Daily Clarity from Hawkes: Marry me Stephen King!
With this paragraph, I thee wed:
What really makes me insane is how eager politicians are to use the pop culture — not just videogames but TV, movies, even Harry Potter — as a whipping boy. It’s easy for them, even sort of fun, because the pop-cult always hollers nice and loud. Also, it allows legislators to ignore the elephants in the living room. Elephant One is the ever-deepening divide between the haves and have-nots in this country, a situation guys like Fiddy and Snoop have been indirectly rapping about for years. Elephant Two is America’s almost pathological love of guns. It was too easy for critics to claim — falsely, it turned out — that Cho Seung-Hui (the Virginia Tech killer) was a fan of Counter-Strike; I just wish to God that legislators were as eager to point out that this nutball had no problem obtaining a 9mm semiautomatic handgun. Cho used it in a rampage that resulted in the murder of 32 people. If he’d been stuck with nothing but a plastic videogame gun, he wouldn’t even have been able to kill himself.
Case closed.
That is a quote from Stephen King’s latest Pop culture article he writes for Entertainment Weekly. Mr. King, a self confessed NON-gamer, has with 8 paragraphs broken down the entire games as violence debate into its simplest form. In short, he kicked some major meaty butt on our behalf, and he doesn’t even like games.
Back when I was in high school, (a time long before many of you were born) I was a Stephen King nut. I’m serious, I read “The Stand” so many times that I had to buy a new copy. Stephen King, and he would tell you this himself, is not the best writer on the planet, but he’s a hell of a storyteller. But it wasn’t just stories, he created characters, he gave them resonance and backgrounds.
Some would argue that he would meander on minutia; I say he was fleshing out these characters so you would love them. And I did, I fell for it each time. I would fall in love with a character, and then Mr. King would (kindly) bend me over and (unkindly) do ungodly things with my backside that makes my sphincter pucker just thinking about. If they fell from grace, it hurt. If they died, it was almost crushing.
One particular character’s death had my heart broken so much that it was a week before I finished the rest of the book. You could, in many respects, see how Mr. King has influenced me. My writing style is similar to his, my love of TV or movies are usually based on story and character rather than that cool explosion. This is the gift that Mr. King has bestowed upon me and us all. It’s the gift that keeps on giving when Mr. King, wisely, posts this amazing missive.
Because he is telling people it’s okay not to like games, but it’s not okay to tell others you can’t like them. The man is more my hero now than ever. You owe it to him and yourselves to pick up every single one of his books. (Yes, even the sucky ones.) Buy and buy and buy. This man already will never want, but I want his great grandchildren to also never want.
But especially buy “The Stand” it remains my favorite to this day. See if you can figure out who my favorite character is.
Thank you Mr. King, for being a rational human being rather than a reactionary.
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