Videogame Nasties are Less Nasty than the Reality.

The apparently humorous columnist Marina Hyde of The Guardian has criticised Dr Liam Fox for suggesting that video games in which players can select to play the Taliban in combat mode is dangerous and unpatriotic.

Yet the subtitle of the article If Liam Fox can rant over a videogame it's no wonder we're losing the war, tends to imply that Afghanistan just could be a war that might be won but for the comic stupidity of those responsible for directing it.

"Dr Fox appears to have surpassed even his own exacting standards of idiocy this week, by calling for a forthcoming video game set in Afghanistan to be banned.

Though the latest Medal of Honor is essentially a first-person shooter following US troops as they seek to crush the Taliban, players can take the role of the enemy in its multiplayer mode. "It's shocking that someone would think it acceptable to recreate the acts of the Taliban," Fox fumed showily. "I am disgusted and angry. It's hard to believe any citizen of our country would wish to buy such a thoroughly un-British game."

The response from the game's manufacturer is pityingly understated. "Most of us have been doing this since we were seven," it runs. "Someone plays the cop, someone must be the robber. In Medal of Honor multiplayer, someone must be the Taliban."

It's vaguely troubling, isn't it, that the press officer for a games company has an infinitely more rational take on the Afghan war than the secretary of state for defence. In fact, the whole business forces a call to the MoD.

Condemnation of Dr Liam Fox is easy. For he is merely playing part in a role play game himself. It's obvious that Afghanistan is being fought for grand geopolitical interests that are considered too complex for the British oligarchy to explain to the plebs. The TAPI pipeline.

To admit British troops are dying for that is never on the news, not an aim considered worthy of dying for, even if this banal reality is the only factor that explains why British troops are out there. For the "war on terror" or some heroic greater cause.

Hence a bit of fake outrage about "patriotism" is entirely in order and entirely predictable in relation to a video game as Fox has to put the mantra forward that this is a real war in in the patriotic interest of defending the country against" evil enemies" Not about a pipeline.

Fox is thus not "idiotic". He is just maintaining the propaganda line in the long war to preserve the Western resource conflict that allows Marina Hyde to be able to enjoy her high standard of living in a consumer society. The hypocrisy runs deep. Few of us are not implicated.

Yet as usual the easy line from smug "liberal" journalists is that it is only the Establishment that is stupid and not the Fourth Estate which comes across as just as idiotic in failing to grasp what is really at stake in politicians devoting time to the trivial.

The problem with most media commentator is that they are largely superflous, adding nothing to helping people understand the way the world actually works, adding more media to media and spinning off words into the void.

Politicians are not "stupid" and often know what they are doing. Liam Fox's comments on video games seem trivial but what seems trivial often has a serious subtext to it that it should be the job of real journalists to interpret.

Liam Fox's comment on video games reveal the fact that there is virtually no examination of the underlying reality of what on earth the War in Afghanistan is really about in the media, which tends to just lead to the received opinion that this war is "stupid".

A war which is continually assessed according to whether it advances "liberal" or "humanitarian" agendas as if that was a given fact because it is the explicit aim given by politicians and "think tank" experts is itself stupid whilst the war is not.

A war for geopolitical hegemony in Central Asia and for the construction of the pipeline to integrate Afghanistan into these designs to give NATO the upper hand in controlling the competition for natural resources, that is the flow of gas from Turkmenistan, is "rational".

Rational in the sense that it is an objective that is considered attainable and desirable as part of a military and economic plan that is amenable to examination on the basis of the ambitions and interests of the contending players beyond the spin and "narrative" as officially stated.

Of course, rationalisations for war can be quite irrational when broken down by a searching and forensic analysis. What is really irrational is the spectacle of a civilisation intent on pursuing illusory ends according to objectives that simply cannot be met.

Dying to be Famous: Spasms of Reality TV Grief.

One of the worst features of the banal celebrity infested and suffocating media wastescape that Britain is immured in is both the obsession itself but also the idea that Andy Warhol's "prophecy" that everybody would be famous for fifteen minutes has turned out to be something that has become true: as a talentless purveyor of dreck he was well placed to know .

Last year I just could not stand the self-indulgent media bollocks with regards the death of Jade Goody. Have you heard anything about her since ? No, she is totally forgotten. At the time things were very different as when I wrote the following......


Following the death of reality telly star Jade Goody, the BBC has made this item the top news story. Goody was famous for being having her terminal illness filmed on camera no less than her 24 hour day on the Big Brother series.

As with Princess Diana, there will be oodles of collective grief by those who thought they knew her. Those who resist the 'emotional correctness' and mention the fact that she did not acheive much with her life will be attacked with self righteous zeal.

The grief over Goody is narcissistic: partly it reflects the inability of many people in Britain to deal with death or to draw lessons from it with regards the way they are living their own lives now and the way they have lived them and will live them.

It's grief for the consumer age in which nothing is of lasting value beyond the money that will buy the pleasures that divert one from having to reconsider their shallow celebrity, sex and shopping obsessed lifestyle choices. People fear death because they aren't really living a full emotional life.

Plugged into reality through whar Bernard Levin called "the idiot's lantern" in the corner of their 'living room', millions of Britons are living surrogate lives when they are not trying to force themselves to feel something because Britain has become such a deracinated, atomised and eerily denatured society.

People often fear death because they really fear they have not lived yet. When someone famous dies, not least someone who could have been them like Goody, there is a curious relief more that 'Thank God it isn't me' rather than any genuine consideration as to the achievement of that person.

If Goody's death from cervical cancer saves others by getting more young women to get tests that can offer some rationalisation for a largely pathetic and meaningless life that Goody lived. Yet the number who will die from it is hardly equal to those who will die from their current sex, drug and booze binges.

Goody's premature death will not make her life seem any better than it really was and it was not particularly good. The celebrity obsessed lifestyle is not a good one and had she lived it out beyond it's natural duration she would not have been able to get the retrospective good gloss it has been given.

Such criticisms will seem callous. The point is that it is what we do with our lives when the threat of death is not immediately there that has to matter. Otherwise any life, no matter how tawdry or squalid, can be glorified as better than it really was as long as that person is famous for anything.

What matters is that people respond to the knowledge of an early death by realising that we all live on borrowed time and that as we only die our own deaths alone the way we deal with others when we still have our life potential before us is the most important thing.

When Goody believed she had all her life in front of her she was as shallow, vulgar, foolish and narcissistic as those who watch Big Brother. Young people today are more so than ever because they think the world belongs to them and that the old are boring and worthless.

Then when faced with their own deaths they become terrified because death only is supposed to happen to those who are pushed out from conscious view-from the old to the one million dead Iraqis who have died so that people in the UK can continue to drive their cars on cheap petrol.

Elsewhere death is a normal part of life. In Britain it is not supposed to happen which is why, in an age of spectacle, Islamist terrorists are seething to punish Western consumers for not caring about the death of fellow Muslims just so they can maintain their vulgar and trivial pleasures.

It is no good thinking about helping others, or even thinking of them, just when you personally are threatened by the prospect of death or because one sees one dying person on TV. It might mean that the way you have chosen to live is wrong.