I'm trying to write a review of a documentary called Sir, No Sir! It's about how the Vietnam War was stopped not by stinking hippie flag-burners but by GIs who refused to fight.
I'm trying to write about how it makes me feel furry inside to see the footage of these crew-cut, callow-faced teenager Hectors in Elvis Costello-style no-sex specs sticking it to The Man, smashing imperialism from within and ending a brutal, stupid, futile war.
It speaks to my pacifist soul, this movie. And I know that if I can write the perfect review—joining all the dots between Iraq and 'Nam—I can trigger a new antiwar movement that will sweep this nation like sentient napalm and have the troops safely back home and Jane Fonda in the White House by Christmas.
But that's all been blown to blood and buggeration. The reason being that I've just bought a sleek, deadly efficient, gunmetal-gray sex-Mac. It's a steel dick of a computer. And as I try to type my message of peace, love and humanity, this sick little mega-rammed fascist bastard is whispering "Kill, burn, smash, destroy."
And I tremble.
It should be easy, writing this review. I have the hissing liberal Quislings of the BBC World Service spewing their vile anti-American propaganda in the background, giving me morale-sapping details of yet another squad of combat-shocked boys from the American heartland run amok and killing civilians. Join the dots.
But here's the problem; when I bought the beautiful Mac I also bought Doom 3—the latest version of the very same first-person alien-mutant shoot-'em-up that the U.S. Marines used to train baby Marines back in the day.
And when the fireball demon takes a shotgun blast in the chest and—get this—barks blood, I find myself rapidly sliding into a reptile brain-stem trance state. All work abandoned, I wade into a 12-hour gore-fest that obliterates all reason.
If war is so wrong, why is it so sexy? Why do my fingers still twitch whenever I see the plastic machine guns of my war-obsessed youth on eBay (like the awesomely totemic Johnny 7)? Why is the sight of a treeline disappearing in a huge fireball of petroleum jelly so pleasing to the eye, gut and nethers? And why can't I think of a single image that says "peace" that doesn't make me want to blow it up and piss hot, white phosphorous down its gaping dead-hippie throat?
The morning after my demented Doomfest and with the deadline breathing down my neck, the disgusted hippie-policeman-in-my-head kicks me out of bed with steel-toed Birkenstocks.
I am sick with myself, and I am at the keyboard and tip-tapping righteous, right-on antiwar bollocks before my Fair Trade coffee even starts to cool.
But still the evil sex-Mac— thin and deadly and encased in shiny titanium—whispers sweet horror. See, when I bought it, I also got this other game called Command and Conquer: Generals. It lets you command whole armies of flame-spitting tanks and—get this—if you choose the U.S. forces (rather than the hollering Arab terrorists), it lets you build detention camps.
Part of me worries about what goes on in these virtual camps—do virtual attack-dog-wielding virtual Lynndie Englands re-create scenes from Marilyn Manson videos using pyramids of virtual Arab terror suspects?
But the rest of me is too busy chuckling as I rain virtual TNT on a just-discovered virtual terrorist training camp.
This war's gonna have to stop without me.