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.