The Man Who Wasn’t Joking

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“A Grin That Became Doctrine”
Permit me to recount an observation.
Brief in length.
Darkly humorous.
Inescapably tragic.

The gravest error made by historians and moralists alike
was to presume he was one man.

He was not.
He was never merely Gotham's ghost.
Rather, he emerged wherever alienation laughed through bloodied lips
—and silence followed.
No one asked why.
They only turned away.

What followed was not revolution, but contagion.
Not led by ideology, nor driven by leadership.
It had no manifesto.
It needed none.
It moved like wildfire,
because it required only one thing:
a void where meaning should be.

He was not a leader.
He was a question wearing a grin.
And that question was simple:

“What if the world deserves this?”

And the world—
fractured, overstimulated, anesthetized—
replied not with reason, but with laughter.

Ha.
Ha.
Ha.

Thus, every metropolis became a variation of Gotham.
Every unrest echoed a smile carved in smoke.
And eventually, the question changed.

Not:
"How did we get here?"

But rather:
“Which mask fits me today?”