Batman really is a superhero, as it turns out.

It began very oddly, as police in Montgomery, Maryland, pulled over a fully-costumed, caped crusader -- spike-earred, face-covering cowl and all -- driving along in a Batmobile, a black Lamborghini sporting Bat-plates.

And so it was, about those plates, that Batman was pulled over, the cops wondering about those plates, that car, that Bat-driver.

The real license plates were inside the car.  The plates that had been mobile, mounted on the Lamborghini, displayed the Bat-symbol.

It depends how you view it:  How lucky, or unlucky, can any one person get? Here are two books arguing wildly separate cases, two more books identified as must-reads.  It is uncertain who among us will turn-a-dumbed-down-and-blinded, societal eye to either:  Who will bother to low-crawl beneath the barbed-wire past of one of them -- whose head is not already filled with too many fears regarding America's future to sift through the other?  Odds seem heavy against both.

Taken together, this pair speaks of real-life nightmares, cold, bracing bookends embracing all that is harshly dismal and bleak -- salted with flecks of astonishing insight, peppered with humanity.  If you are worthy of the trek, and can bear up under issues of such formidable size, and can render hefty sighs, these are for you.  The books are compelling and will propel you to pinpoints in time and space where no one will hear you screaming -- or, even if someone should, they themselves might be screaming, too.

Humanity has a bunch of rabidly-serious, snarling-mad problems, not the least of which is a god-complex that sooner or later gets in the way, swaggering in, sure we can save the day. Otherwise, humans tend to be binary, mostly switch off, do little to nothing constructive, leaving end-results to The Fates, to an assortment of denominational gods and goddesses.

In the latter scenario, we eventually despair, throw ourselves on the fire of last resort -- Science -- and expect its wizardry to sort everything out, help remove our well-toasted behinds, roasted glutes, and charred butts from the inferno.  The track record here is spotty, maybe 50-50 on a good day, despite some really impressive showstoppers -- returns from the space program, amazing leaps in medicine, too.

More than a month we are now from Trayvon Martin's killing, still unable to get any clean traction of facts amid all the slipping and sliding of local cops tripping all over stand-your-ground laws.  So, here we are, wondering why it is we have to step back to take in this view, a scene that seems pretty cut and dried, simple for anyone to understand why this teenager died.

Racism never likes to announce itself, though. As drivers of action, it's quite retiring, instead preferring to hang in the background, make excuses, nudge other notions closer to the front as reasons for things people do.  See:  Racism understands that if it came right out and spoke its mind, truth would be revealed:  I don't like you because you are different from me.