Lawyers and lawsuit abuse: this is the greatest threat to
superheroes! I’m surprised nobody has made a movie about this yet. (Maybe
someone has, and I missed it?) These days, everybody always sues everybody else
over frivolous claims, like criminals sue people who fight back, police who
arrest them for violent offenses, etc. Surely superheroes would be the perfect
mark for this type of nefarious strategy!
In The Dark Night, the Joker offers to get rid of “The
Bat-Man” by killing him. All he’d really have to do these days would be to show
up all bruised and bloodied and say The Bat-Man bullied him and beat him up and
violated his civil rights just because he’s a dangerous violent criminal (like in Dirty Harry: a surprisingly prescient movie indeed!). And
we all know that these days it’s not permitted to give violent felons a taste
of their own medicine: only they are
allowed to abuse us; reversing
that and fighting back is cheating and illegal bullying and as such is a crime
against humanity!
So while he used to keep America safe for good people, these
days Superman would probably get sued by burglars and muggers and rapists and
other fiends and ne’er-do-wells for pain and suffering, as well as emotional
distress. In fact, these days, criminals would probably go through the motions of
perpetrating fake crimes just so the superheroes would show up and beat them
up, and then they could sue them for millions. This strategy would work
especially well against Batman, since Bruce Wayne is so über-wealthy. And when
he continued to be able to afford to pay out all of these damages to criminals
he’d roughed-up, it would become crystal clear to everyone who he was, because
after all, who else could possibly afford to pay damages award after damages
award, time after time, on top of hiring all those fancy-schmacy lawyers,
except for billionaire philanthropist (and bully of bad-guys) Bruce Wayne?
Perhaps today the most feared super-villain of all would be:
“The Shyster Lawyer”! (Or maybe: “The Judge” {He wears one of those British
barrister wigs and black robes, and he fights with a gavel in each hand,
hammering his opponents with blows from the “gavel of greedy jurisprudence” and
“the mallet of monetary malice”.}, or a team of super-extortionists called “The
Damages”.)
