Coffee, tea… or concussion?

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 19/02/2022 (1670 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

It is one of the most searing scenes in modern film history, but before we talk about that I want to blather on for a few minutes about an important philosophical concept.

The weighty concept I am referring to here is the notion — and let’s all take a moment to put on our thinking caps — that life tends to imitate art.

The legendary writer Oscar Wilde said a lot of famous things during his lifetime but none more famous than this impressive gem: “Paradox though it may seem — and paradoxes are always dangerous things — it is none the less true that life imitates art far more than art imitates life.”

I’d like you to ponder the beauty of that quote as I describe a gut-wrenching scene from David Cronenberg’s 2005 action thriller A History of Violence, wherein Viggo Mortensen portrays “Tom,” the mild-mannered owner of a modest diner in a small Indiana town who spends his life chatting with customers and serving them coffee and pie.

Things change in a split second, however, when two murderous drifters wander in as the diner is closing, demand coffee and pie, then begin menacing the customers and assaulting a waitress, at which point Tom turns into an action hero — taking the classic glass diner coffee pot in his hand and hammering it into the face of one of the bad guys, hopping over the counter, grabbing the bad guy’s gun and — BLAM! BLAM! — polishing them off like the mob hitman that he apparently used to be.

OK, grab yourselves a steaming cup of java, because it was that heart-pounding, highly-caffeinated cinematic moment that came flooding back to me when I read dozens of stories online about a plucky flight attendant who helped prevent a “near disaster” last weekend on board an American Airlines flight from Los Angeles to Washington, D.C. that was forced to make an emergency landing in Kansas City after an unruly passenger went berserk.

According to news reports, the passenger, described as standing six-foot-three and weighing around 240 pounds, began creating disturbances on the plane and threatening flight attendants. With terrified passengers looking on, the agitated man attempted to enter the cockpit, then tried to force open an exit door, pulling hard on the handle with one hand, at first, and then with both of his hands.

Which is when a quick-thinking flight attendant decided to channel Viggo Mortensen’s performance when she sprinted to the back of the plane, grabbed a hefty airline coffee pot, ran back to the front and proceeded to hammer the guy repeatedly over the head with the pot of java.

“A flight attendant ran to the back of the plane and got the coffee pot and continues to bash the guy on the head,” stressed-out passenger Mouaz Moustafa told reporters after the plane landed on the tarmac in Kansas City.

“I honestly thought today I might die,” he said. “Many passengers held him while the flight attendant bashed him on the head with a coffee pot many times; he was bleeding and pinned down until we landed and the police and FBI boarded.”

Plucky passengers quickly helped restrain and bind the agitated man, but it was the coffee-pot-wielding flight attendant who made headlines around the world, and I’m not surprised.

I wasn’t on the plane, but I’d like to think the chaotic scene included the following standard airline conversation:

Flight attendant: “Would you like a cup of coffee, sir?”

Unruly passenger (trying to force open door): “@$#**$#@&$!!! I’M BUSY!!!”

Flight attendant: “Here, sir, why don’t you have the entire pot … WHAM! WHAM!”

The news reports didn’t mention it, but I assume, after getting beaned with the coffee pot, the deranged passenger did not ask for a refill.

You will not be surprised to hear that this caffeinated chaos stirred some Twitter users to weigh in with pithy online remarks. “I think the airline attendant was at boiling point!” one user remarked. “Clearly not decaf,” quipped another. “Those metal airline coffee pots are heavy…lol. I’ll bet that stung,” another helpfully noted.

Similar lame thoughts were brewing in my own mind, but personally, I am just glad that in these troubled times airlines are still legally allowed to serve coffee during flights, otherwise the crew in this case would have been left defenceless.

Happily, the jittery bad guy was taken into custody by the FBI and, after hearing how he was brained with a coffee pot, we can only hope the authorities remembered to take his mugshot.

The point I am trying to make is that, as Oscar Wilde said a long time ago, life imitates art. And it’s a good thing it does, because if it weren’t for a flight attendant wielding a coffee pot like an action-film hero, this real-life drama might not have had a happy ending.

I’d like to think that the flight attendant was cheeky enough to ask the berserk passenger how he liked his coffee before she walloped him, but it doesn’t really matter. Because in this case he definitely got creamed.

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