Liberalguy

Irony Man By Jerry Bowyer (bio)

Yes, I loved it. I’ve got an Y-chromosome, what do you expect? He is a man wrapped in a robot, wrapped in a missile. Oh, and he shoots lightning. He kills terrorists. He saves children. According to CNBC, Americans paid over one hundred million dollars in one weekend to see Iron Man do all that stuff. We’ll probably see it again. I liked the politics of it. I’ll pay to watch someone insult my politics once, if the movie is good, but the only people who get a second mini-van load of fully-paid-up Bowyers are the ones we agree with. Marvel gets us again because Iron Man is an entrepreneur. In fact, horror of horrors, he inherited the business from his father. In double fact (duck, incoming spoilers), the only Americans who oppose him are the lackeys of his upper-middle-management corporate weenie COO. The first half of the movie is an uncensored love note to US soldiery and capitalistic engineering ingenuity. In fact, Bill Gates has a photographic cameo early on. Also, note, our beloved, equity-loving Jim Cramer has a hilarious cameo about midway through the film. Yes, Iron Man, an arms manufacturer, does make a public announcement about walking away from the missile business, but only so he can build the ultimate missile and then wear it like a suit. Like Bruce Wayne before him, Iron Man is a billionaire. He gives some of it away, but he keeps most of it himself, and uses it to make things, including the kinds of things that kill Jihadi terrorists. Now that I think about it, the weenie COO is the one who does all the foundation stuff. He’s a glad handling flack in public but when he is revealed in all his evil, he talks a lot more like Henry Kissinger (vee muss mentain ze balintz uv powah). In fact Iron Man is the moral clarity guy, no winking and nodding at bad guys around the world. The bad guys have stubble, turbans and heavy Arabic accents. They torture people, including our hero. They slaughter families. Iron Man doesn’t spend any time trying to understand their rage. He admits that he had unwittingly with the best of intentions supported these fanatics in the past, and that the only thing he can do now is to make a better weapon and use it to go after them. When Churchill went to war with Jihadists in the Sudan (as you can read in his memoir) he said that the Brits were able to win because they were better at the logistics of battle. The sheikhs would give their long harangues about killing the infidel until they were hoarse, while the brits laid down train tracks, checking and rechecking their ammunition and their supply lines. Churchill called it ‘prophecy vs. prudence’. Religious zealoutry vs. technical competence.