Archive for April 21st, 2009
We can't wait to hear cries of RAAAAAAAAACISM! over this one: Hail to the Chimp, the video game
Yesterday, it was pouring rain so we ducked into, of all places, a video game store in Evanston, Illinois.
The clerk was on the telephone with a buddy complaining about having to work 6 days a week now that corporate decided to ship most of its product on Saturdays to save money on shipping, and so store managers had to work 6 days a week to receive all those shipments. This was, supposedly, part of a cost-cutting and hours-watching strategy for corporate (though the only way that makes sense is if store managers are salaried, not hourly, and so making them work 6 days with no extra pay is a way of cheating hourly employees down to 4 days a week of work instead of 5).
As we browsed the store waiting for the rain to subside, trying to understand the conspiracy theory involved in the clerk’s shipping problems, we also heard a grandmother arguing with her grandson over the cost of video games. She promised him a game, but only one $5 or under, and the little boy grew increasingly frustrated and angry that nothing in the store was less than $10, but grandma wouldn’t budge on that $5 spending cap. The grandmother kept repeating, “These days no one has any money to spend on things, so $5 is all I have so find something for that or you get nothing at all.” And the little boy, making a lot of sense, said, “Grandma nothing in here costs $5. It’s cruel to make me look at things when I can’t have them, so why did you bring me here? All it does is make me feel bad.” The kid was about 8 or 9, and was in tears by the time he and his grandmother finally left the store.
Personally, if we were the grandparent in the above, we would have used the $5 to buy some art supplies or cupcake mix and eggs and either had a fun day drawing and making construction paper projects with the kid, or baking cupcakes to eat while we played board games or something. We sure as heck wouldn’t have brought him into a video game store where the lowest priced games are $10 when we’d only let him spend $5. That is pretty cruel (unless you live in Walnut Grove, and you think this is the Olsens’ General Store, where you can get armfuls of dried goods for $1.47, and still complain how much money that is all the way back to your little house on the prairie). It’s like promising to change the world, lower the oceans, fix all of our collective problems, and give everyone lemonade, pixie dust, hope, and unicorns and, after close to 100 days, still not articulating exactly how any of that is to be done, or what good’s going to come from any of those nonsensical things you’ve managed to shove through an acquiescent Congress.
Which brings us serendipitously to this game, Hail to the Chimp, which we spotted only because the little boy in the vignette above dropped it as he tried to put it back on a shelf after checking its price ($15.95). We walked over to pick it up and put it back for him, when we took one look at its cover and wondered how long it would take for the race-baiters at large to realize the game existed.
Hail to the Chimp centers around a monkey named Crackers who wants to be President of the Animal kingdom. It is a perfectly innocent and poorly-designed children’s product that makes our eyes bleed the way most children’s animation these days does, but because it features a monkey as President, we honestly wonder why it hasn’t set the Al Sharptons, Eric Holders, John Lewises, Spike Lees, and James Clyburnes to work ranting and raving and race-baiting the way they all so love to do.
Those clowns usually LIVE for this kind of thing. Finding it’s like their own personal Holy Grail — something actually depicting a presidential chimp? That should be ranting and raving lunatic GOLD for this lot.
The game’s existed since June of 2008 and not one of these race-baiters ever used it to spark feigned outrage and faux anger.
Why not?
The scene Sharpton, in particular, made when a NY Post cartoon depicted spending-spree-addled-Congress as the deranged chimp that attacked a woman in January didn’t even involve a depiction of a chimp as President. The cartoon was all about Congress being out of its mind, wasting taxpayer money, and passing bills without reading them. Yet, Sharpton dialed us up to racial Armageddan again, for no reason.
But, he said nothing about a game that actually depicts a President as a chimp, right on it’s box cover, with its actual title being Hail to the Chimp.
It’s all completely ridiculous, really. The video game isn’t a racial attack any more than the political cartoon was. But, it’s funny what Sharpton, Lewis, Clyburne, Lee, Holder, et al choose to mushroom into major issues, and what they choose to completely ignore. Quite obviously, they are all very agenda-driven…so maybe crying about this game back in June 2008 when it came out would have been bad for whatever agenda they had at that time, but crying about that cartoon in January 2009 fit perfectly into something they wanted that week. It’s interesting to continue to monitor this Kabuki nonsense, because eventually even the densest members of the public won’t be able to see what a shame the race-baiting truly is.
And it just gets more and more ridiculous each and every day.
Catch Grey Gardens on HBO (a movie whose sequel could easily film in Nairobi)
If you haven’t seen Grey Gardens on HBO yet, it’s really worth your time.
If you don’t have HBO, rent the original 1975 Grey Gardens documentary, and then wait for the HBO film to come to video too. The Broadway production last year was also very good.
It’s the story of the Bouvier-Beales, relatives of Jackie Kennedy, who descended into abject squalor in their summer home, the estate known as Grey Gardens, despite being related to a family that very often tells other people how they should live their lives — but has a problem taking care of its own.
It’s similar to the squalor the current president allows his own family to live in back in Kenya, or in Boston, in the case of his aunt. Looks like all the faux-Camelot marketing and the Portuguese water dog are not the only things he has in common with the Kennedys after all.
Tuesday Open Thread
What’s on your mind this Tuesday?
Are you following how the Trillion Dollars in Spending is being spent? Supposedly, $60 billion has been spent already. Are you looking into where that money is going? What are you hearing in your local communities?
