Mitt Romney and the Video Game "Cesspool"

While I was standing in line waiting for Harry Potter 7 last Friday, Mitt Romney was busy in Ida Grove a few hours away talking about terrorism, sexual deviants, and describing much about our current popular culture -- including video games -- as a "cesspool" of violence, sex, drugs, laziness, and perversion. If you want the "talking points" version, you can get it all in his latest campaign ad:

The video transcribed (my emphasis in bold):

I'm deeply troubled about the culture that surrounds our kids today. Following the Columbine shootings, Peggy Noonan described our world as the ocean in which our children now swim. She described a cesspool of violence and sex and drugs and indolence and perversions. She said that the boys who did the shooting had inhaled too deeply in the oceans in which they swam. I'd like to see us clean up the water in which our kids are swimming. I'd like to keep pornography from coming up on their computers. I'd like to keep drugs off the streets. I'd like to see less violence and sex on TV and in video games and in movies. And if we get serious about this, we can actually do a great deal to clean up the water in which our kids and our grandkids are swimming.

Sound familiar?

I'll mention without commenting that fellow Republican presidential candidate Sam Brownback's camp countered Romney's new ad by accusing the former governor of Massachusetts of hypocrisy. From the Brownback news release:

In a move rich with irony, Mitt Romney's presidential campaign released a new television advertisement decrying "the culture that surrounds our kids today," despite the fact that Romney served on the board of Marriott International, which generated tens of millions of dollars in revenue through in-room pornography services at its hotels.

In stark contrast with Romney's role at Marriott, which brought him over $100,000 per year, Senator Sam Brownback lead the fight against indecency and asked the hotel chain to stop offering pornography in its rooms.

Global warming, terrorism, poison in pet food, diethylene glycol in toothpaste, children abducted, home invasions, fiance-killers, illegal immigrants pouring across our borders, your sagging butt and exploding waistline, and kids becoming lackadaisical social deviants because of the corrupting influence of entertainment -- interactive or otherwise. Can anyone say "climate of fear"?

And speaking of fear, hasn't the country learned this lesson by now?

- Witchcraft was deemed the source of Puritan hysteria and "justified" the execution of 20 people (14 women and 6 men) in the 1692 Salem witch trials.

- From the late 1940s to late 1950s, Senator Joseph McCarthy persecuted and victimized tens of thousands of U.S. citizens for supposedly "communist" activities, including artists like Leonard Bertstein, Charlie Chaplin, Langston Hughes, Arthur Miller, Pete Seeger, and Orson Welles.

- The famous pen and paper roleplaying system Dungeons & Dragons was accused of inducing psychotic states in players, who were purportedly "unable to separate fantasy from reality." Remember the Tom Hanks made-for-TV 1982 film Mazes and Monsters?

- Heavy metal rocker Judas Priest was accused of including a subliminal message ("do it") in the song "Better By You, Better Than Me" when played backwards, a message which purportedly triggered a joint suicide attempt by two Nevada residents in 1985.

- Marilyn Manson was blamed for inspiring the 1999 Columbine High School Massacre. So was id Software's first-person shooter Doom.

- Earlier this year, renowned anti-video game muckraker Jack Thompson claimed Virginia Tech shooter Seung-Hui Cho was influenced by the popular first-person online shooter Counter-Strike. No such link ever emerged.

- I listened to a radio program this weekend on which the Harry Potter books were repeatedly derided as vile, abominable, and most intriguingly: "mind-altering."

Not to put too much onus on Mitt Romney or draw moral equivalencies between McCarthyism and video game gadflies, but politicians can be galvanizing moral figures, for good or ill, and pigeonholing video games these days as "violent" or "perverse" is too easy. Violence in games is a hugely complex issue, but no, I suspect Romney simply hopes to rally those with a shallow appreciation (or none at all) of video games by making hopelessly facile generalizations that appeal to anyone who thinks games boil down to decapitating enemies and kicking prostitutes.

I'd only remind Mr. Romney of philosopher and writer George Santayana, who famously said "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."