Yesterday, Rush Limbaugh uttered the priceless line: “The American people have just rejected liberalism. They need to be told that’s what they did.”
That is everything you need to know about the Republican media right there.
I wonder how many people really think that this past election marks some sort of seismic shift against Democrats for any meaningful period of time. I think most people are smart enough to notice that one major party rarely stays down for very long in American politics.
“Remember, remember the Fifth of November,
The Gunpowder Treason and Plot,
I know of no reason
Why the Gunpowder Treason
Should ever be forgot.” –traditional Guy Fawkes night rhyme.
Guy Fawkes and his Gunpowder Plot were popularized by the film V for Vendetta, and now it seems like everybody who’s protesting anything makes references to him. I’d heard of him before the movie came out, and always thought he sounded like a pretty interesting–pardon the semi-pun–guy. Then I read about him on Wikipedia and thought that his plot sounded kind of stupid. It’s not everyone who fails so spectacularly as to have a holiday dedicated to their failure.
But if nothing else, it makes for a good excuse to have a bonfire, and I think that it’s a good, melancholy sort of holiday, well suited to the season. In some ways, this atmosphere transcends the political purpose of the holiday. (For me, at least.) As Thomas Hardy put it in his novel The Return of the Native:
“It was as if these men and boys had suddenly dived into past ages, and fetched therefrom an hour and deed which had before been familiar with this spot. The ashes of the original British pyre which blazed from that summit lay fresh and undisturbed in the barrow beneath their tread. The flames from funeral piles long ago kindled there had shone down upon the lowlands as these were shining now. Festival fires to Thor and Woden had followed on the same ground and duly had their day. Indeed, it is pretty well known that such blazes as this the heathmen were now enjoying are rather the lineal descendants from jumbled Druidical rites and Saxon ceremonies than the invention of popular feeling about Gunpowder Plot.”
Well now, this is very interesting:
“Co-founder [of the Tea Party Patriots] Mark Meckler tried to pre-empt expectations among the faithful that Washington would shrink and the federal deficit would close overnight, instead alluding to a “forty-year plan” that the group was busy working out with its members. The plan, according to Meckler, was a highway with four lanes, only one of which was explicitly political. The other three were educational, judicial and cultural.
‘All civilizations and empires have fallen because their cultures became decadent,‘ Meckler said. ‘We need to lift up conservative culture, family values and wholesome things by supporting conservative musicians, writers, artists and producers.’” [Emphasis mine]
If this vaguely Spenglerian quote really was said by Meckler–and I have my doubts because I haven’t seen it reported in many places–it certainly does make it sound like the Tea Partiers are not just Libertarian Free-Marketeers.
“National Greatness Conservatism“, thy time has come, it seems.
Apparently, Michael Bennet beat Ken Buck for the Colorado Senate seat.
I must say, I didn’t think he could do it. He seemed like a rather uncharismatic fellow to me. But then again, so did Buck.
This election would be much more interesting to watch if we hadn’t known more or less what the results would be two months ago.
Pundits sometimes use metaphors of sporting events like football games and horse races when discussing elections. Frankly, if elections were anywhere near that unpredictable, people would be far more interested and voter turnout would be much higher.
Of course, our political system really ought to be compared to a sports league that only has two teams in it… I don’t suppose that would be very interesting either.
Awhile back, the Democratic Governors Association made this ad:
Color me unmotivated. This, however, might do the trick.
From a 2005 New York Times article by Stephen Dubner and Steven Levitt:
“Why would an economist be embarrassed to be seen at the voting booth? Because voting exacts a cost – in time, effort, lost productivity – with no discernible payoff except perhaps some vague sense of having done your ‘civic duty.’ As the economist Patricia Funk wrote in a recent paper, ‘A rational individual should abstain from voting.’ The odds that your vote will actually affect the outcome of a given election are very, very, very slim.”
Well, the hell with that stuff. Vote anyway. But it is true that voting is not the most effective way to make your voice heard. If only there were some means of freely distributing your political opinion to many people at once in order to influence them…
So, I was all set to put up some posts on Saturday afternoon when my internet connection died. It didn’t come back till late yesterday. As a result, many of the Halloween-related posts I was working on, including the one mentioned in this post, could not be put up.
Maybe I’ll post them anyway, but right now I’m thinking I’ll save them for next year.
I’m just glad that on Saturday morning I bothered to set this post to go up automatically.
[NOTE: I am not a lawyer or a constitutional scholar. What follows is merely my opinion as a player of video games.]
Our beloved Republic stands at a crossroads. Tomorrow is a momentous occasion in the history of America.
I am speaking, of course, of the case before the Supreme Court, challenging a California law that would ban the sale of violent video games to minors.
One problem with the coverage of this issue is that they’re talking primarily about the question of violence in games. The real issue is not just “violence”. This is mistake people often make. The real question raised by the case involves its definition of violence, which deems a game violent if, among other things, it doesn’t have: “serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value for minors”.
This seems to me to require an answer to the question: which violent games have artistic merit and which do not?
Consider: The most violent video games are rated “M” for “ages 17+” by the ESRB. But not all “M” games are alike. Most of them fall into the category of being mindless shooters, like Doom, Call of Duty, Gears of War and so on. These are the games that usually grab people’s attention for excessive violence.
But then there are those other games, which are not merely endless levels of cannon fodder enemies, but instead present real, gritty fighting, disturbing scenes of violence, and most of all, show the consequences of that violence and its impact on the characters. Games like Black Isle’s Fallout series and Planescape: Torment and Hideo Kojima’s Metal Gear series. These attempt to deal with violence in a realistic and adult manner–not merely a cartoon-ish shoot-’em-up.
The question is, which is worse for a kid to see: a game where wave after wave of nameless enemies are gunned down without consequence, or a game which depicts violent acts, but also the physical and psychological after-effects of violence on the victims and the perpetrators?
There are two classes of “M” games: those which use violence because they think it’s awesome when the guy’s head explodes and those who are using it to serve some artistic purpose. The former kind kids will enjoy, the latter kind they may learn something from.
The trouble here is that the law concerns whether or not the games have artistic value to minors. “Minors” is a big range. For example, Sniper Wolf’s death scene in Metal Gear Solid is poignant if you have the maturity to grasp it, which many people have by the age of fifteen, but which few people have by the age of nine.
Of course, we face the same issue with movies. There are seven Saw films, there is only one Natural Born Killers. (And even its artistic merit is disputable.) It must be understood that violence is not the real–or at least, the only–issue; there is also a question of artistic value. I believe that video games, as an art form, deserve exactly the same treatment as movies, books, and all other art forms in this area.
