Re: The McVeigh Video Game

[Michael Stutz <stutz@dsl.org>]

On Tue, 17 Jun 1997, Alan wrote:

> I am expecting Tim McVeigh to show up in a video game any day now.  Check
> out some of the games at the local arcade.  See who the villians in the
> "shoot-em-up" games are...  Used to be "drug dealers".  Now it is
> "terrorists".  And you get to be the one to "blow the badguys away".

Read a similar theme last night in James Kunstler's New Urbanist manifesto,
_The Geography of Nowhere_. He talks of the currently-ruling corporate
society's romanticism of the past in a discussion of the psychological
techniques used on parents and children in the Disney theme parks. Actors
guised as pirates, cowboys or brigands all stage "shoot-em-ups" to the
entertainment of middle-class families; he wonders if, in 100 years hence,
the status quo families of the age will watch reinactments of black gangsta
youth and their drive-by shootings.