Tag Archives: Video Games

World news and the everyday teenager

Posted on by
2

There wasn’t any conversation to speak of on the drive to school today, so I turned on the news. From the back a teen immediately interjected “Is that completely necessary?”

I muted the sound and turned around, completely incredulous. “What?”

“Is that completely necessary?” she repeated without a hint of what I hoped to have been mischievous insolence.

“Not really.” Is all I could muster as I turned the volume back up and refocused my attention. I can’t say that listening to corporate propaganda is necessary, or even a good idea. But I am at an equal loss for how else to stay tuned to what’s happening around us. It’s a good thing my honest ambivalence tripped up the teaching moment I might have offered.

There are probably far too many ways to get entangled in current affairs, but for children with school, sports, video games, television, play, music and the odd meal, there is no break for non-academic reality. One might argue that kids could be spared the complications of the world outside. I can hardly see the merit to that school of unthought. Especially as domestic politics have certainly invaded their education, the piss-poor vocational experience few are willing to admit that American schools have become.

This drive-time comment came after an evening spent not being forced to attend a journalist’s lecture last night. It was off-putting enough to have to wait in the atrium apparently. Although, as dense as the economic principles might have been, I sorely regretted that all of the kids, especially the girls, had not witnessed Naomi Klein, about as apt a role model as any young woman could dream.

So what if much would be above their head? Won’t they grow into it? Are there realities too shocking for children? Shouldn’t our challenge be to address those horrors, sooner than shield ourselves by pretending they do not exist? What a luxury that our children have even the choice to know how they are impacted.

It’s one thing to expose kids to pictures of highway accidents, or television programs about serial killers, quite another in my opinion to complicate their understanding of societal malevolence. Can they not gleam from parental example that such obstacles do not render life hopeless? We cope. We blot out certain realities to pamper our own delusions. Is that a difficulty level beyond young people?

There’s no doubt a fine line about forcing experiences on children, the morning news for example, but isn’t that to pretend that almost all their indoctrination isn’t involuntary? Can you think of any accomplished person who wasn’t pushed?

We can be thankful our children aren’t experiencing household raids, aerial bombings, and marketplace bombers which take the lives of their friends and relatives. How sheltered do children need to be? Even if their Social Studies will eventually teach them Zinn or Chomsky, aren’t the lessons sabotaged by the context of isolation? How are children really to learn that they aren’t working in factories but for blood spilled by labor unions; that their grandparents aren’t destitute or dead owing to collective efforts which demanded more from their government? Pop culture has already lulled kids to the politics of nothing matters. Is there any wrong time to try to right that lie? Or do YOU believe that individuals have no power to participate in the global community?

Say hello to my little friend

Posted on by
1

I have become my dad. I remember when he thought my interests too extreme, when decorum appeared all but lost on my generation. What were the offensive bits? I don’t remember. Comic books? TV? Mr. Bill?

This is one of a popular series on YouTube, and the dead-pan stupidity is pretty funny. It doesn’t work for me when it’s a sniper talking to himself.

Here I am freaking out about generations succeeding mine. Have I a leg to stand on? You tell me if this should be a 13-year-old’s MySpace pick. Is this what comes of already watching violent R-rated movies, and playing first-person-assassin video games like the Godfather?

Shall I describe for you the Godfather game? You’re a hood, working your way up through the ranks by doing jobs for the boss. You shoot cops, shake down merchants, and take out other gangsters, while knocking off anyone in your way. You know these games: shoot first, there is no ask-questions button on the joystick. Now say an innocent bystander witnesses your deed. You kick, punch, or knife him or her until they stop calling for help. You can shoot them if you’re not worried about drawing more attention. Makes sense of course.

The next gangland game coming up? A first-person-shooter based on Brian dePalma’s SCARFACE, which itself staged more gratuitous violence than all of Frances Coppola’s films put together. Already kids are announcing themselves entering the room, air-Uzi in hand, with heavy accent: “Say hello to my little friend!”

Snipers
Really. We have American soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan picking off everything that moves through their sniper scopes. Our boys, all they can be, are shooting toddlers like they were bugs to torment, women because they can’t have them, old men out of spite, boys for sport, and babies because nits make lice.

What do we hope to be breeding?

J.K. Rowling and the Dead Zone

Posted on by
8

With author J.K. Rowling declaring she’s written the last of the Harry Potter titles, there’s a panic coming from the publishing world that there will be nothing to take Harry’s place. I suppose this fear anticipates the readership’s sadness, it certainly expresses the commercial concern, but it cloaks itself in a [Scholastic] librarian’s voice: whatever now will the children find interest in reading?
 
Harry Potter has been around for ten years. Educators like to credit him for pulling children from the terminus of their gaming consoles. If Potter has created an upsurge in reading, I ask you, to where has it led? Ten years is enough to have nourished the new generation. Over 325 million Rowling books have been sold. The first Harry Potter readers are already graduated from college. What are they doing?

It’s a leading question, because I haven’t an answer. It’s not discernible. Blogs, Myspace, trivia-tourism, what? I’ll confer with college professors and get back to you, but it certainly isn’t the Peace Corps.

I would purport that the Scholastic [1] worship of Harry betrays a lack of faith in what it means to read. Do children need to be rewarded for reading? Is not escaping into the abstract a pleasure unto itself? I thought it was a fundamental need that even distinguishes us as human beings. Do we have to offer candy bars to induce people to eat? I’m sure humans can run themselves out of gas out of sheer distraction, but I know appetite is inherent.

A key is to educate children that there’s a world beyond theirs, an abstraction beyond their horizon, which can be explored through reading. Much of it, history, thought, imagination, lies only in books. Travel and science can lie beyond if they wish. Those subjects are taught in school, via reading. Teachers who suspect their students haven’t bought into reading are obviously not grading to challenging standards.

Through books lies an existence of infinite proportion, as n approaches the finite lifetime. Are the Potters hypothesizing that children must be coaxed into this world, without regard that it might be form over substance? Do children whose thumbs twitch for video games need to be lured by books that feel like video games which lead, like arcades and the pool halls before them, nowhere? With Harry Potter, are we creating readers or are we killing them off? Form has become the new substance, which to some sounds clever and new, but really means empty is the new full.

Dead Zone
There’s something happening outside the Mississippi Delta where man’s agricultural runoff, waste and industrial pollutants meet the sea. It’s being called a Dead Zone, which describes it literally, and it’s growing. The phenomena is a total collapse of the ecosystem leaving Hypoxia, the absence of oxygen in the water. It starts with the algae, then never mind every next link in the food chain [2]. We’ve measured it only since 20 years ago. Doubtless it started earlier. Doubtless too it’s happening exponentially in every estuary downstream of overpopulation. I read about Hypoxia overtaking Lake Victoria in Africa, rendering it a sinkhole, the social repercussions of which match Dante.

I cannot but wonder if such a consequence of pollution cannot manifest itself on the human population. Could not our minds become sink holes? Could not a culture or generation be faced with a Dead Zone?

Debilitating, not irreversible in the grand scheme, but certainly final, like stunted growth. Generations of minds shrunk below capacity, below what we might have wished for them, like fingers crippled by the early industrial age. A dead zone of thought, of initiative or motivation, of energy needed to get out of the dead zone. Why it’s called a dead zone, not merely an empty one.

Booksellers seem happy as snakes to see our children want sugar instead of oxygen.

Footnotes
1. The publishers of Harry Potter, Scholastic Press, is a commercial enterprise, not an educational concern as the name implies. It’s like the pseudo-junk food company Subway, owned their ads say, by Doctors Associates, Inc.
2. Overuse of synthetic fertilizers has been causing rising hypoxia on every coast. The excess nitrates lead to blooms of algae which pull all the oxygen from the water, knocking the breath from all other living things. So my analogy is closer than I intended.

In defense of fundamentalism

Posted on by
Reply

Mankind is going in circles.

When you look at the Greek histories you can see periods of democracy and liberty lead to corruption and oppression, until the next democracy emerges centuries later.

From the dark ages emerged the Renaissance whose sun is still shining on our times, if perhaps just our subconscience by twilight. For we are descending again into darkness, this time a secular dark age.

The common man’s adventures in self fulfillment are going off cycle.

Advances in medicine and science, our understanding of the natural world, make us think that humanity is progressing. But this is not progress. this is merely complication. Who’s to say that a scientist has any better grasp of the workings of the universe than does a shaman? Because you can read a book doesn’t mean you can throw it further.

In philosophy as well as science, there is a sense that through time, each successive thought builds upon our past. Yet you’d be hard pressed to find a scholar who could say that any philosopher or scientist has surpassed yet Aristotle. As Eisenstein was to be with film, so Aristotle was to rational man: medium fully explored.

From an Eastern perspective, Buddhism has for quite a long time been trying to raise the world’s consciousness. An admirable goal, but has it succeeded from one generation to the next?

Man’s personal development certainly goes in circles. Development leads to entropy and decay. Vitality flourishes then becomes decadence. By the time you have a culture preoccupied with its sex life, you’ve got a people with a spirituality going nowhere.

You can look around today and see signs of this decay everywhere. Look at the ultra-violent video games or at a mass media obsessed with sex: a sexuality absolutely removed from procreation.

While it’s hard to explain why any of these preoccupations are vices per se, they are traditional signs of end times. They accompany the death of culture, as the decline of the Roman Empire, as before them the Greeks. They signal biblical end times like Babel, Sodom and so on.

To champion personal freedoms may feel righteous. What feels more natural than the motivation to explore and indulge our personal proclivities? But perhaps this is only hastening the end of our cycle.

Why not instead try to transcend this downward curve?

Fundamentalist religions do this. They deny human nature because they want to transcend it. They see mankind’s weakness to succumb to idolatry and self destruction and they think maybe this time they can avert it.

That’s my guess as to what they think they are doing.