I’ve rather considered myself a fervent traditionalist, for somebody who was born into the computer age, despite the glow of electronic devices pretty much dominating my time: I work IT. I’m a consummate forum troll. I’m rarely more than two hours away from a computer if I’m awake.

But I only just now got a cell phone, eschew the 3G network, maintain a personal library of more than two thousand books – as in the physical objects, not the digital feeds – and hate Web 2.0 with every fiber of my being. I’m friends with people who prefer personal contact and live performances to networking and recordings, and who keep LPs not just for the fidelity but for the social protocol as well.

The reason for this is as simple as it is distressing: I feel that we’re replacing a medium with new one that does not offer everything the former one did. We’re losing something. And not just the displaced jobs – else I’d be a neo-luddite – but something far more intrinsic; fundamental: We’re losing intellectualism.

I mean, sure, there’s already a lot written out there about how, with the decline of newspapers being able to afford foreign offices and investigative reporters, we’re deluged in a wave of amateurs, but that was always the case with the internet. This is a blog. This isn’t my first blog. I know the score. But perhaps I’m a skylarking idealist whose hope that the original precepts of the internet – a frank and open exchange of ideas – would be born out.

I remember in college lauding the internet for being what is essentially a printing press in every living room. The flip side to that is, when printing presses came out, what kept the presses running were not peer-reviewed periodicals and papers of record, but handbills and tawdry literature: The equivalent of “Obama is a Secret Radical Muslim” and Dan Brown potboilers.

How the concept of journalistic integrity came out of this cauldron, I don’t know, but we appear to be, with this shift in dynamics, losing it. It was inevitable, to be sure: What was the wild west of the electronic frontier would be tamed and, eventually, monetized, but short of that right now what we get is not exactly WalMart and not exactly anarchy but instead Abu Dhabi: Two or three big players with their own spurious agendas and a lotta unpaid laborers.

And in the fray we’re reading less (yet owning more “books”), not paying attention to what we read, and care not for the truth but the domination of the message. What matters is not what happened but who’s shouting loudest – in school we denigrate the Soviet Union for their reliance on propaganda to opiate the masses, but our current system of dueling propaganda isn’t exactly better.

Fox excuses itself by saying the NYTimes is a liberal rag and thus we need “balance.” Democrats lament that Republicans are pulling the debate to the right by catering to their extreme, and then turn around and suggest the solution to that is to do the same, reversed. The news is only too happy to “report” on both, which is to say they’ll take quotes ad verbatim and play on the salacious and scandalous attention rather than the veracity of the claims.

What matters is not whether a statistic quoted is correct, but how soon that statistic will become a meme before it is corrected. The Islamic Cultural Center on Park Place lost the media battle the moment Sarah Palin called it a “Ground Zero Mosque,” which it is of course neither, and only in the op ed pages do columnists report on the “error.”

Stephen Colbert reported on the “truthiness” of the current cultural zeitgeist: Nobody reads into anything, so everybody is duped by any ruse that plays to their pre- and mis-conceptions. I think the internet must take its fair share of blame, here. Rather than being the great egalitarian library – the forum (in the original sense of the term) of a new age – it’s instead done the exact opposite: Reinforced ignorance, hyperbolized public sentiment, and self-served prophecy.

We’re looking at ourselves through a funhouse mirror and calling it the world. We’ve become lumpen-sophists, in the ugliest form of the word. Perhaps we should take a step back and figure out what parts of this new electronic age really work and what clearly do not.

The problem with war films and mob films is that their message – “this is hell” and “these are bad men,” respectively – is undermined by the glamor of the medium. In order to make them interesting, they’re made likable, and suddenly you have mobsters not only enjoying Goodfellas but emulating it, and soldiers pumping themselves up for war by watching Apocalypse Now.

So how far would a director go in order to drive home the point? Would he make his film a documentary on the seediness and ugliness of the whole scene, to the point where there are no protagonists, only antagonists? He could inject the naif, a la the main character in Richard Price’s Clockers, or the hapless squadron in Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, but even then by doing so he’s saying, “you can be moral and do this bad stuff,” lending credence to it. He could also devise the “seeking redemption” theme, a la Nico Bellic from Grand Theft Auto 4 or, well, any and all anti-heroes Hollywood seems to love so much nowadays.

Two game sequels that seem, in my mind, to form the logical extreme of this debate have come out in the past week: Kane & Lynch 2 and Mafia 2. The originals of each were panned, one of the reasons for which was the fact that the protagonists – in this case the player avatars – are unlovable, unlikable soulless amoral bastards who are personally responsible for a great deal of death and misery about and around them.

So in that stead, Kane Marcus, James Lynch, Vito Scaletti and Joe Barbaro are bad men. They’re not in it to save their loved ones, because their loved ones’ misery is directly attributable their actions. They’re not in it for a just cause, except to get money and not die – everything and everybody else is expendable. In fact, the latter two are racist, sexist thugs and the former two are ugly, violent sociopaths with no redeeming qualities. And you play them.

In a way, it’s refreshing.

It’s, to say the least, visceral and immersive to hear your comrade-in-arms causally wax prose about how the moulinyans are “fucking animals, too busy selling dope and killing each other” to bother with you as you set out to rip them off on their turf, literally on the far side of the tracks. “Where’d he find the money to get a car this nice? Probably stole it himself.” Even the (licensed, actual) top 40 songs 2k Czech chose for the soundtrack to the game from the 40s and 50s are just as bad if not worse than the most reviled gangster rap lyrics today. (That’s right, you old folks got nothing to complain about.)

Just as it hits home that your wife is kidnapped, tortured and murdered by a local Shanghai mob boss because you blithely fucked up on his territory.

And both games are getting panned for it. Eurogamer UK especially didn’t like how bad the professional criminals were depicted in either of the Kane & Lynch games, and gave a scathing review of Mafia 2 for not living up to the bow-tied costume drama that was Godfather. (Eurogamer France loved it, tho.) To that I say, hey, real life mafiosi are and have been the very epitome of goons. They’re not nice guys. Hell, they’re not even well-dressed guys.

Likewise, Gamespot’s magazine Game Informer wrote a blistering review of Kane & Lynch 2 because the characters were “unlikable.” I disagree. I found them to be compelling tragic figures.

In that stead I wish we were to go back to the days of James Cagney films – villain protagonists that get theirs in the end. Or even, for that matter, Tarantino’s heyday films: Guys you don’t want to emulate, but are yet interested in seeing how they cope with their lives. Is this honestly not allowed in today’s works? Are we that bound to conventional plot formulae?

The one thing I’ve been bemoaning in computer games for a long while was the lack of decent writing. Now that I see people attempting exactly that, they’re getting punished for their efforts. Why bother?

Someone please mark the exact time and date of the death of satire.

to put it succinctly, the only problem is that nothing is in the way of this liberal elite radical socialist madrassa-trained Islamic Kenyan Nazi (who, by the way, is Black) from forcing his agenda down America’s throat, and that his administration has all the resources they need to deal with the current oil spill* (right after he wins both wars, stops torture, bans lobbyists, restores faith in government, saves the economy, ends corruption, resurrects the Democratic party, quells American fear, solves the Middle East crisis, fixes health care, bails out the states, balances the budget and gives us all jobs).

Who does he think he is, king?

*And really, us liberals know that all Obama really needs to do is part the Gulf of Mexico so that BP engineers can just walk up and plug the pipe, but that he’s holding back so he can put the screws to evil capitalist corporations…

Obama gave a speech last night to address not so much the BP Oil Crisis, but the media narrative surrounding his involvement with it, for the two have little in common. That didn’t stop the narrative from plodding right on, but then nothing Obama can do is ever remotely in the right direction (so sayeth the narrative).

a) The Oil Spill was somehow Obama’s fault. This allows opponents to draw parallels to Hurricane Katrina (because there are only two sides to every issue and every partisan move has a direct analog, right?). Yes, the government bears responsibility, but not in the way the narrative implies.

b) The government has the resources to address the spill, with the implication that it isn’t mobilizing those resources. The governor of Louisiana got the troops he asked for. The appropriate authorities have put up barriers all along the Gulf. The government leaned on BP to provide billions in an escrow account (arguably the biggest hostile government takeover of private assets in Obama’s administration to date, yet the least controversial) to pay damages, and yelled at every American oil corporation for having basically the same policies as BP. It remains to be seen whether MMS and other regulatory agencies will have cleaned house by the time all this is done, but that’s basically the extent of government involvement. The issue, after all, is not whether the government can plug the hole itself (it can’t; nobody can), but whether it can stop corporations from breaking what they can’t fix.

c) Obama’s leadership is in question due to his impotence in the problem. I voted for Obama because he was a fresh, vigorous Democrat who looked like a strong leader, sure, but also because there was no way in hell I’d ever vote for the GOP. Obama’s inauguration was historic, sure, but aside from the warm glow of that night, nobody actually believed he was Jesus and JFK rolled up into one. Indeed, such sounds more like a GOP sneer on how strongly liberals supported Obama during his candidacy rather than how liberals saw him. So, to hold him to such a standard where he’s able to leap tall buildings in a single bound and swim to the ocean floor and beat it into submission is disingenuous at best.

There’s things to get Obama on – his criminal negligence of continued illegal detentions, his hawkish stance towards Afghanistan, etc – but he’s a politician, and one with the worst job since Hoover left office, coupled with a far more hostile congress and public than FDR ever had to deal with. We’re at the point where the GOP narrative has so poisoned the well for all government (after defanging regulatory agencies, defunding legacy projects and decades of media campaigns devaluing government initiative) that we have an entire “movement” of so-called Tea Partiers who don’t know what they want except that DC should burn. We’re at the point where reaching across the aisle means liberal Dems making deals with NDC conservative Dems, because the GOP are gleefully and cynically sabotaging government – delegitimizing the current administration – rather than looking to govern.

The idea that the same pundits can criticize Obama for not doing enough (whether it’s the bailouts, the recovery plan, the health care bill, or the BP response) while simultaneously blocking his every move is insane, but that’s the current narrative.

Andrew Leonard makes a rather tongue-in-cheek article about how Apple fanboys are railing against Obama over a speech he recently made at Hampton University, in which he says,

“Meanwhile, you’re coming of age in a 24/7 media environment that bombards us with all kinds of content and exposes us to all kinds of arguments, some of which don’t rank all that high on the truth meter. With iPods and iPads; Xboxes and PlayStations; information becomes a distraction, a diversion, a form of entertainment, rather than a tool of empowerment.”

Leonard ends his article by clarifying that Obama is, after all, pointing out the difference between educating oneself on the world and filling one’s free time with the hyper-grapevine New Media has become. Hey, it’s a valid point and Leonard agrees with it. Which is why Salon titles his article “Obama’s self-hating iPad attack” and gives it a picture of Obama’s laser-beam eyes blowing up an iPad.

Thereby proving Leonard’s and Obama’s point. Irony.