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absolutely nuthin
Dec. 15th, 2004 09:56 am
Cross-reminded of Ted Rall. If James Lileks is my favorite funny person whose heart & mind was lost to the right after 9/11, then Ted Rall is the soul lost in the other direction. He used to be one of my favorite cartoonists, and I liked him for a little while after he switched formats (the "President-in-Exile Gore" stuff was funny for a time), but he completely lost it after that, and has been stuck in an irredeemably ugly mode for a couple of years now. In recent cartoons he has called 9/11 widows "whores" and depicted Bush supporters as drooling retarded children (thus managing to purposelessly offend groups of people that have nothing to do with the topic, hurray). And his drawing has somehow gotten worse, too. (Though I don't agree with his critics who like to say that he never could draw for squat -- he found his style early on and has stuck to it since, even if said style does happen to look like Land of the Cubist Gingerbread Men. Compare this to, say, the "Close to Home" guy, who has for years clearly been trying to draw well, according to some vaguely Gary Larson-ish style, and simply failing.)
Probably a lot of people reading this shared the uncomfortable feeling of wishing -- horribly, monstrously, and despite oneself -- that the Iraq war continued to go badly, that the number of U.S. fatalities broke four digits, and all that, under the unshakable premise that the worse things got there, the better Kerry's chances stood here.
Killer question: do you, still find yourself hearing a bitter internal celebration with each new scrap of bad news, despite this rationalization going away? What's wrong with you? Do you hate cake?
I wonder how I would feel had Kerry won, and our troops continued to get ground down, day after day. I guess a little better once he took office, since I like to think he'd try a little harder to tell the truth, or at least acknowledge reality. I bet it would still be pretty rough, though.
It's weird to me that I'm going through a phase of wargame appreciation when thoughts of war are particularly sickening to me right now. Really, if it weren't for "Iraq II" I wouldn't be bothered at all, as I have a perception of the U.S. armed forces, and the activities they engage in, being more just than not (N.B. that I was born after the Vietnam War ended and didn't really learn about it until high school). Seeing them abused and besmirched -- and thus besmirching us all -- through the foolishness and dishonesty of our C-in-C and his cronies it what makes me very sad, and I hate the rush of very loud mixed feelings I get whenever I see a uniformed soldier on the street. I love what they represent, and I loathe what they're representing right now, in the eyes of most of the world. (And half of the U.S.)
Maybe I just want to see pretend wars play out for the "right" reasons, as a temporary antidote. Saving the western world from the no-really old-skool Axis of evil, preserving the Union, destroying the Ring, or (in case of Civ) crushing my enemies and taking their land because it's fun and it gives me a better score. Hey, wait a minute...
While waiting for my Thai takeout to be cooked up the other day, I found myself watching an NFL game on the restaurant's TV. They do something pretty cool now, which I don't recall ever hearing about: through CGI magic, the broadcasters "paint" bright, color-coded lines on the field, displaying the offense's starting line and goal line for the current down. The lines move in perfect tandem with the camera motion, and players appear to pass over them as if they were actually on the field; it's a very simple and impressive effect.
In the short time I watched, I saw an exciting moment where a ball-carrier got right up to the glowing blue line and failed to break through, though he ran laterally across it seeking an opening in the relentless defense. I tell you, it may have been the first time I ever actually understood anything that happened mid-field in a football game, and I laughed aloud in delight. The players seemed to act as if the line were physically there -- and to their trained minds, it probably was, of a sort. But to me, the simple decoration brought new meaning to their actions, which I have always had difficultly seeing as anything more than big dudes running into each other, never clear what their immediate goal was.
Immediately I wondered what exists in the field of really good football-themed board games (laying a hex grid over a gridiron seems pretty natural) coz I wanted to try this game too! Except without all the, you know, actual physical exertion. Probably not a lot, given the likely vast cultural divide between the typical adult boardgame player and typical adult football watcher. (Despite the likely wide crossover between boardgame players and war-history wonks, and the fact that football appreciation is a stand-in for modern western civilization being disappointingly devoid of exciting border skirmishes against neighboring tribes.)