M
y son, after spending his whole life in Mario world
picking up rows of spinning gold coins, is about to
step into the real world. I’m worried the shock may
traumatize him. (“Dad, where’s all the money?” “Er,
the Pokemon took it.”)
I told my kids that in the media in the old days there were
no special effects so we had to do everything for real. “In the
original 1977 Star Wars they had to blow up a planet, which is
why old books list nine planets but new ones have eight.”
One good thing about kids’ appetite for movies and games
is that they learn that bad guys always end up suffering poetic
justice, something that those of us in the news business know
happens remarkably often in real life, too.
In the newspaper recently was a report about a man in
Pennsylvania who was annoyed that his neighbor’s big old tree
dripped sap on his car.
The angry man used a chainsaw to chop the tree down—
and it fell right on top of his house, wrecking it.
The formal scientific term for this kind of thing is “Karma
strikes again mwa ha ha ha ha”.
Karma also seems to have been present in the case of a US
prisoner who made a deathbed confession.
Dying of a heart attack, James Washington of Tennessee told
What Goes
Around…
Karma ensures that poetic justice doesn’t
just happen in stories, finds
Nury Vittachi.
a police officer that he had “to get something off my conscience”
and revealed that he had killed a woman 17 years earlier.
Karma arranged for him to have a miraculous recovery to
full health for his new 51-year jail sentence for murder.
And you probably noticed that when Angelina Jolie and
Brad Pitt announced that they were getting divorced, his
ex‑wife Jennifer Aniston made one comment: “That’s karma.”
She clearly believed that the God or more likely Goddess of
Karma noticed that Ms Jolie stole her husband 11 years ago
and waited patiently to arrange an implosion in her family.
It does seem to be true that cosmic justice can operate
rather slowly.
In contrast, those of who attempt to educate others (I train
would-be novelists and screenwriters) are instantly punished
for making any ill-judged remark.
ME: “There’s no such thing as a stupid question.”
STUDENT 1: “Did snakes evolve from ropes?”
STUDENT 2: “Did Shakespeare write anything in English?”
STUDENT 3: “Is there gravity in Australia?”
ME: “Okay I’m wrong.”
Nury welcomes your comments and ideas at his Facebook
page:
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