Winning Ways

[from 10/14/09]

Yesterday I was traveling by bus with Anitra "She Who Is Not To Be Entrusted With The Transfers" Freeman. I struck up a game of "How Is That A Christian Allegory?" This is a fun game you can play with your friends that doesn't require equipment, hands, a direction in life, or any sort of skill. Someone names a movie you've all seen. You have to come up with a way in which the plot or some significant subplot is a Christian allegory. You don't have to be Christian to play the game, you only have to know as much about Christianity as anyone born in America must in order to squeak by.

We started with the Wizard of Oz, which is easy. A story of redemptions all around. Everybody's soul is saved by the end, or else they've been cast out, or the equivalent. Work out your own details. Anitra thought she'd stump me with The Graduate, thinking I'd go for "Dustin Hoffman forms a cross in the church window", a mere sign, but I zigged around that and pointed out that, in hopping a bus with Ben, Elaine is truly taking up her cross by renouncing worldly possessions for a life of sacrifice. Anitra then tried to nail me with Debby Does Dallas. I had to admit I'd seen it from beginning to end, but could not discover any allegory in the plot, as I could not have been distracted by any. Fortunately, Anitra hadn't seen it at all so it didn't count against me. But later I lost on Dr. No. Perhaps I could have got that one if I knew the Minor Prophets better, but I earned karmic points (part of a parallel game) for admitting defeat when I did.

There are lots of games like that you can make up. There are so many such games, in fact, that you can even play the meta-game "How Can We Turn That Random Fact Or Event Into A Game?" -Game. Wherein a player tosses out a random fact or event and all take turns suggesting games to be devised referring to it, and offer illustrations of game play.

For instance, let's take the extremely random fact that Barack Obama, our president, is a Nobel Peace Prize recipient. The game I would offer to play off that is "What's Obama Going To Win Next?" Players try to think of potential Obama wins the other players haven't, until they can't. Let's see, I might go with "a game of Horse", "a lifetime supply of Turtle Wax", "The Afghan War", "The War of 1812", "Constantinople", "The Publishers Clearing House Sweepstakes", "The Genius Award", "an Emmy for best leading man in a daytime drama", "the Super Bowl (by himself, with his hands tied)."

Another player might then counter with "What's The Nobel Peace Prize Committee Up To, Anyway?" The play in that game could get quite convoluted as it calls upon the players to put their best paranoia forward. He could offer as illustrations of play, "they confused him with Eddie Murphy", "they wanted to annoy Ahmadinejad", "they wanted to annoy Glenn Beck", "they're Norwegians, so they're socialists, enough said", "they picked the guy (Obama) who's making foreigners love America, so that Americans will then hate that guy and oust him, so that everyone outside America will go back to hating America again, which is what they (the American-hating Norwegians) actually want."

The overly attentive reader will have noticed that I have just taken the introduction of the aforementioned meta-game as an event and played a round of itself with itself. If you try this alone at home, keep a towel handy.

Here's another fun game you can play. Watch an afternoon of Fox News with your friends and pick out the games the talking-heads are playing. You'll find them remarkably similar to mine, except that they don't tell you when they're playing them, or what the rules are. And, sadly, no one ever drops out.

The Democrats’ Gift Horse

The games congressmen play. These days it’s High Horse (AKA High Horse, High Horse, Now Who’s On Their High Horse?)

I have long enjoyed games myself. Growing up as an only child in a sick, sick, sick, (pretend I wrote it 13 times), family, often living in isolation, I became adept at what you could call the Meta-Game Game, also known as Now What Might I Want to Do? The idea of this game is to invent a game, then another game, then another game, until a death in the family occurs, hopefully not your own. At no time is it necessary to play the games invented. In fact, if you play one of them, you automatically lose at the meta level, and have to start all over.

Some of the best games I came up with had no rules or instructions. For example, Figure Out How To Walk On Air pretty much says it all in the name. The game consists in spending hour after hour trying to figure out how to walk on air. One day I made the mistake of actually playing a spinoff game called Figure Out How To Bounce A Ball Off Air, and broke a window.

Having become so good at entertaining myself in isolation, I tend to take that skill for granted. So I’m always a little surprised when I discover people who are incapable of ever playing quietly by themselves. People like ex-Congressman Mark Foley, for instance. This is a guy who will never be satisfied with an imaginary friend.

Foley was playing a fantastic game of High Horse. High Horse isn’t as sophisticated a game as the Meta-Game Game, but that doesn’t mean that great play isn’t possible. Foley’s move of chairing the congressional Missing and Exploited Children’s Caucus, in between exploiting underaged former pages for minor real-time titillations and jollies on the internet, was extraordinary, and will surely go down in High Horse history. For anything even close you have to go back to Dan Quayle and Murphy Brown in 1992.

Of course we’ve all been watching the entire Republican Party consistently win at High Horse for the past quarter century, ever since Reagan got even for that time Nixon fell off his. Their capture and ownership of the phrase “Family Values” continues to impress all of us, all the more so as their economic policies crush poor families.

Now the party that tried to force Clinton out of office for having extra-marital sex in the Oval Office and trying to keep it a secret is faced with charges of having a pedophile in their midst and trying to keep it a secret.

Now, I don’t know if you can necessarily say that Mark Foley is a pedophile. I mean, Jerry Lee Lewis married a thirteen-year-old girl. That was certainly something, wasn’t it? Did anyone call him a pedophile? Well, OK. But still, sixteen is practically ‘round the bend, when it comes to boys.

Anyway, for Hastert and Company to be aware that Foley was sending inappropriate emails to former pages and not call for an investigation, all the while trumpeting Family Values, that should earn them big points, and I think they deserve a lot of credit for staying on their game.

But the Republicans aren’t the only ones playing. We also have Democrats jumping onto their own Horses, pretending that if you vote Democrat next month it will be a vote for decency.

The Democrats are missing an opportunity to raise the game of High Horse to a whole new higher level. What they need to do is come right out and tell the truth, that the behavior of the Republican leadership was typical of all political leaderships in the face of such scandal, and that they, the Democrats, would have probably reacted the same way, because it isn’t the Republicans that are broke, it’s the whole system.

Then they could say, “Ha, ha, we told the truth and you didn’t.” And they’d be the new winners.