Young VS Old...In a Cage Match!

So I just finished the reading from Steiner. Thank God not the whole book. Don't get me wrong, I thought the book was interesting; it's just that reading Steiner and not spacing out is completely impossible. It seemed I had to read the same paragraph again and again. Regardless, I got through the reading unscathed and decided to write my blog on the conflict between young and old. I suppose this goes unsaid but I will be playing the part of young...

and I will be versus Old...

An artist's depiction....of course.


So I know this kid who used to work at the Mall movie theater...Gallatin Theaters maybe, anyways he would routinely get me into movies for free. Most of the time he would just walk us in, but sometimes we had to check in with someone in management. This story occured on one of those occasions.
I walked into the theater just as I had many times before, but my friend stopped me before I advanced "too far." He brought me over to the cashier to be checked in. On this movie trip, I had about three of my other friends and they had also never been checked in before. At time I thought it was weird to be checked into a FREE movie, but I digress from the point. The lady behind the cashier, sporting her manager badge or whatever, looks us up and down...searching for what I dont know...maybe she thought we were sneaking in candy. She wrinkled her face and looked suspicously at us. "So what movie you boys going to?" she asks. "Superman Returns." we answered. It seemed like an open and shut case, but then she said, "I'm gonna need to see some ID."
At first I laughed, once to myself and then again audibly. "What is Superman an R-Rated movie?" I remember thinking to myself. I asked her why she needed to see an ID. She responded, "Someone is going to need to be 21." It was lucky for us that indeed one of my friends was 22, which 1 year more than 21 which I proudly stated with sass to the manager. She chuckled, not yet annoyed by my presence, and it is then that the thought occurred to me, "Why the hell do you need to be 21 in order to see a FREE movie!" It bothered me so much that I asked her...of course, she didn't know the answer. She just looked at me blankly like the thought had not once occurred to her. I grilled her.

"So I can buy cigarettes which kill ya. I can go to war. I can have reconstructive surgery. If I was a woman, I could have an abortion or buy birth control. I can go to jail...I can be legally executed by the state. For God's sake, I can vote on the very things that I can be ALLOWED TO DO! I can do all this, but I can't get into a FREE movie!"

She once again looked confused. I saw her glance at the growing line behind me. I wonder if the people behind me were literally behind me in my agism accusation or were they just pissed 'cause i was holding up the line AND getting in free.
I left the counter, more or less dragged away, and went to the free movie. The only thoughts going through my head were, "When did someone take time out of there day to designate a certain age that people can get into movies for free?" I think about it now and realize that maybe because most of the theater workers were adolescents in high school, a theater big-wig decided that young people don't get free movies or that they would abuse it. (not a big deal when you can literally walk into that theater unnoticed and watch any movie you want...trust me). I use the same argument when I speak of drinking. I'm for the drinking age being changed not because I am some kind of drunk or am feeling left out from the bar scene, but simply because I believe I am responsible enough to have the legal right to drink alcohol.
So the argument goes...we can't be like Germany or England, which drinking age is almost directly linked to if you can see over the table and have money, because neither country has the advanced traffic that the U.S. does... Well, I was wondering, what about Canada? Canada is the closest thing in the world to the United States in nearly every societal way. Except, and some of you may already know, that Canada has a drinking age of 18 (19 in some provinces) AND they can legally smoke marijuana (to an extent). So i looked up some driving fatality numbers on the infamous MADD site, obviously if they are right then the Candadian fatality rate (in driver impaired cases) per person should be much higher than the U.S. rate.
However, the percentage of Canadians killed in drunk driving accidents is .0046% (annually) and the U.S. rate is .0056%. Maybe one can atest that to the population difference or some other social difference. But maybe MADD is wrong.

Close Reading Of Steiner

I chose to look at page 99 for my close reading...simply because 9 is my favorite number (times two). If there was a 1000 words in this book, I would have probably picked 999.

On this fated page, Steiner quotes a German academic named Holderlin saying, "To him, the tragic dramas of Sophocles were indeed 'rediscoverd holy books.'" This stuck out to me. For quite a while I have wondered how such a short piece that Antigone is, how it could be considered a cornerstone or atleast a foundation for the reading of all tragic drama and stories of human conflict? Steiner himself addresses this (somewhere between 231-277) when he writes of how much longer the common known tragedies like Hamlet are compared to Antigone. It certainly suprises me that I had never heard of Antigone before this class and that the work seems so essential to an academic library. Maybe it's just cause I went to high school in Montana. Who knows?
Anyhow, I was shocked when people were quoted as saying this play rivals the holy bible, even as far to call it "rediscovered holy books." Once again, just hold ten copies of the bible in one hand (and I dont mean the pocket variety) and ten Antigones in the other, and see which one ya drop first. But then again, I suppose that something (other than the bible) is needed to be considered the foundation of tragic drama....even if it was simply ok in Greek times. When does a work become a classic? I'm sure students in Greece weren't studying Antigone as it was on the scene...that wouldn't make much sense at all. It would be the equivalent silliness of kids today studying Titanic or Rocky.

Although Rocky is bad ass, in case you didn't know. And this is not considering MTA majors. I'm thinking on more of a high school basis...movies today like plays of yesterday were for entertainment and not for study.