Cages

I'm sorry about the maudlin, indulgent entry I did yesterday. Sometimes this blog is a good way to let off some steam (even if it's really whiny steam - like Bob Dylan stuck in a kettle).

I'm feeling a bit more upbeat today, thanks in no small part to watching Con Air last night. It's an utterly ridiculous film, full of explosions and terrible teenage dialogue. It's excellent.

Lucy and I have been rewatching loads of cheesy action films lately, and this was a good one. The secret to a good Die Hard-esque action film is a few cool set-pieces, a bit of humour and an assortment of mismatched caricatures played by talented character actors. If your film has Colm Meaney playing an asshole authority figure with an implausible accent, and Steve Buscemi playing a psychopath, you can't go wrong.

Other important elements to an action thriller:

- people getting impaled
- exasperated officials
- jumping away from explosions
- puns, puns, more puns
- gratuitous nudity (sadly lacking in Con Air)
- people struggling to decipher simple clues, or easily deciphering really difficult ones
- phone calls being interrupted before important information is gleaned ("I've figured it out! The bad guy is... *BZZT*" "Johnson? Johnson!")
- and finally, if they fit into the narrative framework: time travel, head explosions, and a talking raccoon

***

I've also been belatedly thinking about Mothers' Day.

Apparently, Mothers' Day is an American invention, which was transferred onto the much older British tradition of Mothering Sunday. Traditionally, Mothering Sunday was more about families getting together than specific praise of the matriarch.

Also, Mothering Sunday was one of the few secular holidays that wasn't criticised or banned by religious orthodoxy. I suppose you'd have to be a cold-hearted puritan to ban a day devoted to family values.

Who could hate Mothers' Day? They deserve it, those mothers. One day a year. They deserve it.

I don't mean to get all feminist here, but Mothers' Day is essentially a tool of male oppression.

One day a year.

It was probably invented to keep women quiet. They don't have a reason to complain now, do they? Because one day a year they get breakfast in bed. I mean, sure: they have been kept from voting and thinking and participating. And they have been marginalised and discriminated against. And they have been patronised and enslaved and raped.

But look: toast!

One day a year, you get hot buttered toast! So stop your whining!

"But we're still paid less for doing the same job as men."

Alright, fine. Here are some tulips. Happy now, darlin'?

The funny thing is, we also have Fathers' Day. I'm sure it's partly a greeting card conspiracy, but it's also a testimony to the sheer selfishness of the privileged.

We had 364 days of preferential treatment and control. We gave them a token day. But then men thought: hang on a minute - where's my toast? Why does she get all the toast? Women do nothing all day, and their whole life if toast and tulips. Where's our day? It's unfair. It's sexist - that's what it is. We need our own day. Just one day - in praise of men. Is that too much to ask?

So we got our day too. Just to make things fair.

We don't really want tulips, but it's our prerogative. We can throw them in the bin. Or pass them onto our wives. We spoil them rotten, we really do!

It's the same lack of perspective that idiots use when they claim that it's the hard-working white British people that are the most oppressed minority. People do actually claim that.

But it's not exactly true. Thirty years of being encouraged to be nice to people probably isn't really the same level of oppression as hundreds of years of slavery. Close, but not quite.

Selfish people - and people who believe that selfishness is inevitable, so there's no point in trying - suffer from a lack of perspective. They think that any small injustice they suffer is more important than a great injustice inflicted on others.

And I suppose it is natural. If I stub my toe, it's more painful than someone in Africa being attacked with a machete. But that's because I'm me. And they're them. It can't really be a basis for decision making, or public policy.

Luckily, some people have this thing called empathy, that enables you to construct a broad picture of the world.

But empathy is often considered a sign of weakness. Complexity if for the non-committal, I suppose. It's better to make a decision and stick to it, even if it's wrong, or if it hurts people.

***

Wow, I was all over the place with that argument! It's probably the coffee.

I can't really be bothered to go back and make it make sense. Would you mind just editing it in your head into something coherent?

If you like, you can just rearrange all the words in this entry into something better. Like a piece about Jade Goody, or a horoscope.

That's the good thing about the written language. You can break it up and start again.

Like a Lego castle. Sometimes you don't want a castle, so you smash it to pieces, and build a Lego washing machine.

And wash little plastic clothes.

...

Sometimes, metaphors don't really do what I want them to do.