Parfait Noël - Coeur de Pirate
Welcome back to xmas countdown! We’re starting off with a song that, instrumentally, could be a gooey holiday romance, but, lyrically, offers extravagant seasonal viciousness:
Et pour Noël, je voudrais couper le fond de tes bas
Laisser l’eau geler et faire une patinoire chez toi
Which translates roughly to: "For Christmas, I’d like to cut the bottom off your stocking, then let the water freeze and make your house into a skating rink". Which leads into the chorus:
Car sur ma liste pour père Noël je n’ai que souhaité
Qu’un beau malheur puisse t’arriver
Un parfait noël pour moi, c’est la misère pour toi
Roughly: "so on my list for Santa I asked for nothing but a for beautiful misfortune to befall you. A perfect Christmas for me? It’s misery for you".
The song is beautiful, though that sentiment is rather ugly, non? There is more dreamt of in my moral philosophy than the precept that suffering is bad, but it seems an important one. Not to say that I never have such ugly sentiments. Sometimes I find myself wishing for someone else to suffer because I think they did something wrong, and if they felt bad it would help me trust that they agree that it was wrong. Sometimes in a conflict I don’t want to be alone in my suffering or, more occasionally and more viciously, I want the other person to be suffering more than me because wouldn’t that mean that I’m winning the conflict, a thing that is both normal to want and possible to achieve?
Still, I don’t quite understand why people support retributive justice, i.e. punishing someone even when punishment would produce no other good, such as deterrence. Does any person deserve to suffer? Some part of me wants an uncomplicated answer: no, suffering can never be an end in itself, only a sacrifice made for other goods! But if someone feels that justice will only be served by the suffering of a wrongdoer… is their desire for justice an important good? I don’t know, though I had a few fun arguments with Zach about it.
Wishing for the gradual supplanting of the natural by the just
(but not always sure what justice is),
- Tessa