I have this sort of reverse addiction to reading directions. No
matter how terribly chastened I walk away from the horrendous
experience assembling a piece of furniture or programming some
gadget, I am powerless to fight the urge to continue shunning
manufacturer guidance the next time I’m faced with a similar task.
Were it not for my inexplicable belief in myself to somehow get
it right this time and my intent to do so, I could accurately
be labeled a glutton for punishment.
The pattern continued this weekend when I donned the facade of
eight-term Vermont Independent Congressman and self-described
democratic socialist Bernie Sanders’ take-no-prisoners digital
video game alter ego at the “Bernie
Arcade” section of his Senate campaign website without
consulting either the game’s online instructions or Chairman Mao’s
Little Red Book. Tempted by the promise of a free sweatshirt to
this week’s highest scorer (sad, I know), I impetuously dove right
into the action.
Piloting a prop plane run on (surprise, surprise) hydrogen power
— whose supporters, incidentally, are also some of its biggest
obstacles — your mission, should you choose to accept it, is
to shoot down giant red “R”s with great black wings and flying
buckets spewing mud representing, respectively, the Extreme
Right-Wing and its nefarious campaigning tactics, with “fact
sheets” on parchment resembling that of America’s founding
documents. Sanders, it seems, is not always anti-war.
Occasionally a special fact sheet comes along that allows you to
shoot parchment twice as fast and drop a little shock-and-awe
action on the minions of the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy. (Who
knows? Maybe it’s that same Chomsky book Chavez has burning up the
charts.)
Yet despite grasping what I thought to be the basics of the game
and careful expropriation of floating green fuel cells, I was
invariably eliminated early on. Embarrassed by my failure to land
myself a spot on the High Scores page in a shooting game
presumably against a bunch of pacifists I finally gave in
and read the instructions. I quickly learned that in the world of
Vermont’s Red Baron the moneybags I’d been steering into were, in
fact, “Big Moneyed Special Interests,” and not nearly as revered as
in most video games (see Super Mario Brothers), never mind
your average hip-hop video. Consequently, every time I ran into
some cash I believed a great boon and asset, my life force faded
and the frown on Sanders’ face in the left hand corner of my screen
became more pronounced.
Perhaps the Sanders Campaign should be applauded for so
accurately portraying its candidate’s political leanings. At any
rate, once I learned to acknowledge and abide by the disincentives
of pursuing wealth in a socialist system, my gaming went much
smoother, my scores were higher, and little Bernie kept his smile
longer.
Then, suddenly, the words “Cat Attack!” flashed across my screen
and tubby kitties big enough to make Morris
feel lithe in Robber Baron top-hats began parachuting at me from
some unseen base in the sky. As a sissy vegetarian, I can name
probably two dozen people off the top of my head I would eat before
any animal, which is to say, euthanizing squealing cats by shooting
them with Constitutional fact sheets is not typical of my nature.
This might be a weakness borne of my love of Tetris to the
exclusion on all other video games. I haven’t had the training
others of my generation have mutilating aliens and ghouls with
chainsaws in Doom.
Still, these are extraordinary circumstances and I am forced to
defend myself. Bernie, via my computer speakers, offers a running
commentary on my performance throughout. When I dart out of the way
of a particularly obese cat and take a moneybag right in the
kisser, he, stating the obvious, snarks, “You’re being bombarded.”
The next hit I take he acknowledges with a sarcastic, “That’s
unfortunate,” which quickly spirals into a description of my
performance as “absolutely abysmal.” (Crikey! Where’s that liberal
positive reinforcement?) Finally he just mutters “disastrous.”
Whether this game inspired Sanders’ Republican opponent Rich
Tarrant’s commercial depicting a cartoon Sanders flying a
similar plane around the world — titled “Bouncing Around the World
With Bernie…On Your Buck!!” — or the other way around isn’t
clear, but when a link to video game is one of the few things the
Sanders camp has bothered to send to their update list since Willie
Nelson campaigned for him…Well, chances are Sanders
isn’t sweating the outcome of November’s general election.
Not to mention, in this little skirmish it’s difficult to not
call the match in the Sanders camp favor when you’re watching the
Tarrant ad and feel your index finger impulsively heading for the
space bar to starting shooting Constitutional fact sheets at an
Egyptian Sphinx or the Great Wall of China.
My last attempt to win that sweatshirt Sunday afternoon ends
with a familiar scene: I run out of hydrogen and finally succumb to
the ever-faster hail of moneybags and fat cats. The expression on
Bernie’s face goes from ecstatic to stern. Nevertheless, when my
score appears on screen, Bernie is comforting.
“The good news is — and there is some good news out there —
that is an unbelievable number,” he says of my paltry score of 96.
(The best score at the time is 1226.)
Thanks, Bernie. I’m glad to see the torch of Marx’s maxim “From
each according to his ability, to each according to his need,”
burns brightly somewhere in modern America, even if it’s only the
Vermont Senate race. Now I “need” my sweatshirt!
