The Good Old Days

Everyone knows that conservatives are just misguided by longing for the "good old days" of their youth--which weren't actually all that good. (Ah, the 50s. If you were white and male and Protestant and rich and didn't know any leftists and didn't have teenage sons to get into rumbles with knives and chains and/or get sent to Korea....)

But romantic liberals who long for the good old days of mankind's* youth are even more misguided.

Surely the ancient peoples were more peaceful, honorable, spiritual, and in touch with the earth than modern Christian/scientific/materialist/whatever society, right?

• The Celts liked to decorate in human skulls.
• The Norse idea of heaven was a place where they could hack each others' limbs off all day, drink all night, and wake up ready to do it all over again? (Didn't Dante give the wrathful a circle of Hell that was pretty much the same thing?)
• The Egyptians worked thousands of slaves to death to build the pyramids.
• The Caucasus mountains are full of peoples who finally accepted civilization only after the Russians showed them that modern weapons are even more neato than rolling boulders down the hill at strangers (although some of them still required Peter to wrestle lions first).

Oh, but those are all part of Western culture, if you stretch "Western" to include part of Asia. What about the wise and mystical east?

I could point out that, long before western culture invented 8 buns to 12 hot dogs, the Chinese invented 16 pounds of mu-shu pork to 4 mu-shu pancakes. How wise and mystical is that? But let's stick to ancient times.

• I'm guessing you've heard of Genghis Khan, and maybe Tamerlane and Beber? A "Horde" is generally not a friendly gathering.
  
• Then there's the Japanese, who, centuries before making salted cuttlefish snacks labeled "For great taste of healthy Fun!" used to intentionally starve most of their people just to make sure they couldn't revolt. Not to mention slaughtering the Ainu for sport.
  
• The Polynesians practiced cannibalism until the 19th century.
  
• Chinese warlords put entire populations to the sword to make sure there was nobody to breed with their women while they were out plundering.

Ah, but those peaceful Native Americans, they knew and loved Mother Earth.

• The Lakota drove entire herds of buffalo over cliffs so they could skim a few off the top.
  
• The Aztecs--this one's just too easy. Yeah, just about every culture on earth had some kind of human sacrifice, often involving babies, but nobody took it to quite the level of these guys.
  
• There are Amazon tribes still alive today who won't let you get laid or take drugs until you can prove you've killed someone--which goes back to the ancient human tradition that the best way to get laid is to kill someone and then rape his wives.
  
• The Apaches, they were nice guys too....

Maybe we're not going back far enough? Maybe it's agriculture or civilization itself that spelled the beginning of the end? Well, whoever the first modern humans in Europe were, they drove the mammoth and so many other species into extinction so quickly that they had to abandon northern Europe thousands of years before the glaciers forced them to. I think that says it all.

If not, look through the early human bones we've found and count up what percentage show clear signs of being attacked--and often butchered after death--with stone axes.

The fact is, through most of human history, the strongest and most bloodthirsty ruled. There were no Ghandis or MLKs until the 20th century. Pining for the peaceful state of nature in edenic prehistory is just stupid.

The good old days were pretty horrible, and as bad as W is, any randomly-chosen leader of Assyria would make him look like a saint.

Now, that's not to say that today's status quo is good. But instead of looking to a mystical past that never existed, look to the future. Figure out what's wrong with the world and find a better way to live that nobody's ever tried. It could be a lot better than today--and it can't be a lot worse than a few millenia ago in the "good old days."

Footnotes:

* If you want to call me a sexist for not saying "humankind," go ahead. But men pretty much ruled the early days of the species, so women don't deserve as much of the blame.

Hillary and Tipper and Hadassah, Oh My

I never understood why the Republicans hated Clinton so much. Sure, he occasionally talked left, but this is a guy who balanced the budget, destroyed welfare, ended affirmative action, screwed over gays again and again, attempted to censor the Internet, prevented technology from being exported, expanded wiretapping, and gave us the DMCA. And not just as President, under duress from the Gingrich revolutionaries; back when he was governor of Arkansas, he was the only governor who allowed Reagan's people to use one of his state's national guard bases for illegal Contra-funding missions.

This is the kind of stuff conservatives love.

The real problem, I think, is that Republicans aren't conservatives anymore. Look at W: He's destroyed the balanced budget. How? By spending more than anyone in history, mostly on a massive nation-building exercise that would have made Goldwater or Reagan blow smoke out of their ears (and, if it weren't both misguided and misapplied, would have made the hippies proud).

Unfortunately, the Democrats now are conservatives, since the Democratic Leadership Council's successful takeover. If you've never heard of the DLC or their agenda, read Nader's viewpoint, or the same thing in their own words. Then come back here.

But forget about their Reaganomic policy for a moment; the worse thing is that they've turned the Democrats into the anti-fun party. There's something horribly wrong when the people who went to Woodstock (or wish they did) finally take over the Democratic Party and immediately use it to try to prevent the MTV generation from hearing bad words (remember the PMRC?) and follow up by trying to prevent the PSX generation from seeing badly-animated simulated sex without nudity. Yes, these are the wives of Clinton, Gore, and Lieberman in action.

The sad thing is that you can imagine W having a good time at a concert, while Gore stands outside giving out leaflets against the band. The question isn't, "How can Democrats like that win," but "Who in their right minds would want Democrats like that to win?"

Grand Theft Auto: The Sex

Of course the real hoopla with GTA:SA wasn't the violence, it was the sex. It all started with the "Hot Coffee" patch. Not that the right-wing lunatics of the Democratic Leadership Conference wouldn't have found some reason to shout about GTA, but this was their way in.

After Hot Coffee surfaced, GTA:SA was pulled from the shelves, and eventually rerated AO for Adults Only. How exactly is this different from M for Mature?

For an M, if you're not an adult, you have to convince your parents to buy it for you even though you probably shouldn't be playing it.

For an AO, if you're not an adult, you have to convince your parents to pretend to buy it for themselves and then give it to you even though you probably shouldn't be playing it.

(If you're Dad's too much of a pussy to look the salesman in the eye and say, "Yes, I want to play Grand Theft Auto," he can just tell them it's for his 18-year-old son in college.)

The difference is supposed to be the sexual content. Never mind the whole argument about hidden content that you have to download a mod to access (and RockStar shouldn't have tried it). Among dozens of minigames is a cheesy sex game with no nudity, and this is somehow less acceptable for tender young children of 17 than Grand Theft Auto.

Well, I suppose it might be dangerous for kids to think they could have sex without taking their pants off. They'll be bragging to their friends that they "went all the way" when all they got was a dry-hump--and they won't even know they're lying. A whole generation could grow up pathetic.

But somehow, I don't think this is what Hillary, Tipper, and Hadassah are all pissed off about.

Grand Theft Auto: The Violence

Does Grand Theft Auto really affect kids? Are today's kids going to be jacking cars to do drivebys for corrupt cops tomorrow? Of course not; that's so 90's (before the games even came out).

Besides, in my day, the biggest game was Pacman. Did my whole generation end up eating pills and running around a dark room to a repetitive beat?

Hmmm... Bad argument. Let's try a different tack.

First, kids aren't supposed to be playing these games.

Pacman was pretty much for everyone, except the small number of people who were over 25 when it came out and therefore never got it. But there were games clearly intended for different markets by the time I was a teenager.

You wouldn't want a 6-year-old to face the trauma of real combat in the form of wireframe tanks approaching over a 2D landscape. And it takes a certain amount of maturity to face up to the awesome responsibility of losing at Defender and failing the last of the humanoids. And the demonic talking space station Sinistar would scare the crap out of any young kid other than maybe Damien the Omen.

On the other hand, the Strawberry Shortcake game was torture to anyone in double-digit ages.

And then there was Master Blaster, a game for the Apple ][ that simulated masturbation, which was obviously too mature for anyone under 18 and far too immature for anyone old enough to masturbate for real.

Now we have this rating system, brought to you by the Clinton/Gore/Lieberman families (you know, the ones who were going to save us from the Bush family fascism). I'm not sure I like the rating system, but it's the same people who pushed for it who are now attacking game companies that follow it.

RockStar claimed that GTA:SA was Mature, and it is. It has lots of violence, tons of antisocial content, light sexual content, and the kind of social satire that nobody really enjoys until they're in college (and not for long after).

The M rating, for Mature, means that if you're not an adult, you have to get your parents to buy it for you. Sort of like R for movies, but with much more detail. There's no way your parents could buy you GTA:SA without knowing what it was about. Besides, the name ought to have been a clue.

Second, if any of these governmental wives had played any of the GTA3 series, they might have liked the messages. Bad guys screw each other over and always lose in the end. Drugs kill. When you spray a room with a Tec-9 it's really easy to accidentally kill your friends. The good cops hate the bad ones. Chuck D is insane. You can make more money putting out fires than setting them (although you do have to steal a firetruck first).

The violence in the GTA3 series is less extreme, less graphic, and at the same time less realistic than you find in movies--and the guys who make those movies get to be governor of Minnesota or California, while the game developers are threatened with bodily harm by Congressmen.

And when is the Predator himself going to get to be governor instead of letting the minor characters get all the glory?

Hints for Austrians

Austrians clearly don't get the American psyche. They don't understand why Kurt Waldheim couldn't be in charge of the UN because of his Nazi past but Schwarzenegger can be in charge of California.

That's OK, Americans can't tell Austria from Australia.

But given that America likes to invade countries for reasons not far different from "You gave us an immigrant who looked like the savior of the Republican Party but who actually turned out to suck," Austrians might need to understand America. So here goes:

While Kurt was recording messages of peace for the aliens to be carried in space probes, Arnie was acting as a homicidal robot and blowing shit up. Penance doesn't work nearly as well as blowing shit up. Look at Clinton and Yugoslavia.

(Not to pick on Democrats. The only reason the Republicans don't try this is that excessive blowing-shit-up is usually the very thing they have to make penance for, as opposed to Democrats, who have to make penance for getting shitty blowjobs. Rimshot.)

Peace, Love, and Matriarchy

The Greeks didn't have our penchant for associating femininity with compassionate rejection of patriarchal violence. Hera, the Queen of the Gods, was the ultimate psychobitch from hell, and the most important human women in their mythology were the Bacchanites, who got roaring drunk and ripped people limb from limb in their celebrations.

Today, Gaia is the hippie symbol of all that's good and peaceful. After all, she's the earth goddess, the all-mother.

In particular, she's the mother of her own husband. And of another boy who she raised so she could give him a sickle to castrate her husband/son. And a bunch of weird-looking monsters, too. Not the kind of stuff hippies are usually into, unless you lace their pot with a mixture of speed, PCP, and blue nine.

Say what you will about Margaret Thatchter, I think she'd fit right in on Olympus.

This whole longing for an ancient pagan matriarchy that was destroyed by the Christian patriarchy is just silly. Anyone who's read the slightest history realizes that the Athenians, the Persians, the Chinese, and the other important pagan nations were ever bit as patriarchal as Charlemagne's Holy Roman Empire.

It wasn't Julia Caesar, after all.

There were a few women like Boedicaea, who ran things for a while when some tribe ran out of men after one too many bloody battles. But you can say the same thing for the Christian era--look at Queen Elizabeth, or the 20 or so Queen Christinas that plagued northern Europe for most of the middle ages.

Then there were the behind-the-scenes women, from just about every king's mother or wife in Byzantium having her nephew's nose cut off up to Princess Sophie of Hanover, who arranged enough royal marriages to guarantee the survival of hemophilia into the modern era.

P.S., to those neo-hippies who think matriarchy is as bad as patriarchy and poly is the real way to go, remember that before the Jews started putting limits on things, "poly" meant that the King had a harem of hundreds of wives guarded by eunuchs. Polygyny is common all over world history, but polyandry only exists (outside of San Francisco) in tribes on the edge of survival, and then only in special circumstances. (For example, some Inuit tribes make the groom's younger brother into a "junior husband" in years when there's not enough whale fat to feed the usual number of nursing women and babies. Not exactly the free-wheeling love fest the Ren Faire/Burning Man crossover crowd imagines.) If you can make it work, good for you--but don't try to tell me it's "natural" or "pagan."