Of the many joys Margaret Atwood brings in her unique approach to analysis, commentary, and Explanation of How to Look Wryly and Appreciatively and Quizzically at All Things Human in This Phase of Our Evolution, we get her random set pieces where, in a tour de force, she merges realities of parenting, the Code of Hammurabi, theories of debt, magic, law, fungibility, reciprocity, and more, in a voice that instructs, guides gently, and makes one smile with profound gratitude for this fellow traveler helping us register it all. This one comes from “Ancient Balances” in Burning Questions, her collections of essays from 2004-2021:
…[I]n the 1980s there was a strange ritual among nine-year-old children that went like this: during car rides, you stared out the window until you spotted a Volkswagen Beetle. Then you hit your child companion on the arm, shouting, “Punch-buggy, no punch-backs!” Seeing the Volkswagen Beetle first meant that you had the right to punch the other child, and adding a codicil—“No punch-backs!”—meant that he or she had been done out of the right to punch you in return. If, however, the other child managed to shout “Punch-backs!” before you could yell out your protective charm, then a retaliatory punch was in order. Money was not a factor here: you couldn’t buy your way out of being punched. What was at issue was the principle of reciprocity: one punch deserved another, and would certainly get it unless an Out clause was inserted with the speed of lightning.
Those who fail to discern in the Punch-buggy ritual the essential lex talionis form of the almost four-thousand-year-old Code of Hammurabi—reformulated as the Biblical eye-for-an-eye and tooth-for-a-tooth law—are blind indeed. Lex talionis means, roughly, “the law of retribution in kind or suitability.” Under the Punch-buggy rules, punches cancel each other out unless you can whip your magical protection into place first. This kind of protection can be found throughout the world of contracts and legal documents, in clauses that begin with phrases such as “Notwithstanding any of the foregoing.”
Atwood, Margaret. Burning Questions (pp. 113-114). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.