Political Cortex: Brain Food for the Body Politic

The moralists in our society have buried their heads so far up their own collective asses that they miss the assault weapons for the children's fantasy story.  Today, a criticism of Israel will attract a chorus of accusations of anti-semitism yet swastika-tattoed gamers spewing racist and hate speech hardly raise an eyebrow. Teens who boast online of their access to their parents arsenal of weapons are sheltered from books like Harry Potter, Fahrenheit 451, and Tom Sawyer.

And Rob Simmons and his campaign play this willful blindness like a fiddle - like the fiddle all Republicans play these days.  To them Christianity is a cheap and easy innoculation that can be leveraged into big money, big votes, and mass apathy.  Unfortunately, the common ground of church and state appears to be pedophilia, hunger for absolute power, and fear of authority.

But there's one more shared value that Republicans and the Simmons campaign claim plausible deniability for.  That is craven immorality.  As I tracked  the source of the slanderous images being used against Courtney, I had to wade through a Dante's Inferno of disturbing imagery, smalltalk, and casual acceptance of violence that still rattles me.

Let's examine a first-person shooter game in which the first-person character can become a congessional page or intern, a large political donor's son or daughter, or a true-religion-believer. The character has access to their parent's and neighbor's guns, they can build bombs in their secret basement room, and their role is to kill a figure of authority, disrupt the political opposition, or make a gloriously violent political statement.

 

By day, your character studies with a character called "The Architect" whose own abilities are constrained by whatever they can get away with [and that includes a lot].  Your character's goal is to complement the Architect's own agenda by seruptitiously acting on his behalf.

Highlights of the game include the opportunity to mass-murder groups of protesters who are penned in areas away from your allies, creating denial-of-service attacks on their websites, and carrying weapons into political events that you are escorted into because of your association with the political party in power.

Oh, one last thing.  Your character may become unstable. If your character turns on his patrons, he gains bonus points and gets to participate in a level twenty winner-take-all shootout with authorities.  Before your character dies, it can recharge its powers by defiling hostages, annihilating property, or other acts of savagery.

There is no such game of course.  But Rob Simmons, in action and in deed, allowed an intern who describes himself as a "gunslinger" and a "righteous subjugator" to escort him to the President of the United States.  Rob Simmons is to national security what Condolezza Rice is to critical intelligence gathering.

The people of Connecticut have a problem that can only be solved in the voting booth.  Simmons is a self-proclaimed national security advocate yet, in the words of the 911 commission, he "lacks the imagination" and common sense America needs to feel truly secure.

In my next segment we'll examine why this isn't just idle speculation.