"The evil was not in bread and circuses, per se, but in the willingness of the people to sell their rights as free men for full bellies and the excitement of the games which would serve to distract them from the other human hungers which bread and circuses can never appease." — Admiral Ben Moreell (1892 - 1978), chief of the U.S. Navy's Bureau of Yards and Docks and of the Civil Engineer Corps
© iPoem's Blog
As the grandfather of three young ones, ages 5 to 9, I get to see my fair share of kid movies: plenty of hijinks, lots of bathroom humor, and an endless stream of slapstick gags. Yet even among the worst of the lot, there's something to be learned, some message being conveyed, or some aspect of our reality being reflected in celluloid.
So it was that I found myself sitting through
The Angry Birds Movie on a recent Sunday afternoon, doling out popcorn, candy and drinks and trying to make sense of a 90-minute movie based on a cell phone video game that has been
downloaded more than 3 billion times.
The storyline is simple enough: an island nation of well-meaning, feel-good, flightless birds gets
seduced by a charismatic green pig and his cohort who comes bearing food, wine and entertainment spectacles (the Roman equivalent of bread circuses). Ignoring the warnings of one solitary, suspicious "angry" bird that the pigs are up to no good, the clueless birds eventually discover that the pigs have stolen their most precious possessions: their eggs, the future of their entire society. It takes the "angry bird" to motivate the normally unflappable Bird Nation to get outraged enough to do something about the violation of their trust by the pigs and the theft of their personal property.
While one would be hard-pressed to call
The Angry Birds Movie overly insightful, it is, as
The Atlantic concludes, a "
feather-light metaphor for our times...
The film functions, effectively, as a fairy tale: It uses its status as fantasy to impart lessons about reality."It turns out that we're no different from the wine-guzzling, food-noshing, party-loving Bird Nation. We too are easily fooled by charismatic politicians bearing gifts. And we too are easily distracted as those same politicians and their cohorts rob us blind.Case in point: while Barack Obama winds down his presidency with a flurry of celebrity-studded events that is causing the media to hail him as the "
coolest" president, and the presidential candidates continue to distract us with spectacular feats of chest-thumping, browbeating and demagoguery, the police state continues its steady march onward.
All of the
revelations of government wrongdoing, spying and corruption disclosed by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden seem to have fallen on deaf ears.
Nothing has improved or changed for the better.
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