If I were to create my own utopian world, I’d get to laugh at people who use phrases like “ … the inane vagaries of late-republic American life.” Oh wait, I’ve been chuckling over a piece from Nation writer and MSNBC talking head Elie Mystal, so I must be living the dream.
Mystal’s article is titled, “In My Own Private Utopia, There Is No Rain—or Republicans.” Turns out, he likes video games -- and not the icky ones that “revolve around killing and gunplay.” (Except for Grand Theft Auto, the “oft-maligned” game of whores, thugs and all varieties of urban mayhem. GTA allows the black Mystal to be victimized by police, “which is not all that different from real life.”)
But Mystal’s favorite game is the Sims, which is nonviolent. ““After a long day of fighting Republicans in real life, he explains, “I don’t always feel like fighting with hobgoblins in a game, even though the digital versions are at least bound by rules and artificial logic.” Charming fellow.
He likes the Sims because he creates a world in which CGI characters live. In fact, he gets to be, in his words, the creator of a “brown, gay, rainless world that banished Republicans.”
“The ‘game,’ he says, essentially involves acting as a deity (a slightly creepy voyeuristic deity) who watches them live out their lives.” More than that, “The player can place hurdles for the Sims to overcome (often a deep pool with no ladder) or grant them favors (like a working toilet).”
You know where I’m going with this. There’s zero difference between Mystal’s utopia and the progressive political agenda for the real America. Mystal’s every manipulation of Sims world is exactly the kind of thing you’d imagine a lefty would do, because they’ve mostly all been prescribed and demanded by the left.
The deity (government) grants you the favor of basic sanitation. Certainly, progressives don’t really want people to face hurdles (except to free thought and economic self-sufficiency), but there’s no functional difference between that and his description of his early Sims world:
I was all about environmental determinism and basically tried to force my Sims to behave the way I wanted them to by imposing structural limitations on their living spaces.
Poor Sims, living out an Al Gore fantasy or a Green New Deal action item. “I was also, in real life, living in a series of cramped Manhattan apartments and working at a job I hated, and I didn’t think my Sim-self deserved to be any happier than I was,” he admits. Shared misery, arbitrarily inflicted. Who would have ever suspected?
But Mystal is in a better place, and showing the other side of the lefty coin. “I’m no longer an angry god, but a helpful genie … a wish-fulfillment machine.”
“The organizing principle of my world is that everyone must be as happy as possible,” so:
I picked a neighborhood and moved all the prepackaged Sims out … I have to be around Sims that I want to be happy, after all. No Republicans are allowed in my game. I’ve even deleted the files of prepackaged Sims that give me any kind of Republican vibe.
No Republicans, because Mystal can’t want them to be happy. Got it. The result is a world that’s “much browner and, well, gayer than what I started with.” But of course it is.” That’s just what happens when you let Sims flirt with whomever they want and marry people who share their interests.” As long as you’ve vaporized all the Republicans.
But Mystal can’t leave off without one last shovel of guffaw-fodder:
I do occasionally have to add a family I don’t personally know just to decrease the chances of inbreeding: So, the Obamas are in my game. Sasha grew up and married my grandson. I’m buried in their backyard.
