The best part about a blog is that I get to share with you the essays I would email to myself, then eventually delete. Now they can be preserved, for better or worse. Observe (the worse):
There's a big discussion on Boston.com about the kid in Korea (?) who played a video game for 49 straight hours and died of cardiac arrest. Are games too addictive--which must mean that I am admitting my guilt that video games ARE addictive-- or are they simply another hobby like ship-building or hunting or golf? Of course, the messages just boiled down to a shouting match with one person calling the kid "Oriental" and another person saying he was a typical Boston racist, which lead to even more racially charged things to be said. And then people were calling each other names for a female cleaning product because they couldn't convince the each other why they were wrong. ("Why are video games bad, you douche?" "Because they just are and my kids will never play them! Get a life douche-BAG!")
Sigh.
My own experiences say that video games are addictive. It's a new form of entertainment to feed the zeitgeist. However, rather than belittle all the "negatives" about video games, why not get involved with the story telling? These are the same problems we had with TV, Comic Books, movies…I bet even literature and math at one point vexed the ancients because it was something new placed into the culture. I sometimes wonder if the only things that make most humans comfortable are the concepts of work, toil and war. Anything that brings leisure is always looked at negatively, as if leisure is a lie that should not be allowed to permeate society.
I yearn to be able to make my own video games/movies so that I may portray African-Americans in a different, positive light. Not "PC", just to have a character who's black, doesn't make "too" many political statements, but is clearly different than the crap that's on Grand Theft Auto (sorry Angry Bostonian, et al, I just can't bring myself to buy it…"Hot Coffee's" good though!)
Wait, let me back up, EVERYONE is bad in Grand Theft Auto, and that's cool. And perhaps being evil is rewarded in storytelling because it fits into some human psychic need as well. Would we like to see the god guy win all the time, or see someone bad just kick teeth and take names? Does it validate the basic rule that life, as (Calvin &) Hobbes put it is, "Nasty, brutish and short." Toil is a currency and freedom is a fallacy. We want—no we need to see something that confirms this point of view. That allows us the release of imagining that we are that evil S.O.B, who speaks the truth that life is a b--, and you must hurt others before you die.
I don’t think that way. I just wish that playing as a “good character” was often as involving as playing a bad one. In comics, the balance is more evident. It started from a minor revolution that happen a few decades ago, when Stan Lee realized (in creating Spiderman) that readers, adults in particular, wanted to read about a hero who not only fought fantastic monsters, but faced the same problems every-day people faced. Often, you have to create a monster to personify your emotion. Thankfully now, after it took sometime for Lee’s revolution to really become mainstream, you can actually read an engaging story that is on-par, emotionally, with other great American short-stories (even though the best comic writers are often British...hmm). I think if you really were concerned about the depravity of video games, spend your consumer dollar and vote for content that you approve of. Or, simply help in creating the content yourself. Allow video games to flourish as a commercial art form, and quit trying to burden it with your authority. Rather than killing it, collectively we would be better trying to positively change it. People who love it and especially those who hate it. Just because it is different than what you want, expect, you have no right to end it.
Or, is it "satanic"?
As you may know, the original meaning of a “satan” is “barrier.” In fact, there are many references in the original Hebrew text of the Lord; I believe it is Jehovah and not Yahweh, sends a satan, or an angel, to restrict the movement of groups of people--as in to block entrance into a city, or to stop them from doing something awful. However, I am making more of a “Da Vinci Code” metaphor in the way Lucifer’s rebellion. Some people use this as an allegory for when human kind discovered science and was not entirely awe-struck with the Divine. This is a common metaphor, e.g. there is Pandora’s Box, and Eve’s apple, but this is a metaphor that really speaks to men. It is about assertion and power, about the desire to free yourself from a powerful society and start your own. Satan wants his own subjects, and his own domain where he is free to impose his own miserable rules. Much of these desires reside in the hearts of man. A deep moroseness that implies life’s only meaning is to find it for yourself and inflict it on others.
This gets me to my theory on why so many people vote conservatively right now. It's the realist nihilism of today. A Calvinist theology obscured inside new political evangelism that determines that there are winners and losers in life. Winners have power, and can do no wrong as long as they have power. Power comes from the ability to bend tradition—historical, political and economical—to your will. It is not enough that we discuss this in clichés: “Do the ends justify the means,”; “A noble lie for the greater truth.” Why don’t we call our inconsistency for what it is? Currently we are selfish; we no longer have the desire to be a model for truth and democracy.
Fair enough, let me address a counter-argument. A democratic government can change its’ mind from decade to decade. This is true. We can change our mind and change our policy to create MORE democracy, not take it away. In particular, adding voting rights to our citizens is the best example I can give of expanding our democracy. Even Affirmative-Action (for women and people of color), or Reparations (internment or slavery) are flawed but our most acceptable ideas on how to create an unlimitedly democracy. I feel this past decade, since the angry America’s “Contract with America” that started the new Conservative Revolution, society is attacking the expansion of our democracy.
The idea that a meritocracy should weigh the starting position based on factors outside a person’s control is not fair, I agree. However, wealth, which we value more than anything, currently gives a far greater advantage than any of the programs I mentioned before. And we are celebrating the wealthy, for what? Well-meaning conservatives say that by creating wealth we create opportunities for all. When we turn our attention to fostering wealth in the private sector, especially by focusing on the rich, we lift up the boat for every class. If you were rich and had money, it would be unfair to take your wealth away. Finally, much of our laws that supposedly protect Civil Rights actually discourage well-meaning people who resist change only to spite Big Brother.
But let’s take those last two points. We are forgetting that the underlying belief is that people are mean-spirited and life isn’t too pleasant either. All means to create wealth – loans, vouchers, bank accounts – all require that the consumer takes extra effort to find a creditor or a school that wants to do business with them. The beauty of the “Ownership Society” is that if you don’t want to do business with someone due to their sex, religion, race, etc, you don’t have to. 10 years ago, there were economic incentives to do business with everyone. You could win money from the government if you had a diverse set of contractors. I believe today, school vouchers would work because people would feel the need to compete for students by improving their schools. In short, before an “Ownership Society”, people actually owned the ability to compete equally with everyone else.
Yes, now if you did not own anything starting the year, not only is it harder to compete, but it is harder to own. The standards of living rises faster than wages--in some markets the vouchers the government wants to give for health care and school do not provide people with the same amount of service they can get if they utilize emergency rooms or public schools, putting an even greater strain on the tax base than 10 years ago!
We were moving, at America’s usually slow pace, towards an “ownership society.” A new generation was arriving to the forefront with a balanced budget, a shrinking desire to utilize an oil-based foreign policy, and the ability to take the gains of the previous generations to build a new society based on the promise of America. Now, the older generation has pulled a fast one. Before we fully mature, we will have more financial, social and psychological debt than any other generation aside from the World War generations. We have to untangle an ideology that created an “Aristocratic Society” where only a few truly own anything.
As silly as it sounds, an aristocracy needs a mewing flock, willing to attack anything that is different and new. It needs to create an ideology that demonizes other political movements that do not necessarily seek to ask questions about the regime first, maybe overturn it second. While I readily admit there are liberals who do not care for democracy, we casually call people who concern themselves with long-term issues such as the environment, workplace safety, financial integrity, and health care as “liberal,” and “anti-American.” Rather than listen to them, branding someone as a liberal is the modern-day equivalent to the banishing dissenters to the woods or burning them in a pyre. No one will listen to you, and in some case, people will actively work against you in business as well as in life. Sigh.
For this reason, I get really angry when people simply dismiss video games. If you were to check the message boards of two posts, one about video games and one about race-relations/interracial dating, you would see the same dissenting reasons. “It’s different from when I was growing up.” “I’m uncomfortable with it.” “I think black men have big pen…“ Wait, that’s my post, sorry. But you see the same objections—all psychic in nature. People have developed this comfort zone, and absolutely have to destroy everything that is not within that zone. It’s all about control.
