I have watched the trailer for “The Dark Knight,” the second Batman movie to feature Christian Bale, at least 10 times now. This is what happens when you live in a small coastal town and you have nothing to do over winter break.

It’s a pretty sweet trailer. Christian Bale is good, and Heath Ledger is pretty scary as a messed-up Joker. Maggie Gyllenhall replaces Katie Holmes — in the cuteness department, a definite downgrade. The trailer was instantly and inevitably re-done (with the same sound but different visuals) on YouTube with clips from both the 1960s and 1980s Batmans.

Dwelling on Batman, however, led me to a grand, satisfying and truly meaningless conclusion: he, above all the other superheroes, is the one best suited to our current time.

I will not resort to negative, Romney-esque attacks (he’s just showing a contrast! Really!), and instead, sing the praises of Batman. The Spiderman, X-Men and Superman movies in recent years have been truly terrible, but this isn’t about them. This is about Batman. And America. We need to stay on topic, about Batman, here. He is the most important for our time by far. How so? Let me count the ways.

America IS Batman. One day, America is a mild-mannered industrialist Bruce Wayne, fond of capitalism and nice cars. The next, America is Batman, the world’s superpower and policeman, saving mild-mannered countries from the extraterritorial ambitions of rogue states and criminal elements. And now fond of really flippin’ sweet cars.

“You’ve changed things. There’s no going back. To them, you’re just a freak,” says the Joker during the trailer, and, in a sense, he is saying something about America. Batman is the reluctant policemen of an anarchic world, hated when he saves it, hated when he doesn’t. We were “bad” for not intervening in Rwanda, we were “bad” for intervening in Iraq. One day we’re a normal country, making friends with Canada, the next we’re the hegemon dismissing Western Europe as “old.”

It’s a dark time for Gotham, and the world. The R-word is looming. The financial markets are unstable. Some countries, like Pakistan, teeter on the brink of instability, others like Venezuela and Russia teeter on the brink of authoritarianism. It’s unclear whether liberalism is winning against Islamic terrorism. More than ever, America’s place in this murky Gotham is uncertain, and in flux.

Batman’s struggle to determine his proper place in society, where he is profoundly different than everyone else, mirrors America’s. We are different. We are the only country able to project power around the globe, the country that sets economic and financial norms, and the one with political leadership over the liberal-democratic world. How do we use this power? Should we try to establish a truly global international order, as we did in the 1940s and 1950s with Bretton Woods and the United Nations? Or should we retreat to the Batcave of isolationism, as Ron Paul advocates, never to impose our values on the world?

We’ll have to watch “The Dark Knight” to find out. Or at least watch the trailer about another dozen or so more times.