Iustitia caecus autem omnis vigilias eius

Tonight--just now, in fact-- I watched Barack Obama announce that Osama bin Laden is dead. He talked a lot about Justice, which, I have to admit, a year ago I might have still been stupid enough to like...

I should preface this--although it is almost offensive that I have to preface my comments with this-- that I in no way advocate wahhabist Islam, or the motivations of al-Qaeda, if indeed such an organization exists beyond the immediate minions of the now-assassinated bin Laden. Moreover, my opinion of Osama bin Laden, which I flatter myself to think of as slightly more sophisticated than the average American's, is that he was a wealthy young man with too much money and romance in his soul, corrupted early by modern radical Islam's very, very seductive persecution complex into launching an ill-fated and relatively ineffective campaign of haphazard terrorist attacks that, in the grand scheme of things, amount to little more than pinpricks against the capitalist imperialism and global overreach of the US military, which was bin Laden's actual target.

Now he will never die, because the United States has killed him.

Goddammit, somebody should have known better. If Justice had been done, bin Laden would have been shamed and humiliated and depowered by being held up before the world for everyone to see. For everyone to witness his impotence. For everyone--all peoples, all nations-- to have the right to participate in the condemnation of this bastard to any Hell you care to name. For everyone to have, in a sense, a hand on the knife as it was driven into his heart.

The world should have collectively judged him. Together. And in so doing, those foolish enough to follow him would have seen how not just those they fight but everybody else willingly condemned their beliefs.

But he was killed in the dark, by a hit squad sent by the Americans.

He was killed-- no, I can hear it already, in the feverish, bloody heart of fundamentalist Islam-- they had to kill him. The Americans were so afraid of him that they had to send their murderers to hound bin Laden across the goddamned planet to find and kill him...he was a hero, he was an example, he is a martyr. And they will raise their sons to say: bin Laden taught the mighty Americans fear.

Bin Laden's death may well have been an accident; it was said there was a firefight. But there is something in me that finds it hard to believe a 70-year-old man with kidney failure was on the front lines. But then again, the man clearly had some steel in him; he did last this long, after all...

Osama bin Laden is dead! But now he'll haunt the planet forever.

Sonum excitantis, nihil significans

It distresses me how much people like to agitate on the internet—speaking in an incendiary fashion, to no end. There’s even a name for it now—“slacktivism”—the digital equivalent of a fist limply pumped and someone burbling “Yeah, you tell ‘em!” But not too loudly, don’t wake the neighbors, kiddies…

No, distress is my polite little word for when I am fucking pissed out of my mind and don’t want to sound unreasonable. It’s such a neat, fussy little word that you can’t imagine it biting your throat out with the slightest provocation—much like an accountant in that way. I am not “distressed”; prissy capital-L Ladies get distressed when their favorite camisole has some dust on it.

Being angry on the internet is easy, right. I’m doing it now, writing words full of hate and passion and fire, such that just in the writing my mind alights with images of lava plumes and blazing souls screaming for blood; but I am sitting here, calmly, cross-legged on my busted chair.

Would these red-blooded souls rage like they do in the face of some spooks, guns in hand? Because it’s going to take a nation of hotheads with balls so big and iron-clad that they can barely walk to unfuck the nation at this point. It’s going to take a lot, because there’s a lot of poison that needs to be either leeched or bled out of us.

Unfortunately, it’s the very poison that needs to be cured that keeps Americans inactive and complacent—a carefully chosen venom, then, injected directly into the spinal column.

Laziness, for one thing—all of the shit everyone gets up in arms about keeps happening because people are too goddamn lazy to have a healthy democracy, which requires everyone being on their toes, so to speak, constantly. Intellectually they have to be able to grasp fundamental concepts about politics and economics, most notably that ideology is supposed to be a guide, not a rule, when deciding policy.

People have to be energetic enough about democracy to get off their asses and fucking vote in elections, and not just federal ones, either, I mean every goddamned election because those names are calling the shots in your life, one way or another.

Democracy is hard fucking work. There’s no just sliding by in one—and I hate to say this, because this very fact was used to disenfranchise non-landowners for a long time, to wit: the manual laboring classes are too busy doing work to become educated enough about politics and thus, why extend the vote to them? After all, they’d vote for people who want to make us, the landowners, pay them more…

Well, now that the wealthy in this country have convinced half the working poor—at fucking least—to voluntarily vote on how big the stick being jammed up their ass is…turns out the dumbfucks not knowing right from left in macroeconomics and national finance actually turned out for the best…

That’s the poison. Laziness, ignorance, the tendency of people to just want to be left alone, not have to fucking worry about this complicated shit, not have to risk their precious lifestyles…

Never mind that the American lifestyle significantly resembles the hell of at least three of five major religions I care to name. We work longer, producing less, in shittier jobs, than anyone in any nation with a GDPPC even remotely similar to ours. American life is beginning to resemble that of Red China more than Europe—although it should be said that this is because the Chinese government is pretty bright and it sees a good racket when it sees one. Panem et circenses…

Jesus fucking Christ, it’s depressing to live in a nation where a guy laid off from a plant being moved to Taiwan six years ago will threaten to beat the shit out of you for advocating something like the UK’s Dole—never mind that this would literally put money in his pocket, for free—because it would mean we’d have to give up our “rights”. Which rights? Oh, well…it turns out the only possible alternative to our glorious, enlightened Utopia is goddamned Nazis.

My bad. Sorry.

But that's all okay, because some fuckheads trolling each other on the internet will fix it with cherrypicked quotes from the Founding Fathers (on both sides, mind you).

Fuck.

FUCK FUCK FUCK.

New political maxim: "If an analysis of American politics lacks swearing throughout and copious references to sodomy, it's not fucking paying attention."

Fata exprobrandum hominem factum

It is my sincere hope that in time, history will look back on religion with particular hatred for one sin that, to my mind, exceeds all the others, which is this:

Religion teaches us, at a very young age, that there is such a thing as destiny.

Which is to say, that the future is already written, or decided, or inevitable. Which, of course, it is not; it's illogical even to assert that such a thing is possible, even excluding the insult to human free will implicit in that assertion.

But we are told: This Will Come To Pass. And it's like an infection in your mind, eating away at your reasoning. When you come in third at the race, well, it "wasn't meant to be". When your first romance ends, there's "someone else out there for you". When you don't get the job, it's "only a matter of time" before something will come your way.

And moreover, it teaches us: everything you have is by the grace of God, or Fate, or Karma. Your athletic prowess? God's gift to you. Your intellect? A blessing. Your successes? A path set before you by the Lord.

And again: your failures are necessary obstacles, that you were meant to have. Are you sick? It is a burden placed upon you to teach humility. Were you born to parents who have grown to resent each other? Your loneliness is your curse.

We are taught, in short, that what we do is not the ultimate determinant of what we get; and this is often served part-and-parcel with a heaping dose of "you get what you deserve / are meant to have" and/or "in the end, everything will even out", often in terms of a post-mortem reward that there's no point in questioning the existence of.

Destiny, if such a thing existed, would rob us of the opportunity to be human. To be living beings that act on the world and bring about things we desire. If all you have was destined, then did you really struggle to gain it? Was the suffering and loss, the inevitable price of life, really meaningful if it is merely the material echo of a primordial dictum of fate, for all that sorrow cuts like a razor and despair drowns like oil?

It fuels...laziness. And cowardice. Even--no, especially in me, because for so long I wanted there to be fate. I almost physically craved some special destiny, an inevitability to existence that would validate everything I suffered and everything I missed out on enjoying. Even after everything, I still hear that little part of me, crying and beaten and perpetually disappointed, begging me to believe once again that every will be okay someday, because it just has to. Because I want to be special and I don't want to have to make things work out.

This same laziness is reflected in society. Readily, almost eagerly, it seems. Pollution will be figured out in time; so will oil shortages. If the world becomes so filthy that human life cannot exist on it, science will take us to a new world. The sick deserve their illness-it's a burden that makes them stronger, not an accident of genes or environment that means they need help. The poor deserve it, somehow.

Madness. Madness and cruelty. This belief that there's a purpose to everything removes from us the responsibility of empathy; it tears from us the duty of being accountable for the fallout of our actions. When banks fail, it is not bankers' children who go hungry...

There is no destiny, friends. There is no reward waiting. The heavens are empty; and all there is in the universe is what we make. So let us make good.

Finis Ipsum

The weather outside is frightful…springtime in Wisconsin demands new folk wisdom. April sleetstorms bring May…brownish muck that gets in the soles of your shoe and turns to industrial-grade ceramic? Something like that, anyways.

Just as a demonstration of how bizarre the things I take seriously can be, I’m going to talk about the latest Mortal Kombat game. And just to show that I have a way of completely missing the point, I’m going to talk about the plot! Nobody plays Mortal Kombat for the plot, jeez.

Anyways, that means spoilers ahoy, so if for some reason you’d be turned away by that kind of thing…well, go away, and re-evaluate your priorities—it’s Mortal Kombat. A lot of people get punched really hard and then their arms fly off for no anatomically justified reason.

Now, I have to admit, as much as I acknowledge that Mortal Kombat is practically the definition of “sale by shock value”, it occupies a special place in my heart. As a young man, the imagery of the original game just leapt into my brain, and my parents banning me from playing it because of the ridiculously over-the-top violence saw to it that it stayed there.

Now that I’m older, the ridiculously atavistic experience and absurd justifications for fistfights with magic aliens are a refreshing throwback to the days of yelling “GET OVER HERE!” at my friends at recess in elementary school. Mindless fun, right?

The Mortal Kombat IP has declined over the years. As an fan from the old, old days, and a bit of a purist in everything, I would say that the decline started to show in MK3, when they introduced a couple of really dud characters where before the series was notable for each character having a pretty simple and attractive “story” that was immediately apparent. I mean, what the hell did Kabal end up being, anyways? And does <i>anybody</i> like Stryker?

That said, MK4 was undoubtedly where the “dud characters, go-nowhere plot” cancer became malignant, for all that it introduced Quan Chi as a major character. That pale little bastard has a special in my heart, as all predictably treacherous minions do; for all that the MK series devolved, it was fun watching him and Shang Sung try to play cosmic poker with the big boys…

As the series dragged its ragged corpse through the 90’s and 2000s., it just kept getting more and more out of touch with what made the original game so popular: interesting, flavorful characters and a lot of brutal fighting with decent mechanics. (The less said about MK vs DC Universe, Midway’s attempt to copy Marvel vs Capcom’s success, the better.)

The transition to 3D arenas was particularly painful, especially as a lot of the most klassic (God, is anyone else tired of that, yet?) moves (Scorpion’s spear, Sub-Zero’s freeze, etc) were single-axis, linear attacks which suffered in the translation.

And the story just kept getting weirder as they tried to out-do the threat of each previous game. The whole “Dragon King” nonsense of MK: Deadly Alliance and MK: Deception just fell on its face, not least of all because the “big bad” Onaga looked ridiculous and, insofar as there was such a thing, had a “plan” that felt lame and unthreatening—hurr, durr, he has a big magic army that totally isn’t inspired by Qin Shi Huang’s terracotta army, honest, and he’ll…attack, I guess! It’s not like Earthrealm had fought off two or three invasions like that at that point in the storyline…

So, like many people, I was thrilled to hear that the series was getting a reboot, and moreover, I was impressed that they didn’t just make a clusterfuck remake based on the premise of the first Mortal Kombat and try to shoehorn everybody from MK 1-3 into the original tournament. I really did enjoy how it retold the events of the first three games, going step by step, making the expansion of the cast seem very natural.

I also appreciated the storytelling convention that enabled the reboot. They could have just done a hard reset, but I think the route they went is significantly more interesting: the opening credits reveal that Shao Khan was the victor in the “winner takes universe” plot of MK: Armageddon, and as he gloats over the all-but-corpse of Raiden (who, for idiot plot reasons, is sorta-kinda evil at this point, although I like his “dark” costume), the thunder god sends an ambiguous message back to a past self: “He must win.”

This prophecy refers to Shao Khan, who (it transpires) must be allowed to conquer Earthrealm because apparently he’ll forget that the Elder Gods told him not to, so they show up and spank him around the events of MK3 rather than letting it get to the point where the Emperor of Outworld ends the universe via whatever dumbass plot excuse justified it in Armageddon. (A nice “fuck you” to the absolute garbage the MK universe became, I think.)

So the plot of the game revolves around Raiden trying to figure out what the hell “future-me” meant, which is kind of funny, but it also let them change story events and characters, and do new things. I found this narrative justification for that sort of thing very clever.

This also allowed them to update and reinvent some of the characters; even Stryker benefitted from the update, not least around the gut region. Kabal got an explanation, finally, and Nightwolf actually did something, to everyone’s shock (although he did so by becoming even more of a stereotype than he was before).

The death of the first Sub-Zero and his resurrection by Quan Chi as Noob Saibot, a major development that was at first only vaguely revealed in the post-game backstory of MK3: Ultimate, is shown on-screen and made clearer.

The cyber-ninjas show up before they’re turned into robots, which is nice, since the Lin Kuei’s cyberization nonsense just sort of “happened” between MK2 and MK3. Now Cyrax and Sektor’s personality clashes over the whole “becoming a robot” issue are overt rather than just hinted at.

In fact, that brings up something that I was terrified of when I saw it for the first time:

I’ll be perfectly clear: the second Sub-Zero has always been my favorite character, and key to this affection was the plotline where he went rogue from the Lin Kuei ninjas because he refused the be turned into a robot, where his friend Smoke was tragically captured and forced to become a cyber-ninja against his will.

However, in-game, this turns out to be one of the ways the new timeline diverges from the original. In the new game, Smoke and the younger Sub-Zero (Originally called “Tundra”, apparently) are both attacked while investigating the death of the original. In the new continuity, Smoke is saved, while Sub-Zero is captured.

This has the twofold benefit of allowing Smoke to become a character (instead of Noob Saibot’s gimp, like he was in the last few MK games before the reboot), and allowing Sub-Zero to get a cyber update, something speculated upon by fans forever.

Sub-Zero eventually gets de-mind-controlled (replacing Cyrax in the original timeline), which is a sop towards people like me who are big fans of his. I am very impressed with how well this was carried off—if Sub-Zero had just gotten cyberized for no reason, or was some kind of “hidden character” bullshit, I’d have flipped my lid; with the plot justification of timeline divergence, I am totally fine with it. (I am such a sucker for alternate realities.)

 Anyways, the game eventually ends in typical Mortal Kombat fashion—horrible bloodbath, incomprehensible screamed gibberish, etc—and in the end it is revealed that all that has transpired has all been according to the plans of Shinnok and carried out by Quan Chi (whose voice is so perfect for a manipulator-type character—it’s smooth and deep and calm…glorious).

I don’t know why I feel compelled to write about this crap at length, it’s hardly high art. I guess I am just impressed with the way the reboot was carried out—new and interesting things were done, while very neatly maintaining continuity with the original series before it went to shit. The changes keep the thing interesting without making it too weird—I always disliked MK3 adding too much sci-fi to Mortal Kombat, which had been by and large a fantasy/magic type story up to that point.

Well done, I think.

BONUS: All the fatalities. ALL of them.