CSotD: Villains and Heroes or reasonable facsimiles thereof
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Today's Baby Blues could touch off a full rant on its own, since it doesn't take much to get me started on the topic of my summers at Camp Lord O' The Flies, and a shameful lesson I learned was just what Zoey states: Better anyone else but me.
As a small kid with a big mouth, it wasn't hard for me to become a scapegoat. I couldn't beat anyone up, and I was fully capable of being unintentionally annoying.
I might have learned to shut up and stay out of the way, but I'm not sure that would have been effective. The cabin was the social nexis, and each cabin chose a goat from among its half-dozen little boys.
And the tag traveled: At least one cabinmate, likely two, perhaps three, would be in your activity group, and at your table for meals, so there was no chance of a summer in which you were picked on in your cabin but got along elsewhere.
You learned, after a summer or two, that it was not sufficient to keep a low profile. Somebody in your cabin was going to hold the short stick, and you could either be part of the selection process or the victim of that process.
The camp director had this Victorian dream of a kid learning to box and wrestle so he could go home and punch out the school bully, so he not only tolerated bullying but occasionally made a spectacle of it, breaking up a scuffle in the cabin so the pair could duke it out in the ring for the whole camp.
Which might be justifiable if at any time in the seven years (56 weeks) I had been either a camper or on staff, the victim had risen up and smote the bully, but all I ever learned from it was that a lot of our bullies were pretty good boxers, too.
Of course, Zoe is talking "mean girls," where the bullying doesn't involve punching anyone, though I'm sure in a camp setting it would include a lot of pranks that would be funny if the popular kids were doing them to each other, which is never the case.
"Mean girl" bullying always reminds me of a "Friends" episode in which Ross and Chandler are being harassed by a couple of tough guys, and Phoebe observes that she doesn't know why guys have to hit each other.
Among the girls, she recalls, if they didn't like someone, they'd just tease her until she developed an eating disorder.
"Friends" being a particularly apt source for this kind of insight.
Now here's someone else's rant
To show I'm not totally self-absorbed, let me now go on about someone else's rant. The current arc at Candorville, which began yesterday, isn't the first indication of Darrin Bell's annoyance over the Eddie Murphy film, "Mr. Church."
Two weeks ago, he posted the trailer on his Facebook page, mostly allowing it to speak for itself:
… to which, in the comments, someone posted this slightly less subtle and certainly more delightful clip:
As a member of the Offending Class, I'm limited in what I can say on the topic, but as a writer, let me point out that the character of the workingclass person who imparts wisdom and lessons is well-established and goes back farther than the idea of a workingclass itself.
Enkidu, after all, was the brutish man of the earth who in many ways schooled the more royal Gilgamesh, though you needn't go back 4,000 years for examples.
In "Tom Brown at Oxford," the 1861 sequel to the blockbuster "Tom Brown's Schooldays," Brown befriends a student who is working his way through school as a waiter, and discovers that he is a more worthy friend than the spoiled young wastrels more typical of his classmates, a conceit so attractive that Owen Johnson ripped it off nearly intact a half century later for "Stover at Yale."
In those cases, the difference is class.
It becomes more nuanced in "Zorba the Greek," where his ethnicity is uncertain: Is he Greek or Macedonian? But, though a bit of an outsider within his own community, Zorba possesses the "otherness" to teach his uptight English employer to dance in the face of tragedy.
But it's a memorable moment in a very good movie, and one I prefer to think of as influenced by class and experience rather than race.
Though I also remember learning the dance at a cocktail party straight out of the pages of the New Yorker, so there's still a Redeeming Whitey factor at play, as well as a chasm between the things we claim to have learned and the lives we continue to lead.
But that was 1964, and Hollywood is increasingly less selective.
It was, for instance, logical for the Lone Ranger to be befriended by an Indian who knew his way around the world in which the story happens. (We'll discuss the dead bird another time.)
But there was no freaking reason in the universe for Kevin Costner's Robin Hood to haul a magical negro back from the Holy Lands to teach him how to get along in his own society.
That was always Littlejohn's job, to the extent that a hardy Saxon hero had to be taught to outwit the Norman overlords in the first place.
And don't get me started on Kevin Costner anyway, because I have just dealt with criticism from an expert on "Native American" history, which is an oxymoron in itself, since I've never met an enrolled tribal member, much less a tribal historian, who used the silly term.
Bottom Line: There's no need to abandon the idea that people who have lived harder lives than our own can bring us back to essential principles.
But Hollywood's increasing embrace of the racial shortcut is a reminder that "Uncle Tom" began with cheesy, low-budget theatrical versions of the original, more well-grounded version of the story.
And that even that better version had seen its day.
Dances with Mongooses
Mike Peterson has posted his "Comic Strip of the Day" column every day since 2010. His opinions are his own, but we welcome comments either agreeing or in opposition.
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