When Hillary Clinton was elected U.S. Senator out of lovely New York, I got the hell out of Dodge. In fact, I moved way the hell out of Dodge, across the country to Phoenix, where I hoped the desert would quell my rage for having to hear more about her political career. Hillary’s one of those million politicians who do what they do because they want recognition and a fancy career, not because they really care, or really want to do what’s best for the country. No, Hillary represents pretty much everything I hate about politicians – going with what’s popular, caring more about themselves than the country, and spinning subjects up to terminal velocities without bothering to do a minute of real research.
Enter Hillary’s latest bit of paranoia, ironically mirrored by conservative rednecks across the country: violent video games are the devil, and should be banned. Never mind that parents should take some responsibility for once, and admit that they don’t actually watch what their children buy in stores. Never mind that little kids, too young to have jobs, shouldn’t be running around with pockets of cash, alone in a store, to buy whatever suits their fancy without parental supervision. No, let’s place the responsibility on the retailer, and fine them when some kid’s parent is incapable of raising their child properly. Hillary, you’re the queen of brilliance.
The bottom line is that video games with truly pornographic and violent content is being marketed to our children,” Clinton said. “As parents and advocates for children, we have to draw the line.”
Hillary, name three video games sold at a major video game retailer that has “truly pornographic” material out-of-box. Can’t do it? Okay, name two? Can you name one? Naturally, Hillary’s latest tirade is based upon the recent hubbub concerning Rockstar’s Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, in which a modder in the Netherlands claims to have unlocked a mini-game wherein the game’s main character has sex with women. This “Hot Coffee” mod, as it is known as, either exploits a bit of code that the developers decided shouldn”t be linked from the main game for obvious reasons, or is a full-fledged add-on written by the mod community. Fact is, it doesn’t really matter how it was made or who made it. Fact is, the sex-game, while pornographic in nature, isn’t part of the game you buy. No one can purchase the PC version of the game (the only version Hot Coffee works on, despite the lack of such reporting by the media), and play porno mini-games without first downloading and configuring files from the Internet. And, the mod isn’t downloadable from any official Rockstar web site. This means two things: one, parents should be monitoring what their kids are downloading in the first place, and two, Hillary (and the media) is incapable of dealing with the real facts, because the spin is far more interesting.
If the material is imbedded in the game and available by a few simple steps, Clinton said she will call for a nationwide recall of the game so that all who bought it believing the M rating can be reimbursed.
The funny thing is, Hillary, the people who bought the game believing the M rating got exactly that: a mature game. Not a game with accessible pornographic content, not a game mislabeled, just a mature game with content similar to many titles out there. I can cut’n paste nude breasts onto the scantily clad pictures in Maxim magazine just to look at porn. That doesn”t mean Maxim, which displays mostly nude women, is suddenly exposing full-on pornography. But here we are, yelling at Rockstar for selling something that isn’t what Hillary is making it out to be.
“The disturbing material in Grand Theft Auto and other games like it is stealing the innocence of our children and it’s making the difficult job of being a parent even harder,” Clinton said. “I am announcing these measures today because I believe that the ability of our children to access pornographic and outrageously violent material on video games rated for adults is spiraling out of control.”
Making the job of being a parent even harder? Jesus Christ, Hillary, how did you raise your daughter? Did you think raising a kid was supposed to be easy? God forbid something comes up where a parent needs to make a responsible judgment call, and God forbid your kid gets angry at you because you told them that they can’t buy the video game they wanted. No, let’s put that responsibility on a third party, all because you’re a weak parent.
As to the issue of violence taking away our children’s innocence, have you watched the news lately? Are you aware that our children are being raised in a society where war is touted as patriotic? Despite the fact that you and other politicians aren’t able to differentiate Iraq from terrorism, some fourth graders are, and they’re being told it’s not okay to buy violent video games until they’re 17, but that it’s more than reasonable to start thinking about joining the Army at that age, so they can be patriotic and kill insurgents in a country that hasn’t been firmly linked to the attack on the World Trade Center.
Oh, but kids these days are supposed to be free from violence immediately around them. Just like the kids of the ’30s who didn’t grow up to be obsessed killers despite the fact that they watched people around them get killed on a daily basis, hearing mortars and bombs and some watching their family toted away to be killed in camps. And kids back in Rome, we all know that watching the games in the Colliseum, ripe with death from the gladius or a lion, all grew up to be crazed killers.
What Hillary doesn’t understand, maybe because the land of politics has blurred her common sense, is that kids lose their innocence. That’s what makes them become adults. If it’s not killing a buffalo, going to war, or going through some other rite of passage, kids lose their innocence and become adults. What kids see these days, on TV, in video games, or what they listen to in music, isn’t going to make them mad murderers any more than our forefathers who witnessed strung up pirates on local fisherman’s docks, the beating of blacks in the South, or the massacre of Native Americans. And if those same kids who live in happy Pokemon-land start to think that virtual, simulated violence in video games is akin to the real thing, then your kids either already have problems, or you need to start talking to them.
Research has, for years, confirmed a link between exposure to violent video games and aggressive behavior in children. A new study by researchers at Indiana University School of Medicine show that playing violent video games triggers “unusual brain activity” among aggressive adolescents with disruptive behavior disorders, said Dr. John Walsh, founder and director of the National Institute on Media and the Family.
Yeah, unusual brain activity in already aggressive adolescents with disruptive behavior disorders. Sure there’s a link between disturbed kids and violent video games, but that link is linear; kids with violent tendencies will inherently be attracted to violent video games. That doesn’t mean violent video games make kids have violent tendencies.
Clinton’s soon-to-be-proposed legislation will call for a $5,000 maximum penalty for retailer caught selling or renting violent and pornographic video games to minors. Much like the way cigarettes and alcohol are sold, M- and AO-rated video games would be kept out of minors’ reach by being placed in locked cases and behind counters, only to be retrieved with ID, she said.
And I, Hillary, would like to propose that any parent found purchasing such a game for their 9-year-old child, be sentenced to same. Silly? Yes, exactly.
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