Wedding jokes

One thing that I really dislike – and yet come across again and again when I attend weddings – are caricatures of husbands as emasculated, brainless, imprisoned slaves.  You’ve probably heard the jokes.  They usually proceed along the lines of the husband learning to tell the wife she is right, he was wrong, references to the wife’s dominance in all decisions, or portrayals of men who have been cowed, beaten and eviscerated by their wives.  The fact that most people find these things funny usually proves that they are not funny at all, but contain some measure of a haunting truth.

What have we done to women and men to provoke such mean (for women) and pathetic (for men) pictures of their relationships?  For surely women must feel ashamed at and abused by such jokes; at descriptions of callous, cold, calculating and selfish women.  

This does not mean men should attempt to roughly establish themselves over their wife.  Ever.  Rather, I ask, why do we represent marriage as a struggle of wills in the first place?  I don’t mean to be overly  idealistic about marriage, but we certainly concede important ground if at its very beginning we plant the seeds of conflict, selfishness and manipulation in a relationship that is designed to be marked by helpfulness, appreciation, forgiveness and clear communication. 

So please, if you happen to be giving a wedding speech, please go for honesty of feeling, not some cheap joke that you’ve googled up.

Filed under: experiences, observations, responsibility , bad taste, emasculation, marriage, masculinity, wedding jokes

Going postal

Have you ever wondered why, today, we can only ever be post?  It’s always post this or post that; post modernity, post capitalism (yeah, right), post secular — we can never actually be something, we can only ever be after something.

The reason is that we more often than not see things as (mere) products of an historical evolution.  There is no objective order that anchors us, only an impatience to be something other than what we are.  Today’s institutions are the baggage of the past, and yet we have not reached the future (obviously), because they are still hanging around.  So we can only ever be post, because, like, we’re so over it.

Oliver O’Donovan puts it like this:  This way of thinking – which is called ‘historicism’ (ie. everything is historical), “makes all created goods appear putatively outmoded. So that if there are currents of dissatisfaction evident in a society’s practice of [for example] marriage, such as might be indicated by a high divorce rate or a prominent homosexual culture, they will treated with great seriousness as signs of the evolution for which the institution is destined.”  Substitute churches, or democracy, or whatever for marriage, and you can see how pervasive this way of seeing the world is. Oh, except that democracy is nearly always seen as the end of the line.  But that’s a topic for another post.

But of course, we never actually become anything different, do we?  We are only ever posted, on the way, but never there.  We’re ghosts, stuck in between.  Thus we can never be content, only ever dissatisfied.

Filed under: history, observations, quotations , contentment, cultural politics, dissatisfaction, historicism, institutions, Oliver O'Donovan, postmodernism

Please explain

It’s early in the semester, the new train station is open, and school is in full swing.  All this means lots of traffic.  I got off the bus this morning a good couple of kilometres from uni and, book in hand and at a comfy walking pace (not so fast that I wouldn’t have time to avoid poles – this I know from experience), I positively sped into the distance, leaving the bus and hundreds of cars in my wake.

Snapped on the way home from the city

At the far end of the road are people waiting – ever so long – for the bus so that they can catch it a few hundred meters to uni or Macquarie Centre, or whatever. Understandable if you possess a zimmer frame or a fake hip, but if you don’t?

Get to uni, and there are cars milling around, trying to find carspaces.  Despite the trains, buses, the bike paths, Macquarie Uni, (possessed of a veritable brood of carparks), has become filled with camping student vehicles, tailing along behind walkers in the hope that they might be vacating a carspace. Perhaps the uni should demolish a few carparks, just to discourage them.

Obviously, the professed environmental concern of the populace doesn’t get in the way of what is simply convenient.  But I wonder what is so convenient about sitting in cars or buses for absurdly short or long periods of time when it is so manifestly inconvenient?  I just don’t get it; somebody, please explain?

Filed under: experiences, madness, observations , commuting, environmentalism, Macquarie Uni, Public transport