Gamer madness

Well. I guess that settles that.

You are right, Mr. President. I confess.

Pole Position made me do it.

Pole Position or Super Mario Brothers or Fortnite, one of those evil video games that turn peace-loving young white boys into bloodthirsty mentally ill killers. Yes, that must be it.  The next time some angry white guy grabs the military grade weaponry he picked up at his local big box store ("I'll take a Slim Jim ... a Red Bull ... and six AR-15s, please.")? The next time he grabs a sackful of clips and drives 600 miles to shoot up another big box store because there were too many brown people shopping there?

It won't be because he was all hopped up on the constant stream of racist paranoia being fed him by Our Only Available President and his enablers at Fox "News." Oh, no.

It'll be Call of Duty's fault.

Holy mother of pearl. Does the madness ever end?

And is there any debunked theory whose rotting corpse OOAP won't exhume to duck his own role in that madness?

Look. I get the obliviousness. I get the lack of self-awareness. No one wants to admit he or she might have played a role in what has become our No. 1 national security threat, white supremacist terrorism. No one, least of all Donald J. "Donny" Trump himself, is going to recognize the intergalactic absurdity of suddenly decrying everything he's been stoking for so many years -- and as recently as last week.

But the video game dodge is especially laughable, if indeed any thinking human being can summon a laugh at this point. Not only has its connection to real-world violence indeed long been debunked, it's especially absurd given that there's an entire sport devoted to it now.

The Blob has always been skeptical of e-sports, but that is mostly because it's reached full Old Man Shouting At Clouds citizenship. It's hard for me to regard as sports an activity you can engage in while crushing a bag of Doritos. But that's just me.

Thing is, e-sports is big business now. Lots of cash is on the line in all the big national events. But if you follow OOAP's line of reasoning, such as it is, e-sports should be banned. Because they're incubating an entire generation of psychopathic hollow-eyed killing machines.

This, of course,  is ridiculous. To my knowledge, no serious professional gamer has yet gone a killing spree because he could not longer distinguish between video games and real life. Not even less-serious gamers have.

My son, for instance, spends a lot of his downtime in the summer  killing Japanese and Germans and insurgents. Oh, not for real, of course. He does it playing his many versions of Call of Duty. In a given summer he'll wipe out entire battalions.

Yet I have no fear that someday he'll do it for real. Partly this is because he's immune to the gun culture; he's never really cared for firearms. Mostly it's because he's not an idiot, and knows the difference between right and wrong.

Also, he doesn't watch Fox "News." Or OOAP.

I consider this a sign of superior intelligence, frankly.

I only wish I could find an old Pole Position game. I'd kick his butt.