Gotham City Is a Caricature of Biblical Babylon

The dark knight rises and Gotham's dark night deepens.

Gotham is a virtual world that sprang into horrid actuality as alleged shooter James Holmes gave flesh and breath to his avatar, the Joker.

Survivors, some costumed in the attire of Gotham, ran into the dark night shrouding Aurora, Colorado, and emerged from the virtual world into hard concrete, shrill sirens, squawking police radios, and the cold metallic microphones of reporters seeking eye-witness sound bites describing the world's latest atrocity.

The survivors had escaped the virtual Gotham on the big screen only to run into a rock-hard parable spun by the prince of darkness himself. Until the Joker incarnate popped into the movie-house the celluloid Gotham was preferable because it disappeared when the film ran out.

Without the incarnation of evil, the late-night moviegoers would have taken their costumed selves to eateries, bars, and clubs, and talked about the chilling fiction they had watched, and the way it all seemed so real it was as if they were there.

Except they were there, horribly so. Read more