Why does whup-ass come in cans?
Jan. 20th, 2011 08:14 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
anansi133I think this has been tickling the back of my brain ever since I first saw _Mystery_Men_. That bit with all the non-lethal weapons, and specifically the tornado in a can.
There is some poetry in the phrase, "open up a can of whup-ass"- there's a kind of inevitability to it all. Once the can's been opened, you get the entire portion, like it or not.
I suppose one could imagine the cans being in different sizes. An aircraft carrier probably contains as much whup-ass as you could fit in 40-foot shipping containers. A modern tank might have whup-ass measurable in 55-gallon barrels. And a handgun might have a smaller kind of can, like those flat tuna cans, or maybe sardines.
But from a martial arts perspective, this doesn't seem very elegant to me. What if whupp-ass could be airbrushed into place? Sprinkled like microscopic jelly beans? Or maybe simply painted on like a camel hair brush onto a stretched canvas?
I suppose that all misses the point: carefully nuanced violence has its own name, it's called punishment. And for the dealer to want to hold back, there must be some expectation that the punishment will be accepted.
There's a larger flaw in this scheme, though: it presupposes that violence is by nature, deliberate. And though I'm in the minority, I disagree. I think violence can't be measured very well by the intention behind it, but only in the effect as felt by the recipient. And by that measure, the vast majority of violence is undirected or even accidental. Much of it isn't even seen as violent at all.
So then I started to ask myself if there was any kind of loving, nourishing activity, that couldn't be turned into violence through misapplication? I'm hard pressed to imagine such a thing: "smothering" someone with hugs or kisses could probably turn lethal, hell, even *listening* to someone - carefully with attentive conscience - could be overdone to the point where they have no privacy at all.
Of course, it's easier to forgive a child than to forgive a knowing adult. So we give ourselves an out, and call this entire species adolescent.
I guess this finally leaves me thinking about forgiveness being an asymmetric affair. Adults will forgive children their violence (often after administering a second, instructive dose) but children also forgive adults the violence we do- not because the adults have earned it, but because there's simply no choice in the matter. I can't really think of any stories where two warring sides are able to stop fighting without there having been a clear winner and a clear loser. And what would it mean to earn forgiveness without having first been punished?
Honestly I don't mind the idea of whup-ass at all, nor the thought that I might have to wield it in order to no longer be called a child.
I can't help but yearn for the the kind of dose and vector that one gets with a tunneling electron microscope, though. I don't think that's cowardly, I think it's civilizing.
There is some poetry in the phrase, "open up a can of whup-ass"- there's a kind of inevitability to it all. Once the can's been opened, you get the entire portion, like it or not.
I suppose one could imagine the cans being in different sizes. An aircraft carrier probably contains as much whup-ass as you could fit in 40-foot shipping containers. A modern tank might have whup-ass measurable in 55-gallon barrels. And a handgun might have a smaller kind of can, like those flat tuna cans, or maybe sardines.
But from a martial arts perspective, this doesn't seem very elegant to me. What if whupp-ass could be airbrushed into place? Sprinkled like microscopic jelly beans? Or maybe simply painted on like a camel hair brush onto a stretched canvas?
I suppose that all misses the point: carefully nuanced violence has its own name, it's called punishment. And for the dealer to want to hold back, there must be some expectation that the punishment will be accepted.
There's a larger flaw in this scheme, though: it presupposes that violence is by nature, deliberate. And though I'm in the minority, I disagree. I think violence can't be measured very well by the intention behind it, but only in the effect as felt by the recipient. And by that measure, the vast majority of violence is undirected or even accidental. Much of it isn't even seen as violent at all.
So then I started to ask myself if there was any kind of loving, nourishing activity, that couldn't be turned into violence through misapplication? I'm hard pressed to imagine such a thing: "smothering" someone with hugs or kisses could probably turn lethal, hell, even *listening* to someone - carefully with attentive conscience - could be overdone to the point where they have no privacy at all.
Of course, it's easier to forgive a child than to forgive a knowing adult. So we give ourselves an out, and call this entire species adolescent.
I guess this finally leaves me thinking about forgiveness being an asymmetric affair. Adults will forgive children their violence (often after administering a second, instructive dose) but children also forgive adults the violence we do- not because the adults have earned it, but because there's simply no choice in the matter. I can't really think of any stories where two warring sides are able to stop fighting without there having been a clear winner and a clear loser. And what would it mean to earn forgiveness without having first been punished?
Honestly I don't mind the idea of whup-ass at all, nor the thought that I might have to wield it in order to no longer be called a child.
I can't help but yearn for the the kind of dose and vector that one gets with a tunneling electron microscope, though. I don't think that's cowardly, I think it's civilizing.
