Batman Could Only Have Developed in America

      Not many characters from speculative fiction are uniquely associated with the United States.  Superman, despite "Truth, Justice, and the American Way," is from a distant planet.  Monsters are almost always foreigners: the Mummy from Egypt, Wolfman from the Celtic Lands, Frankenstein from Germany and Switzerland, Dracula from Transylvania, the Gillman from the Amazon Basin, Godzilla from Japan, Mothra from the South Pacific, etc., etc.  Wonder Woman hails from Atlantis and Green Lantern got his powers from somewhere out in the universe.  Silver Surfer caught a space wave from out beyond, as well.  

     But Batman is firmly rooted in the good old US of A more than any other, because his very name would not make sense elsewhere on Earth.  Consider that in Berlin he would translate as Flying Mouse Man, in Paris as Bald Mouse Man, and in Naples as Peep-Peep Star Man.  Further back, in the ancient Roman Empire, he would have been Little Evening Thing Man.  Even among the Brits, with whom we occasionally share a common language, his name could not have caught on, for it would suggest a flunkie serving a military officer.  And so it goes.  Not nametags that exactly would make a criminal tremble.  

     So we must be grateful for our homegrown hero, even if he dresses less patriotically than Captain America.  He is so much one of us, both in his strengths and his weaknesses.  Empowered with his belt full of technological wonders and beset with periods of emotional anxieties, Batman looms over Gotham like the ghost of our national imagination.  Whether the rest of the world will ever truly understand him, we know not.  Yet our own visceral bonds to him will never fail.  Hail to this Dark Knight in a land that dubs no knights of its own.  May he always lurk in the alleys where our fears wait to assail us, offering the salvation he could never give his own privileged family.  Batman is America.