Snoopy and Charlie Brown: The Peanuts Movie (Steve Martino, 2015)
"The whole world seems to be conspiring against me. I'm just asking for a little help for once in my life."
Thanks so much for coming, please, take a seat, I want to talk to you about games. Not sports games, but board games. Specifically games that require dice.
You roll the die or dice and usually if you get a high number this is good, and if you get a low number this is bad, but it's always about dice. Imagine a game you could play where you did well simply by doing good. And by 'doing good' I mean doing what we call good deeds. That's not the way a game works because a game has rules. To exemplify these rules let's go into a cafe and buy a coffee. Now, I want a double macchiato, which is approximately £1.90-£2.50 at the time of writing. In order to get the coffee we have to give the person behind the counter the given amount of money in either cash or on a card. We can't proffer up a cash equivalent. I can't bring a book into the cafe and trade this in for the coffee. And I especially can't get the coffee on the promise of a good action. This is not a barter system, this is a system in which numbers count.
Going back to the board game, I roll a 6 and I do well. When a person does well we say it's down to hard work, and yes, that's true, but there's also a great deal of importance connected to the roll of a die. We don't see this though. Or perhaps we see it but don't want to talk about it. Only the other day I read an interview with Tracey Emin where she spoke, as successful people always do, of the importance of hard work. But, as ever, to believe this would be to believe a lie.
You're reading a history written by winners. By people who rolled a 6. It's a history that claims that those who roll a 6 are simply better players than others, harder workers. But there are plenty of people out there who are talented, and work hard, but come up snake eyes every time. I would never speak out against hard work, but I would speak out against the existence of a mantra that more often than not has the effect of negatively impacting on those whose hard work is never recognised.
But I'm straying. Instead I want to return to the idea of a game in which you do well by doing good. Some people might call this a karmic system: it's the idea that when you do something good for others something good will come to you. It's nice, and it makes sense, it seems just. If you were cynical you might say that the concept of karma exists because otherwise there's no incentive for people to *ever* do good. And sure, maybe you're right. I bet there are people out there who do good things for something other than altruism. Maybe it's the fear of how they would feel if they did the wrong thing. After all, we've all done the wrong thing from time to time, and we all know that it doesn't feel good.
People are smart. They build bridges and stuff. Would we really all talk about karma if there were no value whatsoever in the subject? I doubt it. Whether it's a fairy tale, or a genuine force, the fact remains that it's a system in place that encourages people to be kind and considerate. And in a world where people can be heartbreakingly cruel, such a system is perhaps more than welcome. Anyway, I forgot to tell you about the dream I'm having.
In my dream I'm cleaning my bathroom. I've scrubbed everything with a brillo pad, and now I've arrived at that satisfying part where you wipe everything clean. I drop the sponge in the bucket of hot water and drag it across the enamel surfaces. But instead of coming up clean everything is left streaked with dirt. I try it again and again, but nothing helps: everything is filthy, and rotten, and wrong. And then you came into the bathroom with someone else, someone I can't see clearly. And I'm embarrassed, I don't want you to be there, I don't want anyone to see what a mess I've made of everything. But then everything changed. Both of you marvelled at how clean the room looked and it was only at that point, only when there were others in the room, that I realised that what I was seeing as dirt was in fact the sparkling clean surface of tiles and glass and chrome, and it was then that I realised that the dirt must have been in my eyes, or perhaps only in the way I perceive it all.