House of Eratosthenes

It sounds pretty stupid, and probably is. You tell a bunch of your friends to meet you at a designated place at a designated time, and then you pretend to beat up on each other or shoot each other with make-believe guns just to get the onlookers to wonder what’s going on.

America's Hat And now it’s led to criminal charges.

An Ottawa teen believes cops were too quick to pull the trigger on a mischief investigation that involved shaping his hand into a gun and yelling bang in a mock gunfight.

Henrick Vierula told the Sun he doesn’t deserve to be charged with multiple criminal offences after participating in a phenomena known as a “flash mob” at the Rideau Centre on Friday.

“The whole thing is ridiculous,” said Vierula, 19.

Vierula and other participants were to shape their hands into a gun, point them at each other, yell “bang” and collapse to the ground.

I didn’t know pointing your finger at someone as if you were holding a make-believe gun, and yelling “bang,” was a criminal offense. But this is Ottawa.

I see a cause and effect going on here. Young men, in Canada as well as elsewhere, seem to be increasingly suffering from a global epidemic of stupids. Well, maybe they should. As any normal grown-up man can tell you, especially if he’s been tasked to help raise small boys into other mature men, masculinity can’t really be stamped out because it is an incompressible liquid hydraulic agent. You can apply pressure to it but for every unit of volume that gives way to cultural forces in one location, an equal volume of it will explode outward elsewhere with equal force.

And where better to observe the consequences of a war against manhood, than Canada?

Poor Henrick is now looking at having a criminal record. Well, I’m not too much opposed to having a criminal record for general stupidity. I figure if you’re a dedicated stupid, it’ll happen sooner or later. But let the punishment fit the crime. Seems to me, this has failed to materialize in the situation at hand, and the reason for that failure is there’s two cultures living in Ottawa that ought not be intermixed. The folks in charge of the rules, want a plaid-paisley society with no reminders of that dreaded knuckle-dragging manly-man anywhere to be seen. But they forgot to ship all the teenage boys out first. Dealing with masculinity by trying to stamp it out. It no workee.

I’m pretty sure that’s the situation. Don’t know it for an absolute fact. But I’ll take my chances.

Speaking of which, for reasons along the same lines, Pokemon has been put on probation in my house. I caught a certain young man failing to show initiative at solving his own problems…I mean, little problems, in ways he used to solve them. So we know it’s not an issue of maturity. Something has been eroding his sense of self-government and leadership — about the same time he got really revved up on Pokemon. Now, a lost pair of socks is an occasion for planting your skinny ass on the couch and waiting for someone to bring them to you. Not good. This, my girl and I have been lecturing him, is how Katrina happened.

What’s Pokemon? Ask the Wiccans at you-know-what…

is a media franchise owned by video game giant Nintendo and created by Satoshi Tajiri around 1995. Originally released as a pair of interlinkable Game Boy role-playing video games, Pokémon has since become the second most successful and lucrative video game-based media franchise in the world, falling only behind Nintendo’s Mario series. Pokémon properties have since been merchandised into anime, manga, trading cards, toys, books, and other media. The franchise celebrated its tenth anniversary on 27 February 2006, and as of 1 December 2006, cumulative sold units of the video games (including home console versions, such as the “Pikachu” Nintendo 64) have reached more than 155 million copies.
:
The concept of the Pokémon universe, in both the video games and the general fictional world of Pokémon, stems from the hobby of insect collecting, a popular pastime which Pokémon executive director Satoshi Tajiri had enjoyed as a child. Players of the games are designated as Pokémon Trainers, and the two general goals (in most Pokémon games) for such Trainers are: to complete the Pokédex by collecting all of the available Pokémon species found in the fictional region where that game takes place; and to train a team of powerful Pokémon from those they have caught to compete against teams owned by other Trainers, and eventually become the strongest Trainer, the Pokémon Master. These themes of collecting, training, and battling are present in almost every version of the Pokémon franchise, including the video games, the anime and manga series, and the Pokémon Trading Card Game.

Now this could all be quite healthy. But I’m not going to assume that it is, just because it has non-caucasian roots, the animals are cute and kids happen to like it.

I see too many parallels that concern me a lot. I see connections with those confused, frustrated — and I’ll bet my bottom dollar, bored — kids in Ottawa. I see connections with the war in Iraq, and the War on Terror. The war is unpopular, I’m told, because no weapons of mass destruction were found. Well, anyone who hasn’t been living in a cave, should be able to see the (economic) necessity of criticizing the war, came first; the Bush administration’s embarrassment over weapons, just dumped a lot of refined fuel onto an open flame that was already present. Even with that, the argument that we should have left well enough alone in Iraq, makes sense only to a mindset that has been somehow inculcated to a predisposition that vexing problems like Saddam Hussein’s despotic regime, are best left ignored.

Conclusion: There is something toxic under the surface of the era in which we now live. Something that says taking the initiative and finding ways to achieve a positive outcome, or to thwart a disaster, is inherently distasteful. Pokemon is both a cause and an effect. It dissuades young people from solving problems the way thinking people are meant to solve them. And it is an agent of something more ancient, something larger. Feminist movement? Maybe that, and some other things.

I’m not venturing too far out on a limb, to guess that this is has a lot to do with why young manly-boys, and tomboys, filled with that good vibrant problem-solving energy the good Lord gave them, are so freakishly bored that they have no better way to channel it than to coordinate “flash mob” nonsense on their MySpace pages. There may or may not be problems to be solved, but finding solutions to them on your own is now frowned-upon.

Well Pokemon came along, according to the Wiccans, in ’95.

Blame Pokemon? Well I dunno ’bout that. Placing all the blame on any one thing, seems childish. But consider what happens in a Pokemon game or cartoon. Consider for just a moment…

…a bunch of semi-adorable, spiky-haired moppet kids with eyeballs the size of dinner plates, get together and talk smack at each other. They challenge each other to fights, and once the fights commence, the moppets don’t do any of the fighting. The fighting is done, instead, by even-more-adorable sickly-sweat animals that look like they came from alternate universes.

The adorable animals, the “pocket monsters,” are very weird looking. It’s clear they are designed to resemble earth species just somewhat, and in some cases, but overall they are supposed to look other-worldly. Not scary, but strange and surreal. They are designed, it’s clear to me, to avoid inspiring too much of a relationship with their human masters, or with the humans in the audience. They, in short, externalize the fighting. Their “masters” give each other a lot of lip, and even if the fight is lost those masters absorb no bruises anywhere except on the ego. All the physical injury is dealt animal-to-animal.

I have never, ever seen a subplot pursued where a defeated animal carries an injury onward into other scences as part of a temporary or permanent maiming. Injuries are forgotten when the battle is ended. It’s kind of like Luke Skywalker getting dragged under the slimy goo by that monster in the garbage compactor, and in the next scene he’s all brushed and blow-dried, like a Bee Gee ready to take the stage. Like that.

The message is unmistakable. Problems, even of your own making, are there to be solved by someone else. There’s just no getting around it.

Pokemon Pokemon will be banned from my house only for a little while, until a certain ten-year-old shows me some of the leadership and intiative I saw in him when he was six. I know he’s got it in him, so this won’t be much of a wait. But what about all the other toe-heads of his generation? Half the time the protagonist’s adorable pocket-monster loses the fight, and so you have to be prepared for disappointment; there is some value in that, I guess. But is it put to any practical use if that protagonist has no concern about anything, other than a miniscule delay as his inevitable victory is positioned at the end of the episode rather than in Act One?

The human receives no injuries. Beasts do the dirty work. You know, when grown men do exactly the same thing with chickens or dogs, in a lot of places that’s a felony. There is a reason for that: There’s just too much cowardice being enshrined and rewarded in such an activity. Well this cartoon seems to make a primary objective out of enshrining and rewarding exactly that, in exactly the same way — and once again, I’m annoyed with the whole thing.

Why am I annoyed? Well, I’ll plagiarize Joe McCarthy: If the Saturday-morning cartoons were merely ignorant of rough-and-tumble, problem-solving creative-resourceful Indiana-Jones masculinity, rather than being determinedly opposed to it, the frequency with which they’d be seen promoting something contradictory to it would be on par with random chance. Somewhere around fifty percent of the time. Take a few steps back from Pokemon and look at all the other stuff our kids watch, and this is higher than fifty percent. Naturally, a guy in a black hat telling Matt Dillon to “draw!”, or anything remotely like that, is nowhere to be seen. This looks more like a deliberate, intense, prolonged and sustained campaign to bypass and usurp parental authority, and do whatever can be done to kill off manhood. To make sure that a dozen years from now, any swimmer caught in an undertow, any child caught on the second floor of a burning house, anyone in trouble who needs a rescuer capable of seeing what needs doing, and doing it…is SCREWED. To make sure a generation of helpless whelps is raised, filling the space just emptied by old-fashioned, can-do American ingenuity.

Once again, I’m pretty sure that’s the situation. Don’t know it for an absolute fact but I’ll take my chances. After all, back in my day Wiley Coyote taught me that I may know the least about what’s going on, when I’m most sure of myself, and I may very well get run over by a truck or smashed by a rock — but that doesn’t mean I should ever stop trying.

Know what? I like that lesson a whole lot better.

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- fastestda » Blog Archive » Flash Mob | 11/05/2007 @ 16:21
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- thinkpix » Blog Archive » Flash Mob | 11/06/2007 @ 23:41

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Flash MobMonday, November 5th, 2007

Flash Mob
Monday, November 5th, 2007