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America Under Attack
2001-09-28 Erik Page 1 Page 2 Page 3 Page 4
When tragedy strikes, America mobilizes.  Actual heroes like firemen and the police leap into harm's way while other heroes get busy making stickers that show someone pissing on the cause of the tragedy.  Soldiers prepare for war while hot chicks who can play the violin rush to assist rockers such as Limp Bizkit in their desperate attempts to retool songs about bitch fucking into sad tributes to heroes.  Heroic watchdog groups upgrade emergency phone numbers that used to be a joke in your town to the status of offensive joke and alert us to movies, dolls, games, and,  perhaps most insidious in their potential for sudden shock, Magic Eye paintings that might in some small way remind us that 7000 people were slaughtered on American soil.  Providing an ongoing counterpoint to this grassroots activism, the television shows the actual planes hitting the actual towers in an endless loop.  And keeping us informed through all of it, the previously insolvent and underappreciated "America Under Siege" magazine:

I'd kind of hoped that my life spent in the simulator would have prepared me for battle when the time finally came.  Unfortunately, it seems to have mainly prepared me to play new videogames without having to first read the manual. As it turns out, the sedentary life of a gamer has made me physically weak and also a coward.  I'm furious, but scared and impotent when it comes to meting out the Rutger-Hauer-style blind vengeance that I crave.  I've spent thousands of hours playing Heroes of Might and Magic, but here, in the end, I'm simply a Victim of Might and Magic.  Inactivity has left me with brittle matchstick arms.  With one hard slap, a Muslim child could make me explode into a cloud of dust like a mummy.  Touched by a relatively harmless Islamist sparkler, I'd evaporate in a burst of flame, also like a mummy.  Gaming has effectively turned me into a mummy - a motionless,dessicated South American mummy like you'd see on Nova, though, not the Egyptian kind that can climb walls and punch a hole through your chest.

With any kind of heroism based on fighting or even moving around pretty much out of the question, I really began to wonder if there was any way for me to help.   Then it hit me: In movies, like say Jurassic Park 2, sometimes a character will display some seemingly useless talent, like say gymnastics.  But later, during a crisis, they're able to utilize that talent in some constructive way, like say using excercise to kill a dinosaur.  But then that thought didn't really lead anywhere.   But then later it occurred to me that video games are my gymnastics, and that the entire history of OldManMurray is like the scene where a character displays his useless talent and you're wondering "what the Hell was the point of that?"  And now's the part where you find out what the point is. 

I am a gamer.  That means I've become too frail to enact any kind of real justice, and so providing real justice will just have to be delegated to those more suited to it.  My talent is sitting alone and amusing myself by pretending to be Sylvester Stallone pretending to be Rambo.  And if that hasn't made me actually able to eat things that would make a billy goat puke, it has at least transformed me into the perfect weapon for showering America's enemies with towering acts of simulated revenge.  What's the point? I am quite possibly the weakest non-baby male in the country, so if I can find a way to strike back, then so can you. 

Using the world league option of NHL 2002, my plan was to beat an Arab-Muslim country so bad that they'd be humiliated forever.  In preemptive open defiance of what I was sure would be protests from Muslim groups, I christened my plan Operation Infinite Goals.




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