do was make the media cognizant of the future within the present tense. He presented “Ali/Frazier” as an inflexible dichotomy in which he was always the progressive, regardless of the facts. It did not matter that he saw social value in the separation of races; it did not matter that Frazier’s life experience personified the underclass Ali claimed to champion. To disagree with Ali was to disagree with social advancement, and if this felt contradictory . . . well, then, you clearly didn’t understand the conflict. How could any intellectual dispute Ali’s insights on race? Did they not know who he was and what he had gone through? “Joe Frazier’s just an ordinary individual,” Ali reminded them. “He doesn’t represent anything.” Here again, it all comes down to confidence: Ali had proven himself as radical and defined himself as meaningful. Siding with Frazier in 1972 was siding with the wrong side of history in real time. And once the intellectual class embraced that perspective, they never retreated. The passing of time only cements that certitude. They need their memory to correspond with reality, so they establish a reality that’s new.

  In Ali’s defense, it must be noted that he apologized for his treatment of Frazier, privately to Frazier’s son Marvis and publicly in a 2001 edition of the New York Times (although, curiously, never to Joe himself). There are other mitigating factors to consider, most notably Ali’s age, his education, and the amount of control the Nation of Islam held over him. (Some of Ali’s most famous quotations — including the sublime “No Vietcong ever called me Nigger” — were directly fed to him by other people.) If we objectively balance the good things Ali did against the bad, there’s no question he’s ultimately heroic. But that’s not the issue. The issue is that these kinds of questions are never weighed objectively. That’s not how the court of public opinion operates. It’s easy to think of iconic figures who lived mostly moral lives, only to have their legacy obliterated by one fatal mistake. Considering the irony of this particular conflict, it seems like this error could have devastated the perception of Ali. It seems like something people would never forget, and (I suppose) this essay proves that some people haven’t. People remember. But they don’t care, because Ali was too “Ali.” He convinced the world that his statements were always politically justified, even when they weren’t. He was too confident to question. We had to let it go.

  I am of the opinion that D. B. Cooper fell from the sky and died on impact. There’s nothing to suggest he survived and a lot of evidence suggesting he did not, most notably the 1980 discovery of $5,800 in the Columbia River (it was found by an eight-year-old boy, and the serial numbers on the deteriorating currency identified it as part of Cooper’s ransom). Of course, the discovery of that money had the reverse effect on Cooper superfans, some of whom insist that Cooper consciously planted the $5,800 in the water to make people think he died. [And this, of course, is the central problem with conspiracy theorists — once you inflexibly accept that something is a conspiracy, any contrary evidence has the paradoxical effect of making your case stronger. Every contradiction deepens the conspiracy. I suppose this axiom doesn’t perfectly apply to the Cooper case, because this isn’t a “conspiracy” in the classic sense — no one views it as a governmental cover-up. But it’s a case of insane wish fulfillment, which operates in almost the same way. The role of the government is simply replaced with anyone rational.]

  Still, I would like to believe that D. B. Cooper is alive. I like to imagine him living on the beach in Cabo, somehow subsisting on the $194,200 he didn’t ingeniously plant in the river to throw off the Feds. There’s a community in Washington (a town called Ariel, population 870) that commemorates the 1971 air crime every November, which is not that distant from celebrating a prison break or a bank heist. But it feels distant, and everyone accepts that feeling as reasonable. You simply don’t find people interested in this case who don’t side with Cooper. He’s something that can’t exist in the modern present: the universally beloved hijacker.

  In the weeks following the September 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, it became common to classify the suicidal terrorists as “cowards.” George W. Bush called them this directly, and others have continued to reinforce the sentiment. (“For seven years, I have marveled at the utter cowardice of the 9/11 hijackers,” declared CNN’s Gary Tuchman on the attack’s 2008 anniversary.) The language was a conscious, semantic counterattack; Bush specifically chose the word cowardice for its loaded Islamic connotation: “The most evil [traits] in a man are severe stinginess and uninhibited cowardice,” states the prophet Muhammad in a collection of platitudes titled Sunan Abu Dawud. [Semi-related: I find it amusing that this document places “stinginess” on par with “cowardice.”] To a much larger degree, it was just a backward way of thinking about what happened on that September morning. Killing yourself for political reasons is stupid and unjustified, but it’s certainly not cowardly. It’s the opposite of cowardly. Still, this became the default way to present the character of the 9/11 terrorists (so much so that comedian Bill Maher lost his job at ABC for pointing out the linguistic hypocrisy). In general, anything involving suicide (terroristic or otherwise) is tagged as “cowardly” and “selfish.” Yet here we have Cooper — a man who put the lives of private citizens at risk for nothing except money — and he gets tagged as bold. He’s an anti-authoritarian ballbreaker, referenced in Kid Rock songs and appreciated by everyone who’s able to remember who he was. The takeaway is not just that D. B. Cooper is not a villain;
the takeaway is that what D. B. Cooper attempted is actively perceived as good.

  Now, I’m not trying to argue that Cooper and Mohamed Atta are ultimately the same. They are fundamentally different. But that shouldn’t make them opposites, because they do share a massive similarity. They’re both defined by the decision to hijack an airplane, so they should both exist on similar tiers of distaste: Atta should obviously be hated more, but Cooper should be hated some. It seems like hijacking a plane is reason enough to vilify someone, and the level of villainy should mostly come down to motive; in other words, wanting to kill strangers and annihilate secular society is worse than the desire for unearned money. But neither option should be a net positive. D. B. Cooper knew the most (about airline protocol and skydiving) and cared the least (about his safety and the safety of others). He should be a villain. But that overlooks the one intangible that makes Americans forgive everything else: superhuman self-assurance. The motive for a hijacking matters, but not as much as the execution. Cooper had verve. In the same way that people who kill themselves are denigrated for wanting to die, he is exonerated for assuming he could easily survive. He believed he could make outrageous demands that the airline would accept; he believed he could parachute from a commercial airplane in the middle of the night; he believed he would avoid the inevitable nationwide manhunt and never be found. The fact that he believed all this while remaining “a gentleman” makes him historically indestructible. Is there anything more attractive than a polite person with limitless self-belief? There is not. Avoiding villainy is not that different from avoiding loneliness: First, you must love yourself. And if you do that convincingly enough, others will love you too much.

  EASIER THAN TYPING

  Let’s pretend Batman is real.

  [I’m aware that this opening is enough to stop a certain kind of person from reading any further. It could be the opening line from an episode of Community that references a previous episode of Community. But that’s life. That’s how it goes.]

  Let’s pretend Batman is real. Let’s assume Gotham City is the real New York, and someone is suddenly skulking the streets at night, inexplicably dressed like a winged mammal. (For the sake of argument, we’re also assuming this is happening in a universe where the preexisting Batman™ character has never been invented by DC Comics, so no one is presuming that this is a person impersonating Batman — this is an original Batman, within a world where he’s never been previously imagined. It’s also happening within our current reality, so supervillains don’t exist.) He has an amazing car, a willingness to engage in street violence, and no affiliations with any traditional authority. He is, however, driven by the same interior motives as the conventional comic book character: Having seen his parents murdered, a super-rich orphan decides to dedicate himself to crime fighting. But you, of course, don’t know those dark details. This scenario has just emerged from the ether. There’s no preexisting backstory. No one knows anything about who this Bat Person is or what he hopes to accomplish. We are all learning about Batman in real time; every detail about his life is presented as new information.

  You first hear about Batman anecdotally. At a dinner party, someone tells a story he’d heard from someone at his office: A young woman was being gang-raped in the Bronx, but a costumed stranger swooped in and beat the criminals senseless. Or maybe you heard the same story in a different way; maybe you hear about a mother whose teenage son ended up in the hospital after a man dressed like a winged mammal broke his jaw. (In this version of the confrontation, the hospitalized teen was innocently hanging out with his friends and flirting with a promiscuous girl they all knew from school.) A few weeks later, you hear another story from a more trustworthy acquaintance you are inclined to believe — he claims he was walking home from a tavern in Brooklyn when he saw a man wearing a cape jumping between the roofs of two tall buildings. Soon after, everyone in the city seems to be obsessing over this unknown Bat Person, sometimes gravely but often ironically. He is constantly trending on Twitter.

  While taking a train uptown, you see subway graffiti spouting obtuse slogans like BATMAN DESTROYS. There’s a local TV news report in which policemen are interviewed about the rumor of a man dressed like a bat protecting the ghettos; the cops insist that vigilantism is wrong and that this person is dangerous (if he even exists, which remains unproven). The New York Post publishes the first mainstream story about Batman: They love him (an editorial half-jokingly urges him to become more violent). The Village Voice responds to the Post’s depiction, satirizing Batman as a homoerotic cross between Mike Tyson and Rudy Giuliani. The New York Times publishes a short online story that strongly implies Batman is an urban myth. The New York Daily News presents a series of detailed, semi-gratuitous examples of how the buzz around Batman is changing crime patterns in the metro area. Eventually, an irrefutable video of Batman is captured on someone’s iPhone and streamed on numerous websites. Soon after, the New York Times concedes that Batman is real; it labels him as “a criminal outlier.” A Fox News pundit nationalizes the story, arguing that the existence of a Batman proves that Democratic leadership is failing the American people. Conspiracy theories suggest Batman was created by the CIA in order to undermine the Occupy Wall Street movement. Media bloggers are convinced this is all an advertising campaign for a yet-to-be-released sports drink. The New York Observer examines his role as a burgeoning fashion icon. Soon after, Batman murders an unarmed man in public, seemingly at random; when authorities search the victim’s apartment, they find evidence linking the dead man to a ring of child pornographers. Public opinion continues to splinter. Because he wears a ridiculous costume and cannot be captured, most informed citizens come to a collection of related conclusions: This so-called “Batman” — whoever he is and whatever he hopes to achieve — is brilliant, brutal, insane, capricious, unwilling to compromise, and obsessed with the criminal underworld.

  But here again . . . this is all you know.

  The only things you know about Batman are what you’ve heard through gossip or gleaned from the media (so you really don’t know anything). Divorce yourself from the fact that you already believe Batman is a heroic figure. Don’t think about Adam West or Michael Keaton. Don’t imagine yourself as a citizen of Christopher Nolan’s Gotham; imagine yourself as yourself. Try to pretend that all you know about this figure is what you’ve just read in the previous three paragraphs. You don’t know that he’s secretly a millionaire. You don’t know what his motives are. All you know is what you read in the papers.

  Do you root for this person, or do you want him arrested?

  Bernhard Goetz was not Batman. This should be obvious, particularly since Batman is not widely perceived as a squirrel-obsessed racist. The person Bernhard Goetz is more often compared to is Paul Kersey, the character portrayed by Charles Bronson in the Death Wish movies: After the murder of his wife and the rape of his daughter, Kersey (a reformed pacifist) walks around the worst parts of Nixon-era New York in the hope of being mugged; whenever it happens, he shoots his attackers dead. This modus operandi prompts a fundamental question about passive-aggressive victimhood: If you want to be attacked, are you still a victim? I’m sure Goetz would say yes. He’d also argue that no one ever “wants” to be attacked, and that his actions were simply the inevitable, unfortunate result of a city’s failure to keep its populace safe (so perhaps he has more in common with Batman than we want to believe, at least within my projection of his mind).

  “I wanted to kill those guys. I wanted to maim those guys. I wanted to make them suffer in every way I could.” This was Goetz speaking in the hours after his surrender and arrest on the last day of 1984. The “guys” Goetz was referring to were four black teenagers who (probably) tried to mug him on the downtown number 2 express train in Manhattan. I use the word probably because there are some who’d argue that the four youths were mere panhandlers who had politely asked Goetz for five dollars without any threat of violence, even though they all had minor police
records (and despite the fact that one of them would later admit they were probably going to rob him). The four teens walked toward Goetz and requested/demanded money; Goetz pulled out an unlicensed .38 caliber handgun and shot all four, right there in the subway car. (In a 1996 interview, he claimed this act was “easier than typing.”) All four survived, although one took a bullet in the spinal cord and was paralyzed for life. Goetz, by his own admission, was pretty ruthless: “If I had more bullets, I would have shot ’em all again and again. My problem was I ran out of bullets.” He also says he considered gouging one of the victims’ eyes out with his apartment key, a resolutely un-Batmanlike move.