Letters to the editor

"The Little Mermaid"

 
Everyone has a personal "hot button" issue or another. Some of the
more foaming types have several, dotted like landmines across the soul.
  I hope mine are rather few, but on the December 19 edition of the
Linux Weekly News, I'm afraid Jonathan Corbet walked right over one of
mine by saying that "Disney may have done children a great service by
cleaning up the gory and depressing parts of 'The Little Mermaid'".
Rather than being off-topic though, I am sending this note because I
think the fight for a Commons is so much more important than what you
can do with a distribution of Linux. Rather, the code is only a part
of a much bigger problem.
 
If you have read one of the more folkloric versions of "The Little
Mermaid", there are two elements which have been overlooked in the
Disney version which are absolutely critical to the purpose of the
story. One is the bargain. The little mermaid herself (Why Disney
might have named her "Arial", I don't know, but it was singular bad
taste...) makes the bargain against her family's wishes that she will
get legs and be able to persue her beloved, who she does not know, but
has seen from the shallows. She gets the legs, but they make her feel
as if she is walking on glass and knives whenever she uses them, a
sacrifice she makes willingly. Secondly, the little mermaid discovers
after having made the bargain that her lover is not faithful, and
abandons her after having his way with her. This leaves her stranded
and in pain between the world she comes from and the world she chose,
but rejects her.
 
As a fairy tale, it's warning is "Don't decide to sacrifice the
familiar for the exciting before you know for sure you can live the
life you dream. You may ruin your chances at happiness in both places
if you fail," which is good advice for a fairy tale to give. Disney's
version is more along the lines of "Whatever trouble you get into,
Daddy will make it O.K.," which is the kind of advice we have had far
too much of, In My Curmugeonly Opinion.
 
What worries me is that Disney may gain the power to prevent anyone
from telling the tale as it was meant to be told, forever destroying a
bit of the wisdom that makes us human, much as a software company,
through a patent, destroys a bit of the common good by robbing the
commons of it's commodity.
 
So we're not just fighting for our code by fighting for the Commons.
In a way, we are also fighting for our cultural heritage. Maybe even
in a small way, for our souls.
 
Barry King
Kingston, Ontario
Canada

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