Now, I will confess up front that I, myself, have never been to Africa. It just never came up. I’m aware of where it is, I’ve known a number of people who were born and raised in various parts of the continent, but I, personally, have never popped on over for a visit. Despite this fact, it has come to my attention that there are quite a few black people living there. Between Houghton-Mifflin, CNN, National Geographic, Eric Cartman or perhaps even Lethal Weapon 2, somewhere along the way I got the message. Many black people live in Africa.

As it turns out, this staggering pearl of wisdom is not limited to the United States. Over in Japan, where they also have cable television and access to globes, it is known that many black people live, as I’ve said, in Africa. So if a Japanese video game company (let’s say, oh, Capcom for example) were going to make a game that was set in Africa (where Africa /= Egypt), you might expect there to be many black characters featured in the game. Had Capcom developed a game set in Africa that was populated entirely by blonde haired, blue-eyed white people, it not only would have been strange, but it’s likely that a lot of people would have asked why they’d done such a thing.

As it turns out, populating their game with people who appear to actually be from the location the game is set in is a big no-no, especially if your character (as in most games) winds up shooting a lot of them. Enter Resident Evil 5, which is receiving a lot of “OMG racism” flak for exactly that reason. There is one particular blog that went off on a wickedly stupid tear on the subject, and I will not link to it simply because I don’t want the showboating attention stunter to get any more traffic than she already has.

Of course, the first three Resident Evils were set in the American Mid-West, and featured the indiscriminantly creepy killing of many white, white zombies. Resident Evil 4 was set in Spain (sort of), and the not-zombie enemies in that game were slightly more swarthy – dark hair, dark eyes, distinctly mediteranian looking. No problem there. I’ve played many games where the enemies were all Asian (Red Steel, for better or for worse, comes immediately to mind). And there seemed to be no outcry a few years back when those highly mediocre Desert Storm games hit the market. But RE5? A shit-fest of implied racism.

If the game featured dark skinned enemies based on the premise that you had to kill them because they were black, yes, that would be incredibly and embarrassingly racist. Even if the game featured mobs of black-skinned enemies who needed to be killed because they were dirty or impure or somehow less than human because they were black, that would also be racist (and in some ways, much worse). But the game features the enemies it does because of the location in which it is set, and the reason you have to fight these enemies is that they have been transformed from innocent people into vicious killers by an outside influence. Probably “The Man” come to think of it (where The Man = Umbrella Corporation). It’s only a matter of time before someone who isn’t getting enough web traffic decides that RE5 is a commentary of slavery. That’ll be a fun few days on Joystiq.

Of course, the other issue that seems to be upsetting people is that the central character is white. So it’s a white guy shooting black people. That he’s white because he was already white in previous games matters not, apparently. Though it does raise an interesting point. Suppose the central character was black. Would it still be racist? What if this newly pigmented hero was shooting packs of white people? And I mean, pasty-skinned white zombies, who were wearing Members Only jackets while playing water polo and listening to Toby Keith. Would that have sparked cries of racism?

Look, I’m not trying to defend racism or prejudices. I think they’re absurd, because if you really want to hate someone, all you have to do is get to know them personally – we’re all flawed enough to find an excuse. And I agree that there is still a shameful amount of racism in the world, even and especially in the Land of the Free. But stupid bullshit reactions like this do not fight racism. They trivialize it. They make it seem like an overblown joke. They excuse the real racism that hurts good, innocent people every day by lumping it in with this made up, oversensitive politically correct bullshit nonsense. Inventing racism where it does not exist furthers the cause of racism instead of diminishing it. And that is what is going on here.

But beyond the already terrible act of trivializing racism, reaction-spasms like this also make it harder to talk about the subject of racism in general. They add a finger pointing layer of obfuscation to the already murky and difficult discussion. They cause people to engage in verbal acrobatics to try to prove just how racist they are not, and those are exactly the sorts of acrobatics that wind up sounding like (you guessed it) racism. You don’t defeat racism by being a hypersensitive bitch, okay? And you sure as hell don’t fan the flames of self-constructed controversy just to get page views. Which is the only reason I haven’t suggested that assuming everyone else is racist might be, in fact. . . racist.

Oh snap! Bring on the flames.

At least, that’s what the AP bothered reporting to me today. It turns out that of the one hundred million accounts on Myspace, seven of them turned out to be unregistered sex offenders. Now, am I glad that they got caught? Of course I am. Do I acknowledge that there are some skeevy bastards on Myspace? Absolutely. But if you poll any given population of one hundred million people, you’re going to uncover just about every variation and deviance imaginable. You could probably find 7 necrophiliacs, 7 flat-earthers. . . maybe even 7 Bush supporters! Maybe.

The point, though, is that this likely wouldn’t have been a story if it hadn’t been on Myspace. Law enforcement did its job and caught some bad guys. Again, I’m glad to hear it. But if you think for a moment it would have warranted a full sentence, let alone an entire article, had it not had to do with “teh interwebs”, you’re sorely mistaken. It’s a non-story, disguised as news, designed to drive a wedge between old and young. Because computers are big and scary and strange. There are child molesters on your daughter’s cell phone and terrorists in your son’s closet. Be afraid. Be so fucking afraid.

Some of you are wondering what I’m going to say about the shootings in Virginia. The answer is that I’m not going to say a terrible lot, because there’s not a terrible lot that we know about the situation, the circumstances, or the shooter. We have the outlined sketchings of what might one day resolve into facts. And it is neither my place nor my right to fill those facts in, or to turn them into a narrative. Especially not one that just happens to further my own political opinions.

It will come as a surprise to none of my regular readers that Jack Thompson is already blaming the shootings on video games. He does this routinely, and then finds out afterwards if the shooter even played them. I don’t know if he did or not. It’s not relevant anyway, and it should be roughly on the five billionth page of the List Of Things We Should Know about these killings. I refuse to even link to him, because I don’t want to give him the Google cred. Dr. Phil apparently agrees with Jack, and this is reason enough to shun that bald headed hack like the no talent moustache transportation system that he is.

There are also a lot of people using this as an excuse to debate gun control laws. This has to stop as well. Those of you that hate me because I’m supposedly a bleeding heart liberal might be surprised to learn that I’m not in favor of most gun control laws (probably not for the same reasons as the NRA, but that’s beside the point). They are written with absolutely no logic, without an understanding of the realities of the world, and they primarily criminalize the tool that is used to carry out the crime rather than the crime itself.

The best thing I can say about gun control laws is that they give law enforcement a pretext upon which to detain or arrest a suspected criminal. The problem with that system is that it forces me to rely on law enforcement to apply those laws intelligently and reasonably. Occasionally it happens. Usually it does not. But what’s important to understand here is that gun control laws, the way they exist right now, do almost nothing to effectively keep guns out of the hands of criminals. And they do even less to prevent tragedies like the ones we witnessed in Virginia (the shooter reportedly was wielding a pair of legal-to-purcahse hand guns, though I can’t verify that with absolute certainty).

Do I think there should be laws concerning gun control? Of course I do. But they need to be reasonable and logical. In fact, I view them in much the same way I view any other prohibitive law we have in this country. I see gun control as being linked to the war on drugs in a very different way than most people do. That they both ineffectively and pointlessly punish otherwise lawful citizens by criminalizing something for everyone because our government is too impotent to actually deal with the realities of the situation, and our society is too fucked in the head to even have an open discussion about it. Prohibitive laws fail in any free society, and actually cause more crime than they prevent. They allow for a black market to exist in place of a fair and regulated market (not to mention a taxable market), and that is the source of the violence.

But no law, prohibitive or otherwise, can cut to the core issue of what happened in Virginia. It wasn’t a matter of access to weaponry or access to media. The truth is that we don’t know what it was a matter of access to, other than society in general. I’m not going to say this guy was pushed over the edge, because maybe he wasn’t. Maybe he had a perfectly normal life, woke up one morning and decided to kill thirty-two people. We just don’t know what or why right now. And all those empty suits and gaudy perms specu-punditing twenty-four hours a day add nothing to the discussion, but detract greatly from those last few shreds of what makes us a civilized society.

The people who truly make me sick (and usually it takes a few days for this to start happening, but I guess the 24/7 cycle demands stupidity at greater and greater speeds) are the ones that start holding their bits and pieces and talking about what a bunch of macho bad-asses they would have been if they’d been at the scene. Mcjoan over at DailyKos has already called out the first two hacks, and there will be more to come. What’s great about free speech is that it allows every voice to be heard. What’s tragic about it is that every voice includes a couple of blowhard back-line gladiators like these two. Whenever the Old Media starts crying about the lack of journalistic standards of the New Media, these two sad, self-indulgent shitstrutters alone should be enough to make them gag on their own shame. Make no mistake, Derbyshire and Blake are the sorts of people that I’m supposedly not as good as. I almost wretch just having to type that.

I normally allow for pretty un-moderated comments here at adennak.com but in this case I am going to make an exception. If you want to talk about violent media, I’ve got a backlog on the subject and there’s always more to come. If you want to talk about gun control, there will definitely be posts in the near future to reply to about that. If you want to talk about Old/New Media, it comes up regularly as well. If you want to use this outburst of raw violence to further your own political ideology, do us all a favor and go fuck yourself.