| Oil and Vinegar |
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My fatherhood is up for trial. I definitely lead a more relaxed life as long as I refrain from gauging the didactic scope of my every act, but how does this enable me properly to participate in the average party game? I take the notion of potential victory for granted, I am familiar with the brutal methods that lend lustre to fairytales owing to the element of morality the storyline usually contains, but whenever during my Sunday-off I play with my daughter, I end up stumped. The card game in question is called "fibbing". We're going at it hammer and tongs. Silence reigns supreme, the only sound being that of our cards rustling. We're still finding our way, each of us looking for the right approach. Hers consists of regrouping and amply considered playing of cards whereas my strategy, hampered as I am by the thought of the inevitability of the statistical mean, is one of indiscriminate playing of cards - until one of us shrieks the magic word "Fibber!". Busily playing one card after another, I focus on the question of how many swiftly played cards it will take to arouse her suspicion. Meanwhile she has resorted to a radically different tactic: whenever her accusation of "Fibber!" hurled at me turns out not to have been true, she turns over the pile of cards pushed in her direction by way of penalty and starts analysing when I had and had not fibbed while playing. This works, and there's nothing I can do about it. The consequences of this piece are nothing short of gruesome. The first, with which you are probably painfully familiar, is that notwithstanding the domestic dimensions of its products, the toy industry boasts an unbridled range of barely concealed social depravity, from the innocent capitalism of Monopoly to the mass destruction of many a computer game that is testing the boundaries of virtual reality. Of course this doesn't apply to wee-wee dolls, although no baby would survive the torments inflicted by toddlers, but that's what the learning curve is all about. Second, I am actually facilitating her behaviour with a happy smile on my face. Worse still, brimming with fatherly pride I congratulate her on the efficacy of her actions. And although it could be argued that she is unmasking me for the fibber I am, this is merely the stage preceding that of self-sufficiency - after all I'm doing everything I can to show her how it's done. A compromise is in order. Those who are unfamiliar with evil do well not because it's the right thing to do but because it's a routine. How this ties in with norms and values is something I can afford to think about for a while. I shriek "Fibber!", but I'm wrong, and my daughter casts a gleeful smirk across the table. |