My Blog
Thursday, March 11, 2004
Joseph and Joanne Elliot are indeed unwitting victims, fallen to the manipulative powers of Astrakhan. Astrakhan is well versed in the world of computing where as Joseph and Joanne are naïve about it. Even though Joseph and Joanne are older, wiser, and more successful, Astrakhan uses his computer skills to gain power over them. As far as Joseph and Joanne know, using their computers does no harm to them. They just innocently do their work, check their email, and read the news. However, everyone has done some things that they regret. Astrakhan took those things that Joseph and Joanne hoped that they could hide forever, and exploited them without them knowing.
Once, when Joseph used his computer to try to do something, it gave him an error, and the person he called for help told him that even he didn’t know what was wrong. “JOSEPH. But the fact is, he doesn’t know what’s gone wrong any more than I do” (Kopit 43). Joseph really didn’t know what he did, or what went wrong, but Astrakhan, in the background, knew everything. Astrakhan knows everything behind everything that Joseph and Joanne do on their computers: what they do, why things happen on the computer, and how things happen. Joseph and Joanne are clueless in what they’re doing, and even more clueless to the fact that Astrakhan is watching their every move, waiting for the right time to silently attack.
To bring it to an even simpler level, Joanne didn’t even know that she had a computer. “JOSEPH. …Fortified with this knowledge, I march inside and bring out your computer. JOANNE. I didn’t know I had one” (Kopit 44). This is the most basic level of obliviousness, and it shows that Joanne could not have had any idea what Astrakhan was doing. As for whether they deserve what they got or not, they do things that every normal person does. Everyone does things that they would rather not have other people know about, but in this case, their secrets got out through Astrakhan, and he took advantage of them.
Joseph and Joanne did not deserve what they got, and Astrakhan was wrong to steal their identities and fabricate stories about them. However, Joseph and Joanne might have been too comfortable in their fancy lives and not aware enough about the ever-changing world around them. This experience will teach them a lesson, but it is not necessarily a good thing to learn this lesson this way.
