The Dunning-Kruger hero

By Zach Hagadone
Reader Staff

Alexis De Tocqueville, Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln get most of the credit for the notion that, “In a democracy, the people get the government they deserve.” French diplomat Joseph de Maistere wrote it first, though. In his words: “Every nation gets the government it deserves.” The theme has been hashed and rehashed. Adlai Stevenson, in the mid-20th century, said, “In a democracy people usually get the kind of government they deserve.” Other sources attribute this nugget of bitter wisdom to George Bernard Shaw, Winston Churchill and, in classic meme-style, pretty much any salty old white guy from Mark Twain to Hunter S. Thompson.

Courtesy photo.

No matter who said it, it’s a remake. So was The Suicide Squad, released in 2021 as a pointed do-over from the disastrously crappy 2016 DC Comics film Suicide Squad. The former was orders of magnitude better than the latter, and shining within it was a character who more than any other — including Harley Quinn — deserved their own spinoff: Peacemaker, whose character-centered series is streaming on HBO Max.

Played by John Cena as “a libertarian psycho who will murder anyone for ‘liberty’ and ‘peace,’” as the Reader described it at the time, Peacemaker was far and away that film’s “funniest, darkest role.” And, if we get the government we deserve, then we also get the superheroes we deserve; and, following that, we deserve Peacemaker. 

Not unlike Homelander, from the Amazon Prime series The Boys, Peacemaker is an avatar for the American amygdala — a physical manifestation of our collective jingoism and the murderous righteousness that goes along with it. Theodore Roosevelt talked about walking quietly and carrying a big stick; Peacemaker is the stick, but he doesn’t walk quietly. He fairly stomps around to a soundtrack of jock rock, shooting and kicking everyone who gets in the way, oblivious to who truly stupid he actually is. (E pluribus unum replaced by Dunning-Kruger Effect, as it is.) 

His animal sidekick is a bald eagle that he’s named “Eagly” — which was the name I gave my own stuffed-animal eagle when I was 6 years old — and he wears a ludicrous shiny-metal helmet above a superhero suit that features a white dove, reminiscent of any number of evangelical Christian church mailers. 

Those who watched The Suicide Squad will be familiar with Peacemaker’s character arc: He betrayed his team at the behest of a secretive U.S. security agency, which leveraged his donkey-brained loyalty to protect its darkest secrets. After that, according to the HBO Max series, he went back to jail but gained his release because — as always — “there’s another job.”

And so the shadow government agency trots Peacemaker back out into the world to fight its morally bankrupt battles — this time against a body-snatcher threat. 

Some kind of alien (or is it?) power is taking over people’s minds and bodies with a bizarre type of flying insect-like organism, turning them into zombies termed “butterflies.” Peacemaker must bring his brand of “peace” to the situation (the old Romans called it a “desert” or “wasteland”), while navigating his own psychological horrors, including reckoning with why he’s “Peacemaker” in the first place. Spoiler alert: It’s because his dad was an enormous George Wallace-meets-Bull Connor-meets Barry Goldwater-level jerk.

Peacemaker is brutal. It’s also funny and dark-hearted, satirical and smart. Directed by James Gunn, who also brought The Suicide Squad to the big screen, it’s a high-value piece of TV-turned-cinema that’s earned a 94% critical rating on rottentomatoes.com and an 85% audicence score. 

We deserve Peacemaker, but not as an anti-hero. He’s a villain in a protagonists’ role. We all should think about that, before we identify with him, which makes Peacemaker a series for our times: A remake/spinoff/rehash for our remade/spunoff/rehashed times.