Target You (and Your Knitting Needles)

So last night my husband and I were watching some clips from a DVD of mid-20th-century Cold War safety films (My husband is a history professor, by the way. We do not usually entertain ourselves with short films on hydrogen bombs.) I think I had seen part of one before, called "Duck and Cover," featuring demonstrations of children ducking and covering under their school desks and an animation of Burt the turtle saving himself inside his shell. A particular laughable one was called "What Is Communism?" and focused on a government man going through a list of adjectives describing Communists (e.g. lying, dirty, shrewd, godless), just in case you would run into one on the street. Come to think of it, the DVD was entertaining after all.

In any case, you might be wondering how this relates to knitting. I'm getting to that. One of the short films was called "Target You" and was all about how the enemies want to kill you and what you should do to protect yourself. The whole thing was done with a kind of modern, graphic style without any photos or actual film footage. Think paper doll cutouts and silhouettes with crosshairs over them and alarming music playing. Anyway, the deep voice over was warning of what would happen if war was beginning and bombs were on the way. He said something like, "You may need to help people, like children and the aged." And lo and behold, when he said "the aged," the graphic was the silhouette of a woman in a rocking chair with knitting needles and yarn sticking up from her lap. As if the image of a hunched-over woman in a rocking chair next to a fireplace wasn't enough to suggest "aged." She just had to be knitting. Had to be.

I feigned being offended, but I really thought it was funny. First off, that image falls way far down on the list of things to be appalled by in some of those films. Second, I kind of liked the idea of this lady calmly knitting away while everyone else is freaking out. Nice move, knitter lady.

Time to run.