Zombies
Back in the 2010’s (is that how you say it?) I was still working at the school, and I had a high school senior boy living with me. He, and his friends, were “hooked” on video games. The dinner table conversation often went something like this: “I killed over a thousand Nazi Zombies today, how ‘bout you”? And while I didn’t have much compassion for “Nazi Zombies”, it did stir a bit of concern. All of this killing, all of this tremendous focus on a screen, and a game, and not on school work (or real work). It just seemed too much. When the TV screen got cracked (did a Nazi Zombie strike back?) there were limits placed on the new one.
Those boys are in their thirties now, and I suspect have moved on from Nazi Zombies. They have “real” jobs, and kids, and lives. But, I imagine, they are still “gaming” in one way or another. And they aren’t the only ones. The skills “honed” on Nazi Zombies now have war-time uses. What seemed like “Star Trek” kinds of fantasy weapons only a couple of decades ago, are very real today.
Drones
Look at Ukraine’s continuing war against Russian aggression. The Russians have more troops, more tanks, more missiles, more of almost everything. But the Ukrainians are the “masters” of drone warfare. “Killer drones” that are programmed to remotely attack far locations. Guided drones that communicate back to base, controlled by devices eerily similar to the “controller” that attacked Nazi Zombies. Drones that can lock onto a single individual, follow them, and destroy when ordered. And “dumb” drones, swarms of them, attacking in numbers difficult to defend.
And with all of this “remote” warfare, we grow used to seeing grainy black and white pictures of a tank, or a building or an oil storage facility; standing one moment, engulfed in explosion in the next. It’s nothing new: back in 1991 General Schwarzkopf showed us the footage of the “luckiest man in Iraq” as a bridge exploded right behind him. The explosion must have filled has rearview mirror.
The question I have is this: is all of our exposure to “remote death” somehow cheapened the value of life? Is this, a by-product of over exposure to “death” on TV, in video games; as a “way of life” – how many Nazi Zombies did you kill today?
Replay
My “old man who did not grow up on video games” experience is this. In the past week, the media focused on the US military blowing up boats in the Caribbean. One boat, supposedly filled with narcotics and eleven humans, was destroyed by a remotely controlled drone. When the smoke cleared, two survived the attack. A second strike was launched. The military called it a “double-tap”.
My chosen news source, the newly renamed MSNOW, spent hours talking about the legality and morality of the second strike. As the discussion went on, they showed the first strike attack over and over again. If you watched (I didn’t) they showed the death of nine people in a black and white blast on replay.
And now, the “proof” in this whole conversation is in the “second tape”, the one “we” haven’t seen. The description of that video depends on the politics of the viewer. Democrats say that two helpless men are clinging to the wreckage of the “drug boat”. They are in “shipwreck” mode, looking for help, perhaps even waving a white shirt of surrender to the drone/weapon circling overhead. Then the “double-tap” hits; another explosion, and nothing left after. That’s the “story” Democratic Congressman Jim Hines tells.
Republicans, after watching the same thing, have a very different story. They tell of the two survivors trying to right the capsized craft, save the narcotic cargo, and contact help by radio. That’s how Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton saw it.
There are often situations where two very different things can be true – but this video isn’t one of them.
Execution
It’s a lot easier to order a “double tap” on a video image, than on the reality of killing two more men, even if they are smuggling narcotics. The act of smuggling itself is not a “death penalty” offense. But that doesn’t seem to even enter the conversation. Is this so much easier for America, because we’ve been doing it “as a game” for so long?
What we can all agree on is this: Americans are inured to video death. We watch it without emotional affect. We can put human execution (even of drug smugglers) on replay, without concern. And, for many Americans, the dinner table conversation seems to be, “How many narco-terrorists did you kill today?”.
