| Penn & Teller PCC articles by Penn Jillette | Reprinted with permission. |
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My high school English teacher (the first to tell me that I comment
parenthetically too often) is still a buddy of mine. Last time we
talked, she told me about a schizophrenic that worked with her
husband, years ago, at a foundry. After being institutionalized a
few times, this troubled co-worker had found his personal secret to
keeping sane enough to stay an out-patient: The daily paper he
read every morning was exactly 6 months old. Every day he read the
news from 24 weeks before. The perspective this gave him trickled
into the rest of his life. It's a little nutty, but, hey, it kept
him in the real world.
I could use a tad more perspective, and I had a ton of PC Computing back issues lying around un-opened, so I figured I'd try the 168 day schizo-busting habit on my PC reading. It didn't work. On page 62 -- John C. Dvorak had a column that sent me ballistic in the first two paragraphs. So much for perspective: the kind of evil thinking exhibited in his article, "Consumers' Advisory: Get those Sick Computer Games off the Market" is timeless. So, at the risk of being the next guy to fight professionally with Dvorak and get my photo in sepia: (If PCC is going to do sepia writer pictures shouldn't they go all the way and shoot them at a mall booth where for 5 bucks they give you a cardboard-framed sepia picture and you get to dress up in civil war garb? I'd give my CD- ROM cable to see Mike Edelhart holding a musket and wearing a coonskin cap. Write him a few letters -- if you want it badly enough, he'll do it.) Back to Dvorak. In this computer games article he harps on the voodoo of violence that's so popular with the lip-service liberals. This theory holds that violence in the real world is caused by violence in art (Hey, if Grand Canyon is art, so is Alien Syndrome). It doesn't matter to these bleeding ponytails that even the slanted, wacky, Meese Commission, couldn't find a correlation between violent porno and crime. It doesn't seem to matter that there was human nastiness before there were books, plays, television or the evil computer games. I don't have kids (Although I do enjoy fooling my body into feeling like I'm entering the gene pool), but I like kids. A friend of mine is my girlfriend's nephew, Charlie. Charlie is five years old and Charlie's favorite movie is Terminator 2, the same movie where little Johnny C. Sensitive saw the 5 year girl crying to her "dopey naive father" and was so sure that months of nightmares were to follow. Little Charlie loves Terminator and Charlie loves to talk to me about special effects. He knows I'm a magician and wants to learn how they do the movie "magic tricks." Terminator is teaching little Charlie the difference between fantasy and reality. This is an important skill. Once you learn the difference, fantasy opens up and you can enjoy the human wonder of symbolism. I learned this lesson from watching "The Three Stooges" with my parents. I wasn't allowed to watch "Twilight Zone" until I was older because it did give me nightmares. My nephew couldn't watch "Lassie" for the same reason. Kids are bothered by different things. My Mom and Dad made the decisions on how best to teach me to enjoy all kinds of fantasy. They didn't cry-baby for labeling and "owners, managers, and employees" to "reconsider their potentially detrimental `contribution' to society. " They raised their children and taught us that we could enjoy Agetha Christie without really getting poisoned or poisoning. It's not a hard lesson, but you must teach it. If you don't, not only do you have to worry about Nightbreed, you have to worry about Pac-Man -- what if your son thinks his real giant-yellow-sideways-smiley-face will really be devoured by a real blue ghost? |