Encore Action, the pay-cable movie channel, has some promotion running about Jackie Chan where they say he’s always “kicking ass and taking names”. But in the footage in this promo, they only show him kicking ass; they seem to have forgotten all about the taking names part. Maybe he’s got a pen in his pocket or something, but he doesn’t seem use it, or to have anything to write on, either.
So does this mean they think fighting is better than writing? Well, excuse me, but violence isn’t always the answer; and after all, the pen is mightier than the sword! (Or so they always tell me: especially booky nerdy types who can’t fight well.) And isn’t showing all this fighting just serving as a bad example to our children, marinating them in the violent juices of torture and murder? And aren’t they making our world a more heinous and dangerous place where life is cheap, might makes right, and all those similar clichéd quotes?
I say that we should encourage our children to become literate, and to help them develop a more diplomatic, peaceful and compassionate value system. And the obvious right way of doing this is to make the action movies where the hero guy is always doing the part where he’s taking the names. We could see him writing stuff down in an ultra-exciting manner, with compelling camera moves and stuff like out of The Matrix, but where he’s just writing stuff down all the time! It would be awesome!
Then we could force this way of doing things on video games next, where warriors are always just writing proposals for how to settle everyone’s differences peacefully with compromise: so everybody ends up happy! They could have a United Nations video game where diplomats write stuff for weeks and then they get it proofread, and they make revisions in a dazzling display of authorship! Then, they could print up copies and distribute them for everyone to read!! And then, if everyone wasn’t happy, they could negotiate for whatever changes were required, and then they’d rewrite it again!!! And they go through the process again and again and again, in an awesome display of literacy and diplomacy! Awesome, huh? And then the author could give someone a paper cut while collating the documents, or accidentally staple someone’s finger, I guess, just to satisfy all of our bloodlust. (See? It’s not all boring!)
