Jeu de Vivre

Given all the things in this overwrought culture operating to divide a middle-aged mother from a 13-year-old boy, I'm relieved to be able to point to at least one interest that my son and I can still enjoy together: the old-fashioned silliness of Mad magazine. The April issue features an article titled "35 Reasons Why School Sucks." Reason # 34 is military recruiters who try to entice you into enlisting in "the one place worse than high school." The picture shows a recruiter coaxing a hapless young man with this line: "It'll be like living in a video game--but cooler."

Both my son and I laughed, but with somewhat different inflections. He thinks it would indeed be cool to live inside a video game, although not one run by the Army. He'd choose a basketball videoworld, to be precise, and he'd create a doppelgaenger with the kind of thoughtfulness not always present in his life on terra firma. He'd consider height, haircut, team affiliation, uniform number. His shirt would be tucked in lovingly, for once his shoelaces tied. He'd adorn his cyberself with a mustache and mutton-chop sideburns because he is hoping for signs of fuzz in real life. There wouldn't be a mother in sight.

For me, on the other hand, the attraction to a fantasy of perfect control is completely incomprehensible. It's a generational thing, I suppose, but I worry that the real world is more and more like a computer game. And I have no particular desire to enter a space where I can edit my flaws and those of my enemies with the brush of a keystroke. Already I have an ongoing nightmare that a whole generation of kids are being sucked into their computer screens, headfirst. At other times I worry that the computer itself is breeding, hatching, programming little cyberhumans who will wander among us, sucking the humanity out through our ears.

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