Ever since I was a little kid, and because my name is Robin, I have always admired my junior namesake of that dynamic duo, Batman and Robin.
Now with Wikileaks, and probably, only a Robin would notice this, the U.S. State Department seems to be seeking humint (human intelligence) from the bat cave.
Two stories today from different embassies use the Batman and Robin comparison, which I first noticed on the New York Times Ipad app.
The cable that got the most play was a dispatch from Moscow as quoted by one of the Wikileaks prime sources The New York Times on Vladimir Putin and Dimitri Medvedev
The cables sketched life almost 20 years after the Soviet Union’s
disintegration, a period, as the cables noted, when Mr. Medvedev, the
prime minister’s understudy, is the lesser part of a strange
“tandemocracy” and “plays Robin to Putin’s Batman.
Right beside the Russia story on the Times app and on the Times website is a story from Washington about a dispatch from Ottawa with the same analogy:
A trove of diplomatic cables, obtained by WikiLeaks
and made available to a number of publications, disclose a perception
by American diplomats that Canadians “always carry a chip on their
shoulder” in part because of a feeling that their country “is condemned
to always play ‘Robin’ to the U.S. ‘Batman.’ “
That leaves me wondering, how many other references to Batman and Robin exist in the Wikileaks State Department data dump?
Unfortunately, the Guardian’s searchable database only refers to real people, not fictional characters. Perhaps the Guardian should update its keyword search system.
Robins around the world need to know.