Batman

 

I Am the Walrus

I am the egg man
They are the egg men
I am the walrus
Goo goo g'joob

I am the Batman, goo goo g’job.

I got excited when the National Renewable Energy Lab featured a story about the Gotham Knight. https://www.nrel.gov/news/features/2024/unleashing-the-power-batman-project-revolutionizes-battery-manufacturing.html. I should have realized that the project named Batman was short for Battery Manufacturing, and not the Gotham  Knight . Before that realization, my question was which Gotham Knight, the one before the Reagan presidency when Batman merely captured crooks for the Gotham  City Police Department OR the Batman after that time where his opponents were insane (at least according to his  morality) and were confined to Arham Asylum. It is the former Batman that was nearly cancelled, not current popular one. But there is another humbler meaning for batman that I would like to suggest is also more in keeping with the pre-1980s Batman.

That is an orderly to an officer in the British Army. It is derived not from the creature of the night, but from the term bat, the French word for a pack carried into battle. A batman managed an officer’s bat. In which case Alfred the butler is the batman to the current Batman.

A famous batman is Mervyn Bunter in Dorothy Sayers’s Lord Peter Wimsey mysteries. Bunter was Lord Peter’s batman during World War I and remained with him after the war to manage his affairs. Despite being only his valet, Bunter is Lord Peter’s friend. Lord Peter admires Bunter’s efficiency and competence in virtually every sphere, and trusts him with his life. We all need a batman like that. I hope that the National Renewable Lab’s project has that batman in mind, and not the current Batman who is all about imposing his point of view by dominance.