Under Your Wing...

 

Hello, Dear Readers.  It’s good to see you.

The other day, I was rereading some of the comments that various readers have left for various posts, and I came upon one left by the ever-delightful Jan4 that said that she now wanted an entire army of flying babies.  Well, OK, so that’s scary in and of itself, but it did get me started thinking about the idea of having my own private army to do some things for me that I don’t particularly want to do for myself.

Now, an army of flying babies would have its pros and cons.  Imagine walking into a Bed, Bath, and Beyond or a Pottery Barn with a whole army of flying babies.  At first, people would just think that the babies were sweet and cuddly.  They’d point upward and say, “Look at all those little babies flying around.  Aren’t they cute?”  And no one would bug you or your army because everyone would think that the babies were so delightful.  That would definitely be a plus.  After all, babies really are cute…until, of course, they turn mean.  And that could be both a pro and a con.  If the babies turned mean because they had to protect you, that would be good.  That’s their job.  But what if all the babies just got tired and cranky because they needed a nap?  Then they’d just start screaming and attacking at random like a swarm of angry bees.  They’d be totally out of control, and that would not be good.  You’d probably end up getting trampled in a mass stampede along with everyone else who was trying to get away from those winged little horrors. 

And what if the babies needed a diaper change?  You’d have to bring down your entire army because someone made a boom-boom.  And that would just be embarrassing, not to mention time-consuming.  So, a whole army of flying babies has its promise, but in the end, it’s maybe not the best strategy. 

So, what kind of people would make the best private army?  Well, I don’t know, and to be honest, I may not be the best person to consider this question because the only experience I have with running my own army is from a game I used to play with my sisters called “Kingdoms.” 

Now, as children, we owned pretty much every board game made, even some of the more obscure ones.  We had a game, for example, called “Careers,” and the idea was that as you went around the board, you landed on squares for different professions and either made or lost money depending on that.  You could go around once, become a doctor, and make $300,000, in which case, nothing else that happened in the entire game could possibly have that much effect on you.  Or you could end up becoming a dock worker whose pension fund gets audited by the IRS, in which case, you spend the rest of the game trying to help your union pay off its legal bills.  I really think a better name for that game would’ve been “Fate” or maybe “You and Your Stinkin’ Bad Luck.”   I mean, it was really pretty hardcore for the age-10-and-under set.

Anyway, after my sisters and I would play a board game a couple of times, we would get tired of it, so we would think of other ways to use the games.  That’s what Kingdoms was about.  You chose a couple of board games, and out of all the pieces, you made up a kingdom.  My older sister’s kingdom was always a place of sound economic principles and prosperity for all.  She worked out trade deals with the other kingdoms and was generally a good corporate citizen.  My kingdom always operated on more of an isolationist policy.  In fact, we were absolute xenophobes.  We wanted nothing to do with the other kingdoms, and to be honest, it’s kind of amazing that my sisters continued to include me in the game since my idea of playing was just to  go off in a corner, set up my kingdom, and then announce our core foreign policy:  leave us alone. 

My younger sister’s kingdom probably brought the most excitement to the game.  They were always barbaric, war-like people who would just randomly attack the other kingdoms for no reason at all.  They didn’t want your land.  They didn’t want your goods and services.  They just wanted to attack you.  And they usually didn’t even bother to declare war on you first.  They just marched over and said, “Hi.  We’re here to attack you.”  And then it was like, “Let the plunder begin!” My older sister’s kingdom spent all their time trying to negotiate with my little sister’s kingdom.  My kingdom spent all its time trying to invent a cloaking device. 

So, I don’t really know that I’m the best person to be considering who should be in a private army, but then again, having had quite a bit of experience with being on the wrong end of a plundering, I suppose I have some unique insights.

My first thought was that the perfect private army people would be Justin Bieber fans.  After all, they can read, write, do math, and feed themselves.  So, right off the bat, they’re a better choice than flying babies.  And they’re insanely loyal, which, let’s face it, babies aren’t.  Babies will go where the food is.  They’re like that. 

The only problem is that some of the Bieber fans are mean.  Really mean.  These are middle-school girls who will go on Twitter and make death threats. And when you stop to think about organizing these girls into an army, well, that’s maybe not such a good idea.  I mean, personally, I think it’s only a matter of time until the Bieber fans turn on Bieber.  After all, he’s not Peter Pan; he’s going to grow up eventually.  And I can’t imagine that anything would piss the Bieber fans off more than that.  He’ll probably fall in love one day and want to settle down and start a family and all that stuff, and at that point, the Bieberites will just turn on him.  They’ll set upon him like a pack of wild dogs.  So, yeah, they’re loyal, but it’s kind of difficult to really determine what they’re loyal to. And that could be a problem.

My next thought was of a private army made up of Heidi Klum clones.  Now, that would be something because they wouldn’t be mean.  They wouldn’t have to be.  They’d be beautiful, so they could get away with anything.  Imagine if they came to plunder on my behalf.  They’d show up and say, “Give us your land and your goods,” and the plunderees would just say, “No, please, you’re so beautiful. Just take this stuff with our compliments.  And if it’s not enough, please feel free to come back and enslave us. We’d enjoy that.  We really would.”

But at a certain point, the Heidi Klum clones would inevitably become self-aware, and that would be a problem.  They’d wake up one day and say, “Hey, wait a minute.  We’re beautiful German supermodel clones.  We can have anything we want, so what the hell are we doing wasting our time plundering on your behalf?”  In fact, the Heidi Klum clone army would probably end up insisting that I plunder for them…and bring them bottled water and fresh fruit every 15 minutes. So, ultimately, that plan probably wouldn’t work out so well, either.

After that, I decided to give it one more shot.  I wracked my brains trying to think of who would make the perfect soldier in my private army.  Then finally it came to me:  Rocky Balboa.  He’d be perfect—he’d have no tiresome moral or ethical issues about plundering (he was, after all, a leg-breaker for a loan shark in the first Rocky), he’d be loyal but not delusional about it, and if anything, he’d become less self-aware as time went by.  After all, as Apollo Creed pointed out to him in Rocky III, “It doesn’t take a man to stand there and get your head beat off,” (and really, have truer words ever been spoken quite so poetically?), yet Rocky is exactly the kind of guy who would stand there and get his head beat off if you told him to.  So reaching a point of self-awareness at which he would turn on you would become less and less of an issue as he incurred more and more brain damage.

There would only be one real problem with Rocky, though:  you can’t get Rocky without getting Adrian, too.  And frankly, that woman is just a buzzkill.  I mean, in every Rocky movie except the first one (well, and the last one, of course, because the writers finally just killed her so she isn’t in that one), about half the plot is Adrian having a big problem with Rocky fighting.  And we all know it’s stupid because all the movies are about Rocky fighting. I mean, no one is going to pay good money to see Adrian talk Rocky into becoming an accountant.

So, if I had a whole army of Rocky Balboas, I’d decide that we should go plunder somewhere, but then Adrian would have a big problem with it, and Rocky would have to tell her that as a man, his job is to protect and to plunder and that he never asked her to stop being a woman (whose job is apparently just to complain), so she shouldn’t ask him to stop being a man.  And then she’d remind him that the doctor said he couldn’t plunder anymore or he’d go blind, but then he’d start training for it anyway, and Mickey would show up and tell him that “for a 45-minute plunder, you gotta train hard for 45 thoooouuusssaaannnd minutes, and you ain’t even trained hard for one.”  Then Adrian would slip into a coma for three or four days, and when she woke up, she’d look at Rocky in a close-up, soft-focus shot and say, “There’s only one thing I want you to do for me.  Plunder, Rocky, plunder!” 

Of course, by then, I probably wouldn’t be in the mood for it anymore.  So, we’d forget about the whole thing for a week or two.  And by the time I decided that I wanted to go out and wreak havoc with my army again, Adrian would’ve reverted back to her old self, and we’d have to go through the whole thing all over again.  So, an army of Rockys would never actually do anything but generate emotional turmoil.  And I’m just not up for that.  I can generate enough emotional turmoil all on my own, thank you very much.

I finally thought that maybe part of the problem with having a private army was the plundering part, so I thought that I’d just try to concentrate on having a private protection army. So, my first task in creating it was to decide what exactly I thought I needed to be protected from. But when I really thought about it, I realized that these days, I don’t leave the house unless I absolutely have to, so I don’t feel threatened by all that many things.  There’s the usual threatening stuff of course—cold and flu viruses, dry flaky skin, Don Knotts, lima beans—you know, the normal things people worry about encountering at home and are never fully prepared to deal with. But with the exception of Don Knotts, I don’t know that those threats really warrant an entire army.  I mean, how many people does it take to hand me a cold pill or squeeze out some moisturizer?  How big an army do I need to dispose of a lima bean?

In the end, I just decided that being self-sufficient is better, and I’d love to say that I came to that conclusion through a beautiful realization of my power.  But really it wasn’t that.  A couple of months ago, I read an interview with a musician I really like who does a one-woman show, and the interviewer asked her why she didn’t have a backing band with her.  I expected her to answer that doing the show by herself gave her a greater sense of artistic freedom or was personally empowering or something like that.  What she actually said was that basically, dealing with a band could be a hassle and that she didn’t want to have to feed them or listen to them complain.  And I guess that having gone through the brain exercise of trying to set up my own private army, I can totally see where she’s coming from.  I mean, sometimes, being self-sufficient and taking care of yourself can be a wonderful thing.  Doing your own plundering can give you a real sense of empowerment and accomplishment.  But I also kind of think that most of us would happily let others do our bidding for us if it wasn’t such a complete, freaking pain in the ass, and I really do suspect that in the end, most of us take care of our own problems because it’s just easier than having to deal with a flock of flying babies, Justin Bieber fans, Heidi Klum clones, or the Balboas.  There is, after all, absolutely nothing wrong with not making things harder than they really need to be, and as Rocky himself once said, “There ain’t no law against ducking.”

Philosophy for a hungry planet.

Enjoy. 

© R. Rissler, 2011. All rights reserved.