Doonesbury by Garry Trudeau for November 27, 2010

Mel needs to adjust to the generation gap.

I wasn’t paying attention, is that a real war like WWII or one like Vietnam?

I am no fan of the first shooter games, so I’m all for the real world. But then, I am showing my age.

War, where? Can’t tell with all the shopping going on.

That’s right, Joe. Until the sacrifices hit the home front, there will be no end. Rubber drives, coupons, victory gardens???–The only gardens are for the unemployed. It is sad.

what crabbyrino said

the sandhogs called it Caisson disease……the question, no matter what your generation, is now:

do you see any value in being able to distinguish reality from fantasy?

(quite apart from the uses of make-believe in training people for real-world tasks)

the child who thinks that super beings are real is the child who jumps off the fire-escape, fully expecting to be able to fly.

GWBush thought “God” personally told him he was qualified to lead the country.

We’re living in his misbegotten “Bring it On”….looking to escape the inevitability of it any which way but “life itself”.

Too many high-schoolers are enlisting believing the real thing is like a video game. Have known a few. Reality soon hits home.

A fellow I work with approached me a year or two ago after a weekend of his favorite video game immersion. He walked into my work space with a smirk on his face and announced he finally knew what I went through in Vietnam. I, being unprepared for such a relevation from someone who actively avoided the draft in those good old days, made the mistake of asking how that had happened.

The name of the video game is lost to history but it was indeed, one of those first person shooters but apparently very primitive compared to the products being played with today.

Without touching him, I was able to help him to understand otherwise.

I wonder if he now thinks he understands what small unit combat is like in Happy Valley or Charlie Ridge or the Arizona or out on the Go Noi since he has so much better graphic and processing units to make it seem so much more real.

And to him and all of you out there who think you know a little something about such affairs: I honestly, sincerely, and deeply hope looking at a computer monitor and hearing a sound track is as close as any of you will ever get to the happenings in I Corps between October, 1967 and March, 1970.

LegacyShooter, you must be a good man. I would have had to touch the guy to get my point across.

Legacyshooter: I retired early because my “workspace” changed from a “private” office with a window and door I could close, to a cubicle in “open space”. My supervisor came to “understand” when I had my headphones on to create “my space” and he touched me from behind. I DID “touch him”, without even realizing it, well, until he was down. I filed my retirement request the next day.

I’m getting really upset about kids playing “war games” on computers– especially those “kids” at Nellis.

I thought “TR” was supposed to address the, 1st person shooter, gender gap. I guess Laura Croft creates the same body image anxieties Barbie does. What’s the answer, “Davorkian Rampage”?

The market will decide.

The transition from Fantasy to Real World is never easy…

and for some of my combat vet friends, the ghosts of the Viet Nam dead are more “real” than this so-called “Real World”. what passes for civilization looks like a mighty thin bubble membrane to those who have gone through the Wall.

those of us who are, so to speak, Already Dead.