Hey, I love your analysis and deconstructions (i cluded but not limited to superhero stuff) and was wondering if you wanted to expand on the Flash part of the Justice League deconstructions? It feels like there are a lot of ways that particular description COULD go, so I was curious about which one you were thinking of at the time/found the most interesting.
It is admittedly a very uncharitable read on the character, and it wouldn't be the be-all-end-all deconstruction of a character with super speed, but given all the discourse volleys over the last five years about implicit and explicit copaganda in the superhero space, I've always found it weird that that ten-ton hammer never seemed to come down particularly decisively on Barry Allen, the one hero in the Justice League who's literally a no-frills police officer in his civilian identity, and that informed my take there.
(It's also very possible that I've never seen this point discussed simply because I wasn't active on here concurrently with The Flash being really big, I'm certain someone must have noticed and hashed this out at some point. I remember people complaining about the cells they were keeping those Metahumans in without trial well before 2020, on sites other than Tumblr. It's not a new observation.)
Anyway, If I were to play the one-liner deadly seriously, my take would be to take the horrorshow mindsets associated with cop-turned-vigilantes as they exist in real life (self-righteous black-and-white thinking, disdain for the "inefficiency" of due process, rampant bigotry, investigative sloppiness) and then append to that the ability to functionally create a one-man panopticon, and let 'er rip. Kingdom Come had a slightly-less dystopian version of this, a Flash who'd basically apotheosized to the point of being omnipresent within Central City and therefore capable of stopping almost all bad things from happening to everyone everywhere within his fiefdom- but that deconstruction was approaching from the direction that the moral responsibilities of having the Flash's power, taken to their logical conclusion, would be intensely dehumanizing to a person as conscientious as Barry Allen is usually shown to be. (see also The Ballad of Barry Allen by Big Jim's Ego.) This would be coming from the other direction, the potential terror of living according to the foibles of an omnipresent busybody with terminal cop-brain.
