I am addicted to Super Mario Sunshine. Since getting my hands on the Nintendo GameCube game, school work, extracurriculars, and -- most horrifyingly -- bar-time have dropped from my schedule. I went to such pains to avoid video games my first three years here at Penn State, but all it took was one sip of Nintendo's new masterpiece to throw me from the wagon. I have become a second grader again, jonesin' to get home from school and sit in front of the TV for hour upon hour, manipulating the mustachioed hero in blue overalls through an adventure filled with pipes, Yoshis and Toadstools.
The other day, while freeing a Shine Sprite from a huge squid covered in oil, I thought I had found a practical application of Sunshine's addictive qualities. Indeed, I thought I had figured out a way to stop President Bush's pushes for an Iraq invasion!
It was an easy enough plan. I walk up to the White House with a copy of Sunshine and I hand it to Bush. The Kegmeister thanks me, pops the game into his GameCube and begins playing. Within seconds, he'll be enrapt, transfixed and in all ways unable to focus on anything but navigating Nintendo's star plumber through a tropical quest to rescue Princess Peach.
Bam! War would be averted for only $49.99 ($49.96 at Wal-Mart)!
A fine plan, I thought, as I continued stomping on electrified Koopas (those are turtles, for the uninitiated). But then I realized it had a fatal flaw.
Super Mario Sunshine is my distraction -- the thing that keeps me from doing the stuff I should be doing.
Bush, however, already has a distraction. Iraq is his distraction. Iraq is Bush's Super Mario Sunshine.
The first-strike war against Iraq is the equivalent of a video game for him. Let's call it Grand Theft Baghdad. It's flashy, loud and lets him take his mind off the more important and complicated issues that are dogging the American people and the rest of the world.
When the president plays Grand Theft Baghdad, he doesn't need to worry about tough domestic matters like the economy. He can distract himself from the Census Bureau's report this week that the number of Americans living in poverty has increased significantly for the first time in eight years. As the number of poor Americans rose last year to 32.9 million, a change of 1.3 million, it has become apparent that Bush's massive tax cuts have done nothing but leave gaping holes in the federal budget and in the average American's bank account.
But Bush need not worry about American economic prosperity or the lack thereof; he's got Grand Theft Baghdad on his mind.
Does it matter that scrutiny of Bush's secret detainments is on the rise, with a federal court of appeals stating that "democracies die behind closed doors," and demanding that the administration open up immigration hearings for those collared in the post-Sept. 11 roundups? Does it matter that José Padilla remains unconstitutionally held in a military brig, with no immediate plans for his release? Padilla is, of course, the man who Attorney General Ashcroft called a dangerous terrorist close to building a radioactive "dirty bomb," but who really turned out to be a Chicago thug, whose dirty bomb "research" mostly consisted of browsing a few Web sites. Should Bush be addressing these highly questionable detainments? Naw, he's kicking butt at Grand Theft Baghdad!
Playing this game distracts the Kegmeister from the fact that his administration has outlined no clear or practical plan for achieving Israeli-Palestinian peace. As Ariel Sharon makes no good-faith gestures to remove settlers from the West Bank, and the Palestinians make no good-faith gestures to elect effective leadership, the situation becomes more and more intractable.
But what does Bush do? He makes weak declarations that gently chide each side. Doesn't he care that bringing a true peace to Israel and the Palestinians would do more for Middle Eastern stability than toppling Saddam ever could? "Shh, quit trying to distract me!" he'd say, staring at the TV and clutching his controller. "I'm at the level boss of this stage."
We all need distractions sometimes. We all need something to get our mind off things. Video games do a heck of a good job at that. But we pop in a disc with the knowledge that we'll have to stop playing at some point and return to the real world. I feed my Super Mario Sunshine addiction, knowing full well that at some point I'm going to have to restrain myself and get on with my work.
Bush has shown none of this restraint in his enjoyment of Grand Theft Baghdad. It has monopolized his domestic and international agenda and has skewed his perspective as to the issues of true importance. And from the looks of it, it's going to be awhile before Bush gives up and "Game Over" flashes across the screen.
