Three of a Kind

The Butcher and I are watching “Making Fiends,” which we both agree is the best cartoon we’ve seen all day.  But watching it has made us suspicious that we are being lied to about the origins of Ziva on NCIS.

Please see the evidence:

Ziva.

Vendetta.

And… Dexter.

You’re going to tell me that those three people are not from the same mysterious country full of La-bor-a-tories, fiends, and assassins?

How It Works

Here’s the most interesting thing I witnessed this Thanksgiving break, if by “interesting” we can stretch the meaning to mean “crushingly depressing,”–a boy who gets the shit beat out of him by his step-father and who watches his mother get the shit beat out of her sitting around telling the most deeply misogynistic jokes and reporting that they’re funny because they’re true.

It occurs to me watching this that this is how this shit gets perpetuated.  It doesn’t matter if you love your mother, if you see her being beat, even if you believe with all your heart that she’s a good woman, with the emphasis on “good,” it’s not enough to outweigh the belief that, because she’s a woman, her fundimental condition is as a person who deserves this.

You see what I’m seeing?  In order to make sense of his life, of a woman he loves who can’t protect him or herself, he comes to believe that she really, really can’t because of some fundimental defect that is inherent in her being a woman; all women suck, she just sucks a little less.

And I thought, so this is how it works, how it gets perpetuated, generation after generation.