Gerbner was Right

Ben McGrath, winding up his article, The Movement, talks about a new video game apparently designed to appeal to male tea baggers. This sounds like it would be a huge hit with the 1/4 day televiewers who need an endless virtual massacre to feel engaged in the political process

Back in New York City, you can feel the tremors in the social bedrock, if not in the earth’s crust, as T. J. Randall would have it. An online video game, designed recently by libertarians in Brooklyn, called “2011: Obama’s Coup Fails” imagines a scenario in which the Democrats lose seventeen of nineteen seats in the Senate and a hundred and seventy-eight in the House during the midterm elections, prompting the President to dissolve the Constitution and implement an emergency North American People’s Union, with help from Mexico’s Felipe Calderón, Canada’s Stephen Harper, and various civilian defense troops with names like the Black Tigers, the International Service Union Empire, and CORNY, or the Congress of Rejected and Neglected Youth. Lou Dobbs has gone missing, Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh turn up dead at a FEMA concentration camp, and you, a lone militiaman in a police state where private gun ownership has been outlawed, are charged with defeating the enemies of patriotism, one county at a time.

The sun is setting rapidly on American democracy, and if daylight savings time doesn't come quickly, it will be night before anyone is prepared for such darkness.


Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/02/01/100201fa_fact_mcgrath?currentPage=8#ixzz0gOfV030H