Black Ops 2 Finally Broke Me

I have no delusions that anyone will actually ever read this, but I'm not going to send it in an email to some customer support line, or try to post it on The OFFICIAL BLACK OPS 2 FACEBOOK TWITTER MEDIA HUB, or email any game review websites or even spend anymore time than necessary on this one but I have to get it out of my system:

Black Ops 2 is officially the last shooter I will ever buy and play online.

Modern Warfare 2 redefined gaming for me.  I actually joined a clan online, started playing with the same guys and all was grand.  When everyone went to Black Ops, I played that for a while and then got sick of the absolutely horrid spawns and connection issues.  Modern Warfare 3 got me back in the game, more serious than ever.  I was involved in actual clan battles and held a respectable 1.28 K/D.  I've never had as much fun playing a game in my life as I did online with my friends on Modern Warfare 3.  I think I prestiged seven times.

The teasers for Black Ops 2 looked promising.  It was future tech, which was never in a online shooter before.  We were hungry for a new game and it was clear that Activision was pulling servers because the signal on MW3 was deteriorating before our eyes.  Plus by summer no one wanted to sit inside anymore and play games.  When it dropped, it was a big deal.  I bought my copy and started playing.

At the beginning there were some issues but that is bound to happen with a game that popular and almost one million players at any given time trying to connect from all over the world.  The problem is, those things never really got ironed out.  To this day, I still have a ton of trouble joining lobbies, trying to keep our group together in games and generally just using the system.  I get a 'Server Full' notice probably three or four times a night.  There are dozens of YouTube videos addressing lag compensation.  Games are constantly stopping to migrate to new hosts, etc, etc, etc.

Worse yet is that the actual gameplay has been refined to reward players for doing bad things.  Hardcore Team Deathmatch should be full of people who want to step it up a notch, to be a bit more competitive.  Instead, submachine guns often kill from across the map (not that the maps are that big anyway.  More on that later).  Since there is no ricochet (ie, I shoot a friendly player and I die) in almost every match someone is getting kicked for killing teammates   BO2 even has a narrator say 'Get that sonofabitch out of here.'  I think players should get kicked for that behavior, but what ends up happening instead is that you finally connect to a game, you are playing for a minute and some dipshit kills three of his team members, gets kicked and the host migrates.  For a game with as shoddy of connection issues as this one, that is a death knell.

In MW3, a team that worked together could run maps.  That game rewarded planning, communication and most of all solid shooting.  BO2 is exactly the opposite.  Give some dipshit a CHICOM with full auto and he is almost guaranteed to have a 1.0 KD.  It is impossible to hold down an area, due partially to the fact that BO2 released an update that allows for instant spawns in HCTD but also because deaths and respawns happen so quickly, it is not at all uncommon to get killed by the same person three times in a row.  It is nearly impossible to snipe. I'm not even a sniper, but this past weekend I tried to use a sniper rifle and I can't even explain the frustration. If you know everyone on your team it is a little better.  But if you just jump into a random match, you are bound to either get team killed by some fast twitch moron shooting around corners or kill someone only to have them spawn behind you.  Since the respawn update dropped, I have yet to see a game not end early from one side getting all of their kills.  I looked at my videos tonight and on average a game of HCTD lasts about six minutes now.  MW3 routinely ended with neither side getting all of their kills.

The death knell for me is the new map pack.  The settings of the maps are inspired.  It is interesting to have a shootout on a ski hill and at a dam.  But along with the map pack came a new gun, the Peacekeeper.  It is very, very clear at this point that this gun is not only remarkably overpowered (and over ranged) but that it was put it in there as an advertisement for those who don't have the map pack to buy it.  The gun is an absolute killing machine anyway, but on the new maps?  I swear it is unstoppable and everyone is using it.

Now I will absolutely admit this is whining.  In fact, that is the entire point of the post.  But there is a bit of a message here that I know no one anywhere will actually pay attention to.  See, I'm creeping up on 40.  Online multiplayer gaming was not even remotely interesting to me until I saw what a team of six people could do in a game.  Some of the guys I played with are current military, their training translated to a better gaming experience.  BO2 is literally exactly the opposite.  It encourages everyone to use the same guns, to play lone-wolf style and to never leave a comfort zone.  It is obviously aimed at casual gamers, probably those under 18 who technically shouldn't be able to buy the game anyway who want to rack up huge killstreaks and get diamond plated weapons.  BO2 doesn't even bother to support a robust server infrastructure because the kids that play for these reasons don't care about a shoddy server.  In fact, it may actually help them.  Split screeners are the worst to play against.  I've watched a corner only to have a split screener appear 10 feet around it and shoot me point blank at least a dozen times.  What BO2 did is in effect eliminate an entire market sector  When this game came out, it wasn't uncommon for me to see 20 friends playing it.  Tonight there were five.  None of my friends want to play this kind of game.  None of them play HALO for the exact same reason.

Here then is the message: BO2 is the shining example of the gaming industry. It set records in sales and claims to be The Standard of competitive online shooters.  But, BO2 didn't win any awards for, well anything.  It just isn't a quality product.  That is fine for the 13 year old kids out there but it won't hold water for those of us who are looking for a clean, fair gaming experience.   To make matters more interesting, the next gen consoles are around the corner.  If what is being leaked is true, used games won't work on the system and there will be no backward compatibility.  Sounds like the perfect system for parents, but I'm out.  The stage is set for someone to come along and wipe the slate clean, to make a game that serious gamers will enjoy. By all rights, BO2 should have been that game.  But it utterly, completely failed.

Just Shoot Already: Can Batman Kill the Joker?

Recently I read a great article at The Big Think that advocates Batman killing the Joker.  The response by Steve Watts is fantastic and one of the few that gets closer to the core of the issue at hand.  But, I have yet to see someone try and fully flesh out the argument.  I think the reason why is that there are two kinds of people that have tried: ethicists and Comic FanBoys (capitalized for emphasis).  As such, we get either a detached and clinical view that sees Batman and Joker existing in our reality or we get the ‘BATMAN IS THE GREATEST DETECTIVE EVAR AND CANNOT BE BEATEN AND HE IS ALWAYS RIGHT.’  Steve Watts is the first person I’ve ever seen make a legit argument that works as well in our reality as the DC reality.  I’d like to tackle it just to see if I can. This is mostly me rambling on the subject, but it is one I’ve thought about for a long time.  I’d like to open the door a bit for a larger debate.  And there are no debaters like Batman FanBoys.  

First about me.  I studied a little philosophy in college, have an embarrassingly large comic book collection, but have only read many of the major Batman story arcs and haven’t kept up with the character obsessively. That said, if you see something I got wrong about Batman’s background or if any of my thought experiments have been done, let me know.  

Both of the articles above make very good cases for the pros and cons of killing the Joker.  In the pro column, you basically have ‘Look, even if you put the Joker away, he will escape and come back and murder/maim/terrorize a huge number of people.  Killing him is a preemptive strike against that.’  In the con column you have ‘Well, if Batman Kills the Joker, it is a moral slippery slope. Gotham has a bunch of other criminals that will immediately (and bloodily) seek to take his place, does Batman kill them all? Besides, doesn’t Batman’s very existence CREATE guys like the Joker?’  

Now, I’m not trying to boil down the argument to these two sides, nor am I building up their arguments to create straw-men out of them.  However, I think they are both predicated on the same premise and that is ‘Batman could kill the Joker if he wanted to, but chooses not to.’  Now, there are dozens of examples Batman saying as much, or at least defending his no-kill policy throughout the past three quarters of a century of Batman comics.  But how can we trust what Batman says to others, or even his internal monologues?  Why isn’t the argument ‘Should the Joker kill Batman? It is my contention that Batman can’t kill the Joker (and vice versa) even though from any sane outside perspective he should.

Comics (v)  Reality

There is one reality that bears mentioning here and while it does break the fourth wall a bit, it has to be examined.  Batman is a comic book character.  As such, there are certain realities he is tied to without his knowledge but shape his character and more importantly the question at hand that are integral to the outcome of the argument.  

There are three things about Batman and comics in general that complicate the argument and kind of make whether or not he should kill the Joker a moot point. First is that comic books don’t have an end.  If you think about it, that is a pretty amazing philosophical standpoint to start from.  Characters will have arcs and live, learn, die, come back to life dozens of times throughout their ‘lives.’ Characters don’t age in the real sense, but they do remember everything that happened to them.  Batman and Joker have been fighting for over sixty years.  Time can ‘accordion’ a bit, but they’ve faced off hundreds of times in dozens of comics and never had any resolution.  Why would one come now?  There is something amazing about these two characters facing off for eternity, well after we’re all gone but due to the genre in which they exist, the past is mostly moot when discussing what Batman should or more importantly could do.  

Second is that dozens of creators have taken the reigns of Batman.  They’ve all worked under the Batman rubric of course and all of them are aware of Batman’s past (all too keenly aware in some cases, Mr. Morrison).  But it creates a psychological patchwork at best of Batman and often times completely re-thinks the character’s motivations and knowledge. Each new writer shades in the areas around the edges a little more until the tapestry looks much different than when it started.  This is what makes comics great but it also works against trying to answer the big questions about a character.  Would the Batman of the 1950’s react the same to the Batman of today?  Unquestionably not, and not just because it is 60 years later: each author offers his or her ‘take’ on the character.  

Last is just the reality of the comic book business.  These comics keep going and going (sometimes ad nauseum) with new writers and ret-conned actions.  The Joker will never be permanently killed in the comics just as a business decision.  Frankly I’m surprised there hasn’t already been a half dozen ‘DEATH OF THE JOKER’ stories already, only for him to rise from the ashes and once again start terrorizing people.  I know the Joker has been assumed dead, but not even the characters believed it.  

While this information seems irrelevant to the issue at hand at first glance, I think this taints the issue enough that it has to be discussed.  Consider this: every single comic book author that has ever written Batman knows two things are absolutely certain.  

1.  Batman is not going to permanently die

2.  Joker is not going to permanently die

That is a pretty amazing bedrock to start from when you are writing a story.  No matter WHAT, both characters are -in effect- invincible.  Necessarily, this colors the debate.  No writer is going to have a thought bubble over Batman’s head in the Batcave thinking ‘I’m just going to kill the son of a bitch.’  If it is there, no one will believe it anyway.  So how much real philosophical debate can there be?  It seems to me far more likely that the debate and details spring up from the writers  hammering our new psychological niches about the characters than trying to change the status quo of their character arcs.

All that leaves us with is a bunch of what-if? questions about the characters.  I’ll gladly indulge myself here.

Mission Accomplished?

I think the reason this question resonates with people is that when it is asked, people are actually answering a different question.  They are thinking ‘Would I kill the Joker if I were Batman?’ In fact, most of the Batman FanBoys take it one step further and pretend to know the mind of Batman well enough to predict what Batman would do and why.  

This blog post at Sci-Fi Mafia is a retort to the post at The Big think and is the entire reason I’m writing my screed.  Granted, it is a blog post and as such probably written off the top of the author’s (Brandon Johnston’s) head, but it is so full of holes and bizarre reasoning that even though I agree with him in principal, I had to write about the topic.  Before I say what I didn’t like, I do like Johnston’s point that Batman isn’t a hero per se.  I think that speaks to something I’ll get to in a minute, but mostly he and I agree about who Batman is: a tortured anti-hero.

Aside from the somewhat condescending tone that all Batman aficionados inherently wield, Johnston drops a massive bombshell in the first paragraph: He says:

“Tauriq argues that Batman’s morality causes more harm than good. It’s a pretty common position among many; because the Joker has proven to be an unstoppable force for evil, one that cannot be rehabilitated, then his continued existence is counter-intuitive to the Dark Knight’s mission to prevent crime in the first place.” (Bold emphasis mine).

I asked ‘What is Batmans mission exactly?’ and Johnston responded ‘It's a rhetoric he uses all the time. It's basically his war on crime in Gotham.’    That is a far shot from ‘prevent[ing] crime in the first place,’ at least from a philosophical standpoint, so I’d like to examine them both.  

Is Batman’s mission to prevent crime? Does Batman’s very presence at least encourage if not create enemies?  This was the central idea behind the film The Dark Knight and is one of the few themes that runs through all of Batman comics.  If Batman’s mission is in fact to prevent crime, his failures make The Rampart Scandal look like accepting a free donut once a month.  His very existence creates the Joker in many versions of the character and enrages all of Gotham’s worst in all versions.  I think this ethos is from the 1980's when police departments started using the term 'Crime Prevention' as a tactic.  While there were -and are- amazing strides being made in this area, it is not the police's job to prevent crime.  There are many things police can do to alleviate some crime, but there is literally no correlation between an increased police presence and decreased crime, especially violent crime.  So how can Batman prevent it?  Fear? 

If Batman’s mission is to wage a ‘war on crime’ then Johnston and I are in complete agreement again.  But, I’ll get back to that later.

Johnston then goes on to talk about how Batman ‘isn’t image conscious’ and yet he wants to ‘instill fear.’ Life as an Extreme Sport has a better retort than I could have some up with, but I think it is important to see at least three things happening here.  First is that fans will defend Batman as infallible.  In fact, in nearly every online poll about the best superheros, Batman wins.  Second is that most people still answer the question as if they were Batman, not giving real insight to what Batman would actually do.  Third -and this is what I like about Johnston’s piece- is that there is what Batman is actually doing versus what he tells everyone (and himself) what he is doing.  Unfortunately, I think most folks (and Johnston in particular here) takes Batman at his word.

WWBD?

Johnston did get me thinking: what is Batman’s mission? Ask anyone and I’m sure they’ll say ‘to fight crime’ and honestly this is the best answer I can think of.  But, what complicates issues is that Batman is presented as the world’s greatest detective, if not the greatest human mind in existence. Would a man of that genius, talent and drive really decide to dress as a bat and punch criminals?  Grant Morrison began to address that conundrum with Batman Inc. before the re-boot at DC.  To say I was excited for that is a gigantic understatement.  Finally, Batman decides that the best way to fight crime is to basically do the exact opposite of what he had been doing his entire career: step into the spotlight, expand his team and dedicate the public resources of Bruce Wayne to the cause.  Alas, Morrison’s idea was never fully realized due to the DC reboot, though Batman Inc is getting its own series.  

Regardless, it points to the problem I have with the matter at hand and the primary reason I never kept up with Batman comic books. Isn’t there a better way to fight crime than this?  The only way Batman works for me as a character is if he is now clinically insane.  Hell, he started out as a bit nuts: family gets murdered, he decides to put on a costume and chase around bad guys.  But you’d have to be completely off your rocker to be that intelligent about so many other things but could not see the forest for the trees.  Arkham is a revolving door.  All of your friends are being hurt or destroyed.  Gotham is actively working against you.

So why does Batman do it?  Johnston mentions his stated reasoning a bit and that part is obvious.  Personally, I think that Batman realizes he is in a comic book.  Not literally, of course.  I don’t think we have to worry about any Deadpool-esque fourth wall breakage.  But, I think he has utterly and completely resigned himself to his roll as The Batman and is unwilling or unable to truly move beyond that.  Frankly, I don’t think any of his fans would want that either.  Sure, a couple of one-offs and what-ifs are fun, but if you collected 900 comic books and suddenly there was a massive change in the status quo, you’d bitch.  And boy, do comic book nerds know how to bitch.  Just ask Donald Glover. Glover, who is black, received many racists texts, tweets and emails when someone suggested he should be the new Spider-Man.  

Are there even trolleys in Gotham?

By now, nearly everyone should have at least a passing idea of what The Trolley Problem is.  But, just to make sure (from Wikipedia):

 

As before, a trolley is hurtling down a track towards five people. You are on a bridge under which it will pass, and you can stop it by dropping a heavy weight in front of it. As it happens, there is a very fat man next to you - your only way to stop the trolley is to push him over the bridge and onto the track, killing him to save five. Should you proceed?

Let’s up the ante a bit.  Let’s say Batman is on a bridge and can drop the Joker on the tracks to save five people.  Would he do it?  Before I go any further, I know that every single Batman FanBoy is stroking their neckbeard saying ‘The Batman would never allow himself to get into that predicament.’  I get it, world’s greatest detective, blah blah blah.  Hell, in The Dark Knight we see Batman extricate himself from this exact thing, which is basically the entire point of their relationship. But play along with me here.  Batman can either kill the Joker and save five lives or let the Joker live and five people die.  

He might find a way to save the people in the comics, but in a thought experiment, or in ‘lab conditions, I say that ten out of ten times Batman lets the train slide by and kill five people.

Batman’s entire moral system is based on one thing, and one thing alone: he fights crime.  He doesn’t eradicate crime, or keep people safe, or stop crime before it happens, he just fights it.  As we’ve seen in nearly every example in the United States (Prohibition, the War on Drugs, the War on Terror) these Wars are largely ineffective and are rife with unintended consequences.  But, the actual players in these games (and I’ve met Federal Agents, military men and a couple of Operators) wash their hands morally of these unintended consequences and (in many cases) rightfully so.  After all, a DEA Agent is just doing his job and his job isn’t to set policy.  I think Batman's strict no-kill policy is his psychological foundation, the only reason he can live with himself.  No matter what happens, he can say 'My direct actions never killed anyone.  All deaths were caused by the actions of others.'  But look back at the trolley problem.  At some point, one has to examine when inaction is just as bad or worse than taking a supposedly moral action. 

If you are a Batman fan that is a whole lot of reconciliation to do for a guy who is by all rights the smartest person in the world but can’t see a better way to clean things up.  Ultimately, that’s why I can’t get behind the character.  I feel like a child could come up with better ideas than Batman has.  Why not exile the Joker to another galaxy?  Why not trap him in suspended animation and store him in the Batcave?  Isn’t it at least somewhat likely that the Joker would have been killed either by his own hubris and insanity or by some low-level thug trying to take his spot?  Or wouldn’t another young and stupid hero try to add a notch to his belt and take him down?  Instead we get: Joker has a huge, diabolical plot against Batman.  Batman figures it out, Joker goes to Arkham, escapes and it starts all over.   

Please be clear: this is not to say that story for story Batman is not a great read.  There is a reason he is the most popular character ever, the guy is just awesome.  In fact, now that I think about it, he is probably my favorite character of all time.  I don't think Batman is my favorite comic book, nor is Detective Comics but this complicated psychogical patchwork is what makes him interesting.  He is the only character I can think of that strikes fear into everyone (including his fellow heroes) and is the number one guy to ask 'What if?' about in comics.  That doesn't mean I can't ask Why? sometimes too.

Speaking of Hoarding

This is a little piece I had published at My Band T-Shirt:

I was at the tail-end of a relationship that wasn’t working very well, and had a series of ‘Is this what my life has been leading up to?’ moments, when I found Hoarders on Netflix.

For those of you in the US who haven’t seen it, shame on you.  But just to bring you up to speed: it is about people who compulsively fill their house full of stuff.  Sometimes it is collectible (dolls) or brand new (unopened QVC packages) but mostly it is just trash.  In every case it is clear that the people involved are harbouring some pretty major issues that simply cleaning up won’t fix.  So at my nadir I found a show about people who have more issues than I have and expressed it worse than I did.

It was refreshing.  I immediately decided that I needed to de-hoard my apartment. Granted, I had far less than the folks on TV, but there was a lot there to deal with. I quickly filled three or four garbage bags full of clothes and took them to goodwill.  But I couldn’t touch my t-shirts.  I had already given a whole stack to my mom to make a quilt because I couldn’t bring myself to part with them.  The quilt is awesome and I got rid of a bunch of shirts, but I still had an embarrassing amount in my closet and dresser.  This past weekend my parents came to visit so I talked my mom into digging through the pile.  After splitting them up into ‘Keep Here’, ‘Make Another Quilt’ and ‘Donate’, I made one more pass through and found this shirt.

After I graduated from college and moved to Chicago, I bounced around like any English major does.  Luckily I knew some folks here and one of my best friends, Merlin*, was about two buildings down from my day job.  We’d get lunch together about two or three times a week and spent most of our day dinking around on our respective company’s high-speed internet connection.  I’m still not sure how it started, but we would randomly email each other names for an imaginary band that we were never in or never going to form.  Throughout the day, I’d send and receive cryptic three or four word emails.  ”Aboriginal Ninja”  ”StuckFick” “Damnit Randall”  ”Banal Probe”… I even compiled them all into a fake Behind the Music of sorts.  I’m pretty sure it was around that time that one of us found a robotic band called Captured! By Robots!  I was massively upset: I couldn’t come up with a name that good in a hundred years.

This was 2001 or 2002, the wild west of the internet, so there wasn’t YouTube where you could type any band name and see ten videos from all over the world for nearly any band.  In the three or four 30 second RealPlayer clips on the official site, it was pretty clear this guy was nuts. We thought he was one part David Byrne and one part Breakdancer that Paints Himself Silver for Cash. And yes, the band is all robotic, or at least directed by him by some mishmash of puppetry and remote control.  There was quite simply nothing like this at the time.  Hell, hipsters couldn’t even say they had seen this before.  Not only were there no hipsters, but literally no one had done something like this.  Now if you say ‘I saw a robotic band the other day’ four people in the bar would have video of their own robots covering Dark Side of the Moon on their iPhone.

When C!BR! came to the Empty Bottle a few months later, we were there.  At the time, the Empty Bottle was in no-man’s land.  The crowds that showed up for a show there were varied but interested in whatever was playing.  Even then I don’t think anyone had any idea what to expect.  After two opening bands went on, he began to set up in full costume, which, if you can’t tell from the picture, is a gimp mask with googly eyes and a shirt customized to seem as if his entrails are pulled halfway from his body.  The entire time he seemed to be talking to himself or to someone the rest of us couldn’t see.

After a lengthy sound check he went on stage.With the gigantic expectations we had there was no way the show could live up to it.  It just wasn’t as strange or over-the top as we thought it would be.  But the music was good; I’d venture to say really good. Everything was in time and he had a kind of duet thing going where he’d click a pedal and his voice would modulate and make the mouths of rest of the band move.  He had convincing, full conversations with them and managed to make everyone laugh in the meantime.  Merlin talked to the guy after the show and asked a couple of fairly innocuous questions to the guy about what parts he used, etc.  He wasn’t a dick about it but he also wasn’t in character anymore either.  His response was basically: “I can’t tell you all of my secrets.”  He also couldn’t sell us any shirts either, he didn’t have any on hand. I had to email his Yahoo account and send a check to get them.

When I watched Hoarders, I kept thinking, “Jesus Christ, people, it is just stuff! You don’t need five different 9/11 memorial mugs or fifteen stacks of magazines from 1986!”  Just as people rationalise watching Jersey Shore by saying, “It is such a trainwreck,” I rationalized Hoarders by saying it was House Cleaning Porn: someone comes over and makes decisions for you about what to keep and pitch and when they leave the house is spotless.  But when I picked up that shirt from the pile I remembered the concert, the conversations we had about different bands, the time I wore the shirt to Merlin’s bachelor party, the desktop wallpaper I found on a fan site, the drive back from the concert and even the second C!BR! show I went to a couple of years later.  I was watching Hoarders because I have the exact same connections to my stuff as they do to theirs.  That stuff doesn’t remind me of other times or bring up emotions, it IS those other times and emotions.

As such, this shirt is how people became friends.  It is the conversations Merlin and I had on the walk to the train at night.  It is the voice that says “Screw it: I’m going to a concert in a shady neighborhood on a Monday to watch robots play ska music.”  It is a time period in my life when I didn’t have an extra penny to my name, a plan for the next day or any idea what to do about it and I didn’t give a shit because I had a friend that felt the exact same way.  Getting rid of this shirt is the same as removing a flash drive from a computer or deleting a sector on a hard drive.  Maybe a robot can do that and still function.  I know I can’t.

Chad H. Mummert

*Yes Merlin is his real name.

Technology can sneak up on you...

When I was a kid, I carried around some kind of pocket knife everywhere.  I never took it to school, but when we'd play in the hundreds of acres of woods around my house, I always had one on me.  It was something like this:

Just a typical Buck pocket knife.  Now one like it goes for around $40, so I'm not sure what it was when I had it.  When I got older, I got a little Swiss Army knife that I carried through high school until I lost it.  It was the only knife I ever lost, so I bought it again soon after.  It retails for about $25 now.

A couple of months ago, there was a sale on woot.com for a Kershaw Compound.  Granted, woot.com sells things way, way below retail, but I paid about $13 for it shipped:

The leaps in technology from each knife are pretty staggering when you think about it.  The first knife is the same one my grandpa carried and was considered the top of the line kind of pocket knife to carry for years.  The second one is a little more 'Boy Scouts' than the first, but it has multiple blades and is built to last.

If you would have showed me the last knife when I was a kid, it would have been nothing short of science fiction.  The design is enough to make a kid's heart go aflutter but it also has a speed release which is nearly a switchblade.  The handle is 'glass filled nylon' making it noticeably lighter than the other two knives, though it is much larger.  And it is half the cost of the other two.

So today when I saw this article on Boston.com about families and their clutter I wasn't as shocked as many people seemed to be.  The big bullet point:

• The rise of Costco and similar stores has prompted so much stockpiling — you never know when you’ll need 600 Dixie cups or a 50-pound bag of sugar — that three out of four garages are too full to hold cars. 

It references a new book out from UCLA on the subject.  Life at Home in the 21st Century is meant to be a time capsule of sorts, a way for people in the future to show how families live today.  I'm not sure the cross section of the people chosen is correct, but I like the idea.  Regardless, the articles written on the book seem to paint it as a study on how consumerism has displaced the family.  While this is undoubtedly true, I feel like it is because people my age (mid 30's) and above are seeing things for sale that literally don't make sense in the context we were raised in.  This isn't to say that having clutter is OK, but seriously: CostCo is freakin unbelievable.  Places like that just didn't exist when I was growing up.  It is really easy to stockpile because it is a really, really good deal.  So good that we can't say no sometimes.  If you have a family, it makes sense to buy big and I can see that getting away from you. It takes a monumental effort on my part not to stockpile these things, but when I see something like that Kershaw knife, I falter hard.   

Brian Platzer: BR Myers : The Hunger Games:The Art of Fielding

Over at The Literary Saloon, Michael Orthofer posted an article in Salon by Brian Platzer: I was wrong about "Hunger Games." Platzer is an eighth grade teacher.  A student asked him what the difference is between 'literary fiction' and 'genre fiction' and if Platzer could provide an example of it.  This is an amazing question from an eighth grader and an awesome opportunity for a teacher. You have a kid that wants to really get at the core of what writing means, why good literature speaks to the soul instead of offering a weekend of cheap thrills.  So what did Platzer do? 

 I mentioned Chad Harbach’s “The Art of Fielding.” Though I hadn’t read it yet, I’d scanned a dozen reviews extolling its virtues. James is a baseball player, and the novel is about baseball. After checking with a local librarian to make sure there was nothing too inappropriate for a rising high school freshman, I borrowed it and lent it to James. What could go wrong?

A lot apparently, but when you start with the premise 'Here is a book other people think is good, check that out!' you shouldn't be too surprised.  Oh, but surprised he is!

 Read this baseball book, reviewers exclaim, and feel pride in your intellectual labor! There’s nothing wrong with “The Art of Fielding” if you’re merely seeking entertainment, but if you’re looking for even a little bit more, look elsewhere.

TAoF didn't break into my top 10 books ever, but I read it and liked it.  I don't think it is a particularly brilliant book but parts of it spoke to me.  Harbach nails characterization, even if they are a bit 'standard character model' and is able to switch perspectives effortlessly. The main character, Mike Schwartz is more complex than Platzer believes, but ultimately it is just a better than average book that is trying really, really hard to be something more than what it is.  I don't think it quite pulls it off, but A for effort. 

Here is what fired me up about Platzer's article:

If the literary establishment wants our teenagers to fall in love with literature, it must stop cynically writing and imprudently reviewing books like “The Art of Fielding” as though they were examples of adult literary fiction.

Ever since BR Myer's long form troll 'A Reader's Manifesto' was published, there has been this ridiculous 'US v Them' mentality amongst people who write about books, etc.  Apparently 'We' just want to read something nice but 'They' keep trying to say that what we like isn't good.  Frankly, I tend to agree to some extent.  The NYTimes review of books is rife with back patting and argument from authority.  But that doesn't mean they are automatically wrong.  The Hunger Games is not an example of great literature, period.  That doesn't mean you shouldn't read it or shouldn't like it but you should be able to recognize why it was written and what it set out to do.  It was written as a page turner to sell books and make movies off of a brand.  Period.  It succeeded wildly, and congratulations for it.  But don't say it is in the same zip code as McCarthy, Ellroy or even Steven King.  These people are at least aspiring to create something bigger than a book or a story. They are trying to speak about the same things that literature has been speaking about forever: the human condition.  The Hunger Games boils these things down to a krazy OMG what if pastiche of tropes meant to make people who didn't have great teachers think they are onto something larger.  I mean for crying out loud, a main character is named Plutach Heavensbee.*

I don't know a thing about Platzer, I don't know what his background is or how old he is.  Maybe I'm reading different reviews or interviews but I didn't see anything in what I read about how Harbach's book was meant to be a gateway for teens into the world of Real Literature.  Ironically, it is all but written in Platzer's job description that he do just that.  It is up to people like Platzer to help kids build a set of tools to answer these questions for themselves, to show that there is something quantitatively better out there than Harry Potter.  Rather than engage the subject, he sees a book that is ostensibly about baseball that seems to be charting right now and offers it up. This is such a shortsited and misguided approach to anything, much less to education and literature. Maybe the problem, then, isn't the so-called literary establishment.  Maybe it is that an eighth grade teacher can say:

I stole hours from James’ summer vacation when he could have experienced the same kind of pleasure watching a sitcom or thriller.

and not feel ashamed.  Worse yet, dozens of comments below the article agreed. 

Now, I'm not a teacher, just a guy who reads a lot but immediately when I picked up TAoF, I saw a connection to an earlier book.  Not only is it qualitatively better, it was written by one of the best living novelists and even has a pretty great Melville connection.  Philip Roth's 'The Great American Novel' isn't one of his best, but it is the perfect gateway for a kid like 'James.'  It is full of intelligent allusions to other great works of literature, it offers a counter history and is at its heart about people who love baseball.  Also, instead of Plutarch Heavensbee, you get ace pitcher Gil Gamesh.  That is just awesome.  And if James liked it, Roth has dozens of other books to keep you interested.  I know this because I read it, but even if I hadn't read the book a cursory glance at it would be a far, far better pick than TAoF and light years beyond The Hunger Games.  

So instead of railing against a faceless group of reviewers for propping up a book that you don't think deserved it, instead of trumpeting that you are a philistine in the one place it matters most to have an ounce of integrity and instead of trying to tear down a book because it didn't live up to your nebulous and admittedly low standards, put in a modicum of effort and teach James something he can use.  Namely: what we like isn't automatically good and what is good we won't automatically like. 

*Be clear: I love me some genre literature.  Warhammer 40K novels are absolutely amazing.  I just won't argue the literay merits of it.