A frontier nation is one that was once considered to be a frontier by whites who were completely oblivious and nullifying of the people who were already living there. The US, Canada, New Zealand, Australia, Israel, and South Africa are all frontier nations. Not unlike empire-building nations of days gone by, frontier nations present their own special brand of sociopathic disconnect that other nations that came about through migration or good old fashioned gene-intermingling conquest do not seem to have. Frontier nations produce individuals with a sociopathic sense of entitlement toward the earth and everything that lives on it. In frontier nations, it makes perfect sense to bore an eight-mile hole into the earth and brutally enslave those who work in the hole in a quest for diamonds. If “successful,” this quest will grotesquely enrich a relative handful of people on the planet. It makes sense to enslave. It makes sense to rape and murder those who may oppose the idea of a frontier. It makes sense to do a lot of shitty things.
And in this manner, we find a unique environment/culture and a unique indoctrination where violence is overlooked because it has “always” been so.
When things are believed to have “always” been the way they are, we are separated from the damage our violence inflicts on the world around us and on our relationships and self-esteem. We remove ourselves from the natural world and from our own humanity.
I was raised to believe that the military was an evil industry. My parents and extended family never had a good thing to say about war or the military. My father served in the Air Force, and I figured he knew what he was talking about.
People who join the armed services are idiots. The government uses soldiers like housewives use paper towels. If someone trains as a soldier and learns to kill, well, if they are killed, then tough shit. That’s what you get for letting the government use you. The thought of joining the military myself never, ever, ever occurred to me.
My indoctrination and its subsequent value judgments impeded my ability to think clearly. I had never questioned the beliefs passed down to me. Like most people, I thought what my family taught me to think.
I was in my thirties and still very much under the influence of unconsidered opinions regarding war and the military when I met Stan Goff, an author, lecturer, community organizer, and retired Special Forces Master Sergeant in the US Army.
Stan Goff is not brainless nor idiotic, and at no point in his life did he deserve to die. To think otherwise is barbaric and insulting. He is a brilliantly sensitive genius of a man. Raised in a very poor town in Missouri, his choices, as he understood them, were to work in the factory that his father and mother worked in or join the military. College was out of the question. It was never posed as an option, just as joining the military was never an option for me. Stan did not want to spend his life in the factory, so he joined the army when he was eighteen. There he remained, into his forties. During this time, he learned a lot about our country and government, about corruption, masculinity, homophobia, racism, feminism, sexual violence, and capitalism. Read his books if you want to know what he learned.
The army was college for Stan.
He came out of it with the lived-experience equivalent of a doctorate in foreign policy, global economics, military strategy, Marxism, feminist theory, and race history in the US.
In one afternoon with Stan Goff, my indoctrination about the military was completely, lovingly, patiently shot to shit.
My family was wrong about the military. It is not filled with brainless automatons who deserve to die. It is filled with complex people making complex life decisions in complex ways and dealing with the subsequent complexities.
The value judgments and unconsidered beliefs of indoctrination miserably and always fail to regard complexities.
Life is this: filled with complexities.
Be all of this as it may, my family did not necessarily teach me wrong on war.
War is a wildly successful business venture from which a small population of wealthy people benefits enormously and a very large population of armed forces and innocent civilians suffers even more enormously. The military provides the workers that serve the business of the wealthy.
When rock stars want money, they go on tour.
When governments want money, they go to war.
Daily fear and xenophobia indoctrinations, courtesy of the mainstream media, prevent much of our population from seeing war for what it is. Up until the late 1970s, the mainstream media was a Rottweiler, always on corporate and government asses. This is how Watergate happened. Now, Watergate would never happen, no matter how many times the media attaches the suffix “gate” to some scandal or another. In the 1980s, the media got good at being the corporate government’s cute lil’ Pekingese, incessantly yapping at anyone who got too close. Sometime after 2001, the media became a Rottweiler again, but this time around, rabidly protecting corporate and government interests.
For example, the mainstream media teaches that we must sacrifice in war in order to protect our innocent civilians here at home. Meanwhile, not all of the items sold as war are, in fact, actual war, and none of our “innocents” are necessarily involved.
There are happenings we are indoctrinated to call “war” and there are happenings we would otherwise refer to as “brutal occupations” if our media-induced indoctrination did not impair our perception and vocabulary. The last war that the US was involved in—where two sides were fighting one another and it was in our nation’s best interest (despite the hue and cry from the wealthy Bush ancestor/eugenic/white supremacist sector) to engage in warfare—was World War II.
What took place in the Philippines, Korea, Vietnam, Central America, Somalia, and presently, in Iraq and Afghanistan—though called so—were never wars. They were and/or remain brutal occupations.
In some countries, such as Laos, we simply dropped our bombs left over from routine sorties over Vietnam. Our grandfathers, dads, and uncles dropped them from the sky for no reason at all. Well, wait, there was a reason. The reason was to empty their cargo so they could land their planes safely and tuck into dinner and bed.
For this reason and in this way, we are still killing Laotian people almost half a century after brutally occupying their fucken’ neighbors.
That’s not “war,” it’s not even a brutal occupation. It is the serial time-lapse murder and maiming of children, farms, animals, and ecosystems for multiple generations. But we don’t call it murder. We don’t call it anything. The experience of Laotian people does not factor into our education or collective consciousness at all.
I know something we can call it. We can call it the loss of legs and arms in 1978, 1985, 1993, 1999, 2004, and 2010. We can call it no wheelchairs or financial reparation of any kind. We can call it perpetual collateral damage.
There is another quite crucial complexity of war that, in our indoctrinations, we fail to recognize.
There are long-term consequences.
The brutal occupation of Vietnam detrimentally affected the upbringing of millions of children throughout the world, who, in turn, grew up experiencing this violence, whether they were aware of its origins or not. The lives of Vietnamese families were shattered, many became refugees, and many children ended up being raised by the invaders. The occupation came home and lived on in the hearts of fathers, uncles, and grandfathers, who became alcoholics, drug addicts, abusers, rapists, chronically depressed PTSD sufferers, and/or altogether homeless absentees.
Their children are now parents, and it is hit-and-miss how they fare in the world.
When does the violence from the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan end? Do you think it ends when the troops come home?
For many, that is when the violence of “war” just getsa brewing up.
In Daughters of Copper Woman, a telling of Nootka history, author Anne Cameron relays the belief that once a people kill others and taste the adrenaline rush of warfare, it takes four generations of peace for the entire population to recover. Mass bloodshed makes people crazy. In the US and some of the other frontier nations, there has never been a time of peace, so you gotta figure, without the benefit of some serious soul searching, we’re all fucken’ koo-koo for cocoa puffs by now.
As of this writing, at least 121 homicides have been committed by soldiers who are now home. I do not know how many children and adults have been raped by troops who have returned home, but rape statistics throughout the US are absolutely skyrocketing. We won’t be holding steady at one out of four much longer.
I got that 121 statistic from a three-part article titled “Across America, Deadly Echoes of Foreign Battles” from January 13, 2008, in the New York Times, which states quite clearly that their research was in no way exhaustive:
This reporting most likely uncovered only the minimum number of such cases, given that not all killings, especially in big cities and on military bases, are reported publicly or in detail. Also, it was often not possible to determine the deployment history of other service members arrested on homicide charges.
This is the first time I have seen a mainstream news source offer a compelling investigation of the long-term effects of brutal occupations and wars. The article explains:
Town by town across the country, headlines have been telling similar stories: “Family Blames Iraq after Son Kills Wife” (Lakewood, Washington), “Soldier Charged with Murder Testifies about Postwar Stress” (Pierre, South Dakota), “Iraq War Vets Suspected in Two Slayings, Crime Ring” (Colorado Springs).
Individually, these are stories of local crimes, gut-wrenching postscripts to the war for the military men, their victims, and their communities. Taken together, they paint a patchwork picture of a quiet phenomenon, tracing a cross-country trail of death and heartbreak.
Colorado Springs must be a notedly violent place to live right now. In February 2008, three soldiers there killed another soldier at the tail end of a long night ah-drinkin’. One of these charmers has a photograph of himself in Iraq up on MySpace, holding up a dead cat. The caption, of course, says, “Killed another Iraq pussy.” Another one’s MySpace motto is “Chillin’ and Killin’,” and he sports a dramatically fetching SS tattoo on the inside of his forearm.
The New York Times article does not discuss any form of violence besides murder, nor does it focus on any female soldiers. It is worth mentioning that, according to a 2009 Pentagon report, one in three female soldiers will experience sexual assault while serving in the military.
Less than a month after this article came out, the AP newswire reported that a female soldier stationed in Fort Lewis, Washington, killed a couple, both of whom were also serving in the military, and kidnapped their seven-month-old baby.
Consider all of the children now being raised by men and women who might not be in the best mental state. This is what happened after the brutal occupation of Vietnam, and it’s what happened after WWI and WWII.
It appears to be a cycle of violence to me.
A young person signs up, seeking community, direction, resources for higher education, leadership skills, a chance to kick some serious ass, or the right to “defend” one’s country. If this young person is of color, there is a good chance military recruiters stalked them—without their parent’s knowledge—plying them with pizza, video games, and promises of a better future.
You learn.
You get yelled at, humiliated, possibly abused, and you make friends.
These friends are not like other friends. You count on these friends, and they count on you. In combat, your friends are the people who make sure you stay alive or who retrieve your body so your family will have someone to bury. They are much more important than civilian friends. If you see one of these friends doing something horrifying—raping, humiliating, beating, killing—you don’t tell. You keep your mouth shut and learn to deal with it. If you see limbless children laying in pools of blood, dead pregnant women, life snuffed before your very eyes again and again—well, it is painful. But you are in no position to allow yourself the luxury of feeling pain. So maybe you bottle it up and maybe you join in and do terrible things that you very well know would break your mother’s heart.
You maybe look away while something horrible is happening to someone and your gut is clenching because you want to stop it, but you know you are completely powerless to do anything. You witness or perpetuate horrible acts of violence. You are raped or relentlessly sexually terrorized. All these things exact a huge toll on our men and women in uniform.
If not now, then in the future, for, without therapy, it will definitely show up in their children.
And you know, when a soldier comes home, wouldn’t that be surreal? Everyone acting like you have not seen a child’s head explode because no one else is haunted by such images, nor do they want to be, nor are they capable of hearing you deal with all the things you have seen. And even if you are blessed with sensitive, caring listeners, you probably won’t be able to talk about it for a while. You need to adjust, but there is no buffer zone for you, there is no safe harbor.
So buck up, get a job, go to school, and act normal.
My god, yes.
I can see how and why soldiers might reach critical mass and set off concentric explosions of violence in their homes or communities.
Violence is not easily contained.
It lives on in intimate relationships. And see how this problem kinda compounds in a world filled with war, poverty, mass rape, starvation, disease, and dear god, what else?
I remember in the movie Bowling for Columbine Michael Moore went around asking people why the US was so much more violent than Canada. There are a lot of guns in Canada, and most of the same teevee shows, movies, advertisements, and video games serve to indoctrinate the population. Mr. Moore seemed to suggest that the fear mongering in the news media was largely responsible. Though this is definitely part of the phenomena, I respectfully beg to differ.
Our penchant for sending our children off to brutal occupations that politicians, businessmen, and reporters call “wars” is responsible. Our endless propagandizing about why this kind of violence is necessary is responsible. Canadians were not raised by people whose fathers raped, murdered, and pillaged Vietnamese lives and then came home with all their nightmares intact. Canadians do not teach schoolchildren that the death of one hundred thousand Japanese via the atomic bomb was “necessary.” That the death of one million Iraqis was to “protect freedom.” That’s why the US is more violent than Canada. We validate and facilitate violence every day and have done so throughout our history.
And through all of this, it must be acknowledged that war has been happening for a long, long, long time. We can’t stop war or brutal occupations from happening, but we can take a look at why great violence is a commodity within, and by-product of, our culture/environment.
One afternoon around the 2008 election, a Somali woman and I got into an election conversation.
She said, “I love George W. Bush. I will miss him.”
I thought I had not heard her correctly.
She is, after all, a Muslim refugee who never benefited from the policies of the Bush administration. I have never heard a Muslim person express any goodwill toward this man. I teach English to refugees and a lot of my students are from Somalia. If George W. Bush is mentioned for some reason, a pantomime of spitting on the floor tends to occur.
I didn’t have a chance to say anything before she jumped off on my body language, as so many Somali folks I know tend to do.
“You don’t love George Bush, but I do, and you know why I love George Bush?”
Again, she did not wait for my reply.
She knew I wanted to know why.
I was mysti-fucken’-fied.
“Because of you,” she said. “I love George W. Bush because of you and people like you.” Her eyes sparkled, she crossed her legs, and leaned in toward me, smiling, beautiful. “What did you know about my religion before Bush? What did you know of me and my people?”
This time she waited for me to say something, but again, she already knew the answer.
“I knew jackshit,” I said.
“Jackshit means nothing, yes?”
“Yes.”
“See? This is why I love the man. You Americans knew your jackshit about Muslims before Bush. This is why I love him.” She laughed, satisfied and exuberant. She is 100 percent right. I knew very little of Islam or Muslims before Bush failed to recognize himself as satan in his fucked-up biblical prophecy.
And so, I have come to see more and more of the complexities of war.
In my daily life, I firmly believe that everything that happens serves a larger purpose. Often, I have no clue what this purpose might be, and I do not question it. If my neighbor’s dog is barking incessantly, maybe I am being given a lesson in forbearance. Perhaps it is a lesson in getting involved with my neighbors and asking them if I can walk their dog in the afternoons when I am home. In the daily-life scheme of things, I really don’t suffer much curiosity. I just listen to what the world might be saying and respond the best way I know how.
But for big things, like war, it is difficult to divine the lesson. The larger purpose in millions of people’s lives being destroyed by violence eluded me. Until I started teaching refugees and became close with a family from Iraq.
Ali and Iman came to the US from Baghdad after their oldest son, Ammar, caught a stray bullet in his head. With their other three children—Zahara, Ghaith, and Anmar—in tow, they arrived in Seattle, Washington, in hopes of getting the bullet taken out of Ammar’s head.
The organization I work for gave the family a home and hooked them up with English classes. The Jackass Organization that sponsored them was supposed to do everything else.
Well, they did jackshit. The JO seems to be one of many organizations that cashed in on Bush’s faith-based initiative policies, for I understand that the JO got government funding for making it look like they were helping Iraqis, but no help was actually ever given. Later on, the JO reported Ali and Iman to a collection agency to recover the costs of the family’s flight from Syria to Seattle.
In any case, my boss picked Ali and Iman up and brought them to class for two months, which is when I met them. After two months, though, we started getting a bunch of new refugees, and he could no longer taxi them to and from school. The public bus ride involved three transfers, and with two small children and a lack of understanding of the language and culture here, this was just not possible.
I called the JO a number of times on Ali and Iman’s behalf. They needed a phone, they needed to get on welfare, they needed food stamps and towels and clothes for the kids.
The employees I spoke with were always doing their best, and it was obvious they were overworked and understaffed. One of the people trying to help the family ended up quitting in tears.
I could not bear the thought of this beautiful family being left to the wind and, in conjunction with my wife, Misty Tenderlove, took them to the welfare office and all the other places they needed to go. A friend of ours was deeply moved by their predicament and gave them lamps, rugs, boys clothes, and a two-hundred-dollar gift card. Another friend gave them top quality toys, girls clothes, and shoes.
I work at the refugee office during the day, so Misty Tenderlove took them to all of Ammar’s medical appointments and eventually to the hospital for his surgery, which—along with all of their medical and subsistence costs—was covered by welfare.
The doctors said that the bullet in Ammar’s head could not be removed. Brain tissue had grown around it and turned it into an oystery pearl. He would survive with the bullet intact, and to mess with it at this point would be dangerous.
This is where I started marveling at the endlessly complex scenarios that can and do unfold because of great violence. For, you see, in checking out the bullet, the doctors found a cyst in Ammar’s head that would have killed him before he turned fifteen, giving the child less than six years to live.
They traveled thousands of miles, with four children and six suitcases representing the lives they had always known, and displaced themselves to the country that had destroyed their home to get a bullet taken out. But the bullet from this brutal occupation saved their child’s life. Ali and Iman knew about the bump in his head. He had been born with it. They would have never sought out medical attention for the cyst.
The
bullet
saved
his
life.
Through translators, Misty Tenderlove convinced Ali and Iman that the bullet was not a problem, but that this heretofore unconsidered cyst would kill their beloved child. She took them to the hospital for the surgery. She prayed from the Koran with them while they waited. Iman trembled, staring, crying, chanting for hours. Ali held the Koran in his lap and prayed aloud. A soldier in uniform came into the waiting room and post-traumatic stress disorder kicked in in full force.
It was a hard day.
In the end, Ammar was okay.
He is alive because of this great violence.
Try and wrap your mind around that one because I have known for a few years now and my mind is still not fully wrapped.
After this, Iman and Zahara no longer wore their hijabs around us. We became family.
This great violence also introduced me to the Iraqi bread staple, khobz.
Pretty much the second they hit US soil, Iman was making khobz. She might be displaced, she might be scared, and she might be terrified about the welfare of her children and husband, but the most important thing in the whole wide world was making this wonderful bread.
I now believe that Ali would flounder if he did not have his khobz.
In class, she would feed her youngest children, Anmar and Ghaith, with pieces of home-cooked chicken or cucumbers (or both) wrapped in torn pieces of this very interesting-looking bread.
I asked her about it, and she pulled out a gigantic piece of flat-bread—huge and round, like a medium pizza. It was moist and delicious, bubbled thick in some places and crispy thin in others. Iman offered me a piece rolled around some cucumber, and I had never tasted such a wonderful single bread food in my life.
My first thought after that first amazing savory bite was, “How much has this bread cost?”
Gold-infused frozen hot chocolate with hidden diamond engagement rings cannot compare. I have tasted some of the dearest, most costly food in the world. Iman paid so very much to share this bread with me.
It cost her the destruction of her country, the loss of family members—some by death, some by unknown fate in Abu Ghraib prison. She was brutalized, she dodged bullets while pregnant, she watched her mosques desecrated and was helpless to do anything about any of it. Her son, shot in the head.
Very expensive bread.
Many foods we enjoy cost people dearly. Vietnamese, Korean, Jewish, Guatemalan, Nepalese, Tibetan, Persian, Ethiopian, and Japanese cuisines are all a part of the US eating experience. The people who brought it here did so at a great price. Great violence has made the US the best place on the planet to grab a bite to eat.
As much as violent histories make possible the destruction Iman has seen, they have also made possible these new understandings and relationships in our lives. It is painful to admit that my country’s brutal occupation of Iraq led to one of the most beautiful relationships I have ever known. It is painful to know that this brutal occupation ultimately saved Ammar’s life. But this, indeed, is the case. There are millions of beautiful hapa kids in the US, given life because of our choices in Vietnam, Japan, Hawaii, and Korea. War and brutal occupations bring many consequences, and not all of them are negative. It boggles my mind to recognize this, but it is true.
I might not be gracing the planet if it weren’t for war. My mother’s mother had an affair with an Irish soldier and got pregnant. If it weren’t for Hitler’s war, there would have been no need for soldiers in London, and so, no affair would have taken place. As much as great violence tears people apart, it also brings them together.
And I know there will come a time in the future when people in the US know the taste of khobz like we know the taste of Kim Chee and Phö.
War brings life and food. War brings post-traumatic stress disorder, rape, and flashbacks. War mixes up races and religions. War causes domestic violence. War is the single greatest intermingling force on the planet. Without wars, the world would be a lot more insular and ignorant.
Accepting this assists in an understanding of violence, great and small.
By examining the overall consequences of great violence, we can more clearly identify our individual and collective place in all of this. As it stands, our culture is arguably more accepting of the violence that comes with war and brutal occupations than it is of the delicious cuisines that they bring.
If one three hundredth of the present US population—that is, a million people—are allowing their young kids to play the video games Vice or Grand Theft Auto, where players get points for tearing through a cityscape stealing, raping women, and causing mayhem, that means that at a bare minimum one million kids are growing up learning that violence is rewarding.
Media producers love this argument: “It’s not our fault kids love these games. It’s not our fault there’s a market for racist, violent movies and teevee shows. We’re just filling a niche.”
Well, that “niche” was created over many years of condoning violence and various crimes against humanity.
I recently received an e-mail from a young woman named Jacqueline Emathinger who is focusing on violent video games as a human rights issue. She told me about a Japanese game called Rapelay, which makes the rape scenes in Grand Theft Auto appear quaint.
The game (made by Illusion Soft, a company located in Yokohama) belongs to a genre called hentai, which roughly means “sexual perversion.” These games regularly feature pornography and violent sex.
As you play, the story unfolds.
You are a young, wealthy man who was convicted of groping a young girl named Aoi on a train. Your parents bribed officials, and you got out of jail. You decide your best bet in life at this point is to hunt down Aoi, her younger sister (Manaka), and their mother (Yuuko). The object is to rape the women so many times that they become your sexual slaves. Keep in mind that the graphics in this game are pristine, and the rape looks quite real. As you rape each of the family members, their “arousal” level increases. They do not like being raped at first but eventually end up having orgasms. The manly folklore (manlore?) that women actually quite enjoy being raped is thus tidily served.
Manaka, by the way, is around eleven years old, so there’s a pedophile edge there for anyone who enjoys that.
There are two “dangers” in the game. The first is if you rape Aoi in a certain sexual position before you have successfully broken her will, she will stab you to death. The second is if you get Aoi or Manaka pregnant without forcing them to have an abortion and either of them gives birth, they will push you in front of a train rather than have you be a part of their child’s life. This is an easy pitfall to avoid, as you can plainly see their growing bellies as you rape them and have ample time to force an abortion.
These are the only “dangers” for you, the rapist. You never have to worry about the police or getting in trouble for doing something wrong, for evidently, you are not doing anything wrong. You are free to rape the women until the end of time. If you progress far enough in the game, you can invite other male characters to join you in various gang rape scenarios.
What
great
fun.
It takes a few minutes to download the uncensored English version of Rapelay, and here is how it is done:
Google “rapelay download.”
Hit return.
Pick a link.
Hit the download button.
I’ve never stood by politicians who want to ban certain music or video games. If you want your kid to get a nasty burn, be sure to ban her from touching the cookies while they cool, you know what I’m saying? Banning makes something illicit. Illicit things have been popular with humanity since Eve ate a shiny red apple.
A great way to make something popular is to create a bunch of taboo around it.
Apples are the number one fruit in the US.
Instead, I am interested in the thinking behind media such as Rapelay. People sat in a room and discussed this video game at great, great length. It was decided there was a big market for a graphic rape simulation game.
Who is this market?
Young boys and men.
Why would young boys and men enjoy raping women as a pastime?
Because they feel powerless and impotent to change their reality!
Wheee!
The money will roll right in.
I don’t know if the people at Illusion Soft really spent a lot of time wondering what would happen to someone who virtually enacted rape repeatedly, hour after hour. There is no way to partake in and/or bear witness to dehumanization on this level without losing some of your own humanity.
Lose enough of your humanity and you are capable of committing or taking part in pretty much any atrocity.
The Mexican drug cartels know this trick.
Young men in Ciudad Juárez are forced to take part in the gang rape and murder of young women. Since the early 1990s, when NAFTA brought factories to this border town, thousands of women factory workers have disappeared. When a young man has taken part in and witnessed enough rape and murder, he is given the nipple of a dead girl. This he wears on a chain around his neck as an amulet to ward off powerlessness and impotence to change his reality.
He will follow any order at this point.
I know this because I had seen the strange shriveled meat-looking pendant in Juárez and wondered what the fuck it was. Then, auspiciously, the day after I got home from that trip, I went to a screening of a brilliant documentary by Lourdes Trujillo about the Juárez rapes and murders called Señorita Extraviada. The nipple pendant was discussed in the film, which you should be watching soon.
Militaries know this trick too.
Various rape tactics have also been used in Poland, France, Germany, Russia, Vietnam, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Colombia, Sudan, Rwanda, and Bosnia, thus robbing entire generations of young men of any sense of empathy.
Lose enough empathy and you become a bona fide sociopath, which is a great thing for a soldier. Sociopaths under command will undoubtedly follow orders. Trouble is, the young men, robbed of empathy, come home and raise the next generation.
Some of these men are our great-grandfathers, grandfathers, fathers, and brothers. One must wonder what kind of hell their children were raised in if their pop’s empathy was destroyed. One doesn’t need to wonder what kind of cultural hell is created by entire generations of men losing their empathy. It’s on plain view every time we listen to the day’s news.
The people who create video games for kids have normal human fears, dreams, insecurities, obsessions, resentments, and political views, all of which will undoubtedly be collectively reflected in the intimate world they create. You cannot create without contributing something of yourself—even if you are creating something with the marketing possibilities at the forefront of your consciousness.
Video games are worlds made by people.
People write the stories, create the characters, and foment seemingly endless scenarios. Individuals—a handful of individuals, really—create video games. They are often brilliant at what they do, and what they do is godlike.
Who else but god can create an alternate world in which your twelve-year-old can exist?
Not surprisingly, the US military uses video games to condition young people to kill. The military has opened up Army Experience Centers in malls throughout the nation because free high-end video arcades are much more effective at recruiting young people than traditional recruitment offices.
After Wikileaks posted a video of US soldiers shooting down innocent civilians in Iraq in 2010, many commentators noted how the soldiers sounded just like kids playing video games while they slaughtered children like Ammar and Zahara.
Because it is such a good medium for various simulations, pretty much forty-five seconds after the video game was invented, violence and rape were factored into this new technology. Pong was nonviolent, but from there on out, it was all about shooting down planets and eating dots and ghosts. One of the earliest pornographic games, Custer’s Revenge, came out in 1982, a mere two years after Pac-Man made its debut. Here we have our intrepid player, as General George Custer, wearing a cavalry hat, a huge erection, and cowboy boots. Custer’s objective (that is, revenge) is to rape an indian woman tied to a pole, while avoiding arrows and other pitfalls.
I read one review of Rapelay where the author, citing Custer’s Revenge, reminisced about the simpler times of video games.
Harkening back to the simplicity of the past is an ongoing theme of humanity’s, while we obsess over progress and the constant sensation of “moving forward.”
Progress compared to what?
Moving forward to where?
Ventures that pull us further away from our humanity and from nature are regularly defended as “advancements.” Take, for example, iPhones, deep-water drilling, mountaintop removal, nuclear physics, and electronic cat-shit boxes that utilize motion-censored sweepers to keep our hands from ever coming into contact with the nastiness from our pets’ asses.
Wars are seen as advanced too, and the more removed a person is from the actual death of another human being or ecosystem, the more technologically advanced their military is perceived to be. Our constant “advancements” are moving us further and further away from our own humanity, making it easier and easier for us all to participate in some very serious atrocities.
In olden times, like today, war was a business. It wasn’t as streamlined as it is now, but it was almost always about someone wanting to take something from somebody else to get money, power, resources, land, or all of the above.
Twenty-five hundred years ago a military strategist named Sun Tzu wrote The Art of War. It has been published the world over pretty much ever since it was written. There are many editions of this text, and a lot of them are geared toward corporate folk. Though these editions definitely serve a purpose—anyone wishing to get a firmer hold on their understanding of the global corporatocracy should have one—I like the hippee Shambhala version best.
Here is how the jacket of that edition sums up The Art of War.
Conflict is an inevitable part of life, according to this ancient Chinese classic of strategy, but everything necessary to deal with conflict wisely, honorably, victoriously, is right before us at all times. The key to skillful action in any situation is in knowing those things that make up the environment and then arranging them so that their power becomes available to us. It is not necessary to change the nature of things to come to victory. Crucial to Sun Tzu’s vision is knowledge—especially self-knowledge—and a view of the whole that seeks to bring the conflicting views around to a vision of the larger perspective.
I mean, people get pissed off all the time. You gotta figure it’s part of human nature or, actually, the natural order, since animals get pissed off too. But when you grow up in a society where it’s normal to pretend bad things don’t happen and where it’s a sign of weakness to show emotion, it’s up to you to teach yourself how to handle conflict. That’s where The Art of War comes in. Even if you don’t understand it, still, keep reading it. I don’t understand a quarter of it, but the spirit of the book seeps into my understanding and helps me to deal, osmosis-style.
The Art of War describes rules of engagement and strategies for overcoming various adversaries. Because most societies are modeled upon the premise of (and often a natural proclivity toward) war, this book reflects power, economy, and cultural structures found the world over. These are largely organized around hierarchies and rectangles.
More on hierarchies and rectangles later.
The Art of War has a lot to offer those who seek to understand how to live and love in this violent time.
There are a lot of theories about why people wage war. Some believe that mentally unstable leaders compel their citizens to corroborate or validate their insanity by killing/being killed at said leader’s behest:
If war is innate to human nature, as is presupposed and predetermined (according to determinism philosophy) by many psychological theories, then there is little hope of ever escaping it. Psychologists have argued that while human temperament allows wars to occur, this only happens when mentally unbalanced people are in control of a nation. This school of thought argues leaders that seek war such as Napoleon, Hitler, Osama bin Laden, Saddam Hussein, and Stalin [Why is George W. Bush not on this list and why do wikipedians erase his name whenever I add it?] were mentally abnormal, but fails to explain the thousands of free and presumably sane people who wage wars at their behest. Some psychologists argue that such leaders are a manifestation of the build up of anger and madness repressed in modern societies and it is only they that are allowed to show various mental anomalies. Because people elect and support such leaders suggestions have been made that very few people are in fact sane and that modern society is an unhealthy one. Scientists such as Desmond Morris have argued that stress is the major cause of death in people of today. Heart failure, obesity, mental disorders and long lists of diseases are proven to be related to stress. Therefore showing that the rise of insane leaders is due to a very toxic environment in which presumably healthy individuals exist and that social pressure forces mentally healthy people to participate in conflicts. (http:/psychology.wikia.com/wiki/war)
In this way of thinking, we’re all crazy due to stress. I’d qualify this. Most of us living under the high-tech stress of modern civilization are detached from the earth, our selves, one another, and humanity in general and are therefore emotionally immature. We are desensitized to destruction and violence, so we can hardly witness its significance. We forget what is valuable. We disrespect ourselves and others. Moreover, we haven’t had four generations of peace to get ourselves straight in the head or the heart.
The two worst things I ever did to other people were because of low self-esteem—because I didn’t know where I belonged in the world or why my life was valuable.
The first was when I was a freshman in high school. In junior high, my place was secure, but when I entered high school, I didn’t know where I belonged. Some of my friends from junior high became street rats—the kids who hung out in the school parking lot—and some became popular girls. I didn’t want to be a street rat, so I hung out with the popular girls. Until one day, when my friends and I found out that an older popular girl had made out with Christy Todd’s boyfriend at a party. We vandalized the entire school with insults directed at the older popular girl. We didn’t realize how seriously epic our actions were until we’d covered the entire campus with horrible things. When we got in trouble for it, my popular friends decided their best recourse for surviving the next few years of high school was to kiss the asses of all the older popular girl’s friends. I wasn’t up for that, so I was pretty much on my own until I met the punk rockers. This vandalism really ruined that older popular girl’s life for a while. I would have apologized to her at the time if it didn’t mean kissing the asses of an entire group of people until they graduated. But it was a very shitty thing to do, and I probably wouldn’t have done it if I had felt that there was a place in the world for me.
The other thing I did was when I was older, after my first book, Cunt, came out. I’d spent four years working on it, holding down various jobs, and I had no other life. When Cunt was finished, I was at a loss about what to do and again felt there was no place for me in the world. Around this time, I met up with an old friend who was in a relationship. We became lovers, and it broke up the relationship. I totally disrespected someone’s relationship because I felt lowly about myself.
What a shitty thing to do.
This is why self-esteem is so important. We tend to lack empathy and caring for others when we have none for ourselves.
My Uncle Bruce used to raise fighting cocks. He refers to this period of his life as “the wealthiest I ever was.”
In one of my father’s many questionable parenting calls, he took me to the cockfights when I was four or five. I do not have a clear memory of this time, and I was too small to see past the crush of humanity crowded around the walls enclosing the fight ring. I do, however, remember the smell of blood. And I remember the excitement. And I can still taste the terror in my mouth. Whether it was my terror or the cock’s terror, I don’t know. My father realized his huge mistake, not necessarily of having exposed a small child to a down and dirty cockfight, but for bringing on the fall-out: an endless onslaught of questions persisting for many years. Why do people pay money to see chickens die violent deaths? Why do the roosters fight? Who thought of this? Why is it so popular? Why did you tell me not to tell Mom you took me there?
I don’t remember his answers to any of these questions, but I never forgot that violence and, worse, how everyone around me embraced it with high-stakes gusto. It is a metaphor that has been endlessly replicated throughout my life.
One of our jobs as human beings is to learn to condone and accept violence as inevitable. Sometimes we condone it in our homes and sometimes we accept it in the world, but by the time we get to be fifteen years old, violence, of almost any kind, is “just the way things are.”
It is naïve to question violence.
History is history because it involves various acts of violence—or the signing of decrees, which were brought about through violence. Almost any historic event can be traced to violence. Betsy Ross sitting on the porch, sipping iced tea, and sewing the flag? Each star and stripe represented land and culture stolen from murdered, sickened, and raped indians. Also, thousands of patriots and British soldiers died so that Betsy could sew her flag. Whether or not this Betsy and the flag business ever happened is questionable, but the story has taken on a life of its own, and like many historical happenings, it doesn’t matter whether Betsy actually sewed the flag or not. Kids are taught the Betsy story in schools, and for various reasons it serves the victors of history’s present telling, so there you have it.
Most things that allegedly happened—from the creation of the universe according to white men with big telescopes, to stolen, fraudulent elections—came about because of violence in one form or another.
We recognize certain acts as violence. Others, we don’t even notice. Then there are the acts of passive violence that occur, and we call them many, many other things, like hanging chads, supply and demand, Proposition 8, office-place gossip, or just the way the cookie crumbles.
This is what interests me greatly: the sheer volume of violence that—because of mainstream designations and other value judgments—is not acknowledged as violence at all.
I think if we took a look at all the types of violence we don’t really recognize, we would learn a lot about ourselves and the culture surrounding us.
Violence of any kind—passive or physical—requires a predator and prey. Think of all the contexts in which a predator and prey occur: Type A shoppers, ramming their cart down the aisle, barely missing your kindergartener. Speeding drivers endangering the lives of bicyclists with every reckless turn. Developers, studying blueprints of your neighborhood, coercing old folks to sell their beloved homes to make room for beige condos with hunter green trim. Churches that shake people down for money in the name of salvation. (Does it truly require three mansions and a full-time staff to serve the lord?) Predatory lending rates require prey. The weight loss, entertainment, and fashion industries prey on the insecurities indoctrinated around femininity. The sports industry, industrial-military, and industrial-prison complexes prey on the insecurities indoctrinated around masculinity. And we can’t forget the police who sit on my block, waiting for one of the underage black kids in the park to light up a cigarette or do anything that can be construed as illegal. Even though they spend far more time scoping out the park than I do, they can’t seem to tell which kids are corner drug clerks and which ones just got out of school and are hanging out with their friends. They’re all black, they’re all young, and they’re all in the park. Therefore they’re all going to be arrested if they make one misstep.
These forms of violence, even if acknowledged, are considered relatively unremarkable.
Even murder is not uniformly considered remarkable violence.
The murder of anything other than human beings is unremarkable. For instance, old-growth forests, all life in the Gulf of Mexico, and the migratory Magnolia Warbler don’t matter. Mass murder of humans is generally not acceptable, especially if it takes place in a wealthy and/or frontier nation. But people get slaughtered in Africa all the time, and it barely musters an e-mail petition. Mass murder is mostly okey-dokey if it’s called “war” or if it’s poor people and/or people of color who are doing the dying.
It largely depends on who is killed and who does the killing.
People who happen to live in the right location and who have the right identity and finances get away with murder all the time. If you are a member of the Israeli armed forces, you can murder Palestinian people with impunity. However, if you are Palestinian and you murder an Israeli, you’re a terrorist. Wealthy white folks in the United States have been getting away with murder for five hundred years, so when a wealthy black man got acquitted for killing his ex-wife and her alleged romantic interest, it seemed like something of a triumph to many of the folks who have been getting murdered by white men for centuries—even those who were morally repelled by this crime.
Oprah is one of a few powerful individuals who affect US culture by proactively fighting to remove our blinders when it comes to violence in America.
She did a show once on a child-porn sting where police ended up busting an eighteen-year-old boy. At first they thought it was his father they were after because people—even jaded police officers—still have a hard time wrapping their minds around the utter pandemic of sexual terrorism in our environment/culture. They had seized the kid’s child-porn collection, and when the arresting officers came on the program, Oprah wanted to show some excerpts for the exact same reason she insisted that New Orleans officials allow her and her cameras into the Superdome after Hurricane Katrina. “People lived this shit,” Oprah said (I paraphrase). “Why the hell shouldn’t I and others, at the very least, bear witness to their trauma?”
She was informed that it was illegal to show footage of the child porn, so she settled for graphic descriptions from the police.
In one video, a little girl is forced to give a dog a blow job while two other children watch.
In another, a man rapes a little child on a dirty bed.
The police officer—the one in charge of the sting—never referred to these incidents as “molestation,” “incest,” “oral sex,” or “sexual engagement.” She called them what they are: rape.
Repeatedly and definitively.
I loved her for that.
Oprah was all, “You know, maybe this is deeply unpleasant for you to hear about, much less see, but how do you think that child feels?”
How can anyone allow a child to have such a horrible experience completely alone in the world?
If the environment/culture maintains its ignorance about this horror show, then our children are, by and large, experiencing rape alone.
Why would anyone choose to luxuriate in ignorance while children are being treated this way throughout the world and in our own neighborhood or family?
This is, after all, our world. We all live in it together. It is a reflection of our most intimate selves. I may be getting all anthropological n’ shit, but it does not reflect well on anyone who lives in a culture when kids get raped.
Our culture produces domestic violence, psychopathic murderers, child rapists, recess bullies, and freeway sociopaths. These kinds of predators organically result from many factors that describe our culture: self-absorption, unwillingness to deal with abuse, lack of resources to help people with their problems, lack of empathy, bloated senses of entitlement, survival of the fittest, lying, cheating, and stealing. These are just a few of many mundane realities found in our frontier culture/environment.
Of course we produce serial killers and child rapists.
Examining our culture/environment and understanding how and why we produce such individuals is therefore key. Holding ourselves accountable for the violence we perpetuate goes hand in hand with this examination. Ultimately, a restructuring of our frontier-minded culture and cultural identity is in order.