Dark Knight of the Soul

Things we-- and Bruce Wayne-- learn during Batman Begins:

Terrorists want to spread fear and panic: that's the point of terrorism, not a side-effect. Terrorists love it when the fear and panic they cause make the target society do stupid things.

The worst weapons modern terrorists can use are the ones they'd like to steal from us.

Large numbers of riot police almost always mean that local or national government has already done something wrong.

If you listen to scientists, support basic research, and plan for public health emergencies now, you might prevent widespread death and destruction later.

Americans love enormous armored cars. (At least, they used to.)

Terrorists hate big cities.

If we lock people up without trials, then torture or kill them, we may not become just like the people we're fighting, but we won't be different enough. (Bruce figures this out in a mysterious Himalayan country early in the film. We figured this out by listening to Dick Durbin early in June.)

If your crime-prevention policy involves locking up all the worst criminals in the same place, or abandoning them to quasi-private entities, you are probably making a big mistake.

Noblesse oblige. FDR, like Bruce Wayne's dad, tried to save capitalism from itself. (The historian Bradford Wright calls early superheroes "super-New Dealers," which seems about right.)

Beware of local political machines (unless you can take them over, and maybe even then). New Dealers and their super-analogues (as Wright also says) used powers that came from faraway places, such as D. C., to make change happen in their hometowns.

Government by large corporations might be even worse than government by individual rich people, because large corporations have more difficulty acting on noblesse oblige. (Sometimes public pressure can make them do it; sometimes it takes Morgan Freeman.)

Port security matters. You never know what could come into Gotham on a ship.

Stiff-looking rich guys with vaguely European manners might know exactly how to save the world, but they will never be popular unless they wear cool-looking masks.