Thursday, April 9, 2020

An analogy for our times

So like most of the world, I have been in social isolation at home. This has entailed working from home for three weeks (and counting). Other than that, my life is remarkably similar to the norm. Well, perhaps I am actually engaging with friends more than normal. Anyway, been doing the usual to get through the days: read, knit (after a break of a few weeks), and watching online TV.

Yesterday I watched three movies. An old thriller I remember enjoying, with Michael Douglas, "Don't say a word". It was as good as I recall, one of the movies I have actually seen on the big screen. I saw that as someone who has never been a particular movie goer, the last movie I saw in an actual cinema was Star Wars: the last Jedi. That should tell you a lot. The other two movies were the Denzel Washington movies Equalizer and Equalizer two. A bit violent for my taste, but I am such a fan of Washington and needed to see the bad guys get what was coming to them, so to speak and I persisted.

On one level it was a fairly typical, tried and true recipe. In the first movie, the foreigners, in the second, the local bad guys. It was a bit surprising as one didn't exactly get to know the character Robert McCall particularly well. Entertaining enough.

The analogy of our times though, which I refer to in my title? From the second movie. The bad guys, [spoiler alert ahead!], ex-CIA assassins who had worked with Robert McCall, the hero as portrayed by Denzel Washington, head to a seaside town to try to kill McCall. In the middle of a hurricane. The seaside town has been evacuated, but this does not stop them. McCall even parks his car in some kind of plastic igloo of sorts (in case you have any doubts as to the level of absurdity). One even climbs to the top of a tower. It doesn't take much to guess how that ends (the hurricane has little effect).

Watching that reminded me of how the US prepared itself for the COVID-19 pandemic. They saw it coming and yet they headed straight into it somehow. Yep.