The Only Winning Move is not to Play

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Aficionados of the teen angst, Cold War, rebel with or without a cause, give-peace-a-chance, et al., type of talkie will recognize, immediately and practically without apparent cognitive effort, the title as the conclusion reached by a supercomputer dubbed WOPR (War Operation Plan Response) by the MIC (Military Industrial Complex), or “Joshua” by its creator and others, in a hugely successful 1983 movie called War Games. The story is pretty simple:

1. Military personnel, tasked with pushing the buttons, turning the keys, etc., and thereby starting the final conflagration of global thermonuclear war in simulations that have gone slightly awry, have refused to comply with their standing orders and have not unleashed the (admittedly simulated) war birds.
2. An official, played by Dabney Coleman, has succeeded in instituting a program whereby a supercomputer can, through artificial intelligence and various simulations, “learn” to choose properly, based on probabilities of success, whether to continue with the order, or not.
3. A less than stellar high school student (as far as high school goes) succeeds in hacking the school system’s computers and changing a few grades. Then he manages to discover something he finds odd and interesting in Silicon Valley. When he hits a wall beyond which he cannot go in his search, he proceeds to get himself into NORAD by certain expedients, and learns of the problems being caused by WOPR/Joshua, which/who has suddenly developed a desire (of some kind) to bring the game to an end state.
4. Young student and his girlfriend embark upon an expedition, rushing to the Pacific Northwest to convince WOPR’s creator to return with them and lend a hand in bringing the unruly child under control.
5. Because retired PhDs like Dr. Falken often accede in the wishes of adolescent trouble-makers, Falken returns to NORAD and convinces Joshua to play Tic-Tac-Toe against itself. Simultaneously, Joshua/WOPR is trying to “crack” the launch code to bring off a world ending war, and is running all of the simulations again.
6. Before the code is cracked, WOPR/Joshua realizes that the “game” he is playing is one that cannot be won, and utters the words comprising the title of this piece. Then he offers to play “a nice game of chess”.

Silly in the extreme? Or prophetic? I think neither, but rather allegorical. For I think I see the same kind of thing playing out week after weary week, year after weary year, in our national demise, said demise accelerating rapidly over the course of time.

This week the big controversy is that one Phil Robertson, a cast member of a rather popular cable television show, has been placed on indefinite hiatus by the network that owns the franchise, called Duck Dynasty. In the way of most such controversies, boycotts have been urged by certain elements of the population, and the focal points of those boycotts have begun to grow outside the boundaries of the network and their presumably contracted employees, the cast of the show, and in particular the person who is now being called the “patriarch” of those contracted employees. One or more companies have apparently decided to suppress their involvement with the show by removing certain items from their store shelves, at least for now, or reducing their prices. So where’s the controversy?

A very few days ago, the big controversy was over a few events connected with the Nelson Mandela funeral, memorial service, etc. What was that all about? Oh, yes, it was that a sitting President of the United States and a sitting Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, indulged in taking “selfies” surrounding the very attractive head of the government of Denmark. The result was that the President’s wife apparently rearranged the seating, and just by the way did not look very pleased with some events or others.

Now, I’m wondering if anyone remembers the big controversy preceding the Mandela thing? No? I didn’t think so. How about Snowden and the NSA? That was last Spring. Lots of things between then and now. Uh, the “failed” “Obamacare” rollout, from the Website to the policy cancellations and everything else? The Presidential, Congressional, and other lies about the Affordable Care Act? Various shootings in public places, including elementary and high schools? Benghazi? September 11, 2001? The housing bubble? The dot-com crash? Don Imus saying silly and stupid things about a female college sports team, or Rush Limbaugh saying silly things about a professional law school student? The Grenada invasion, or Panama? The Bork or Thomas hearings? Maude worrying about abortion? Race and gender based quotas in everything there is?

Don’t the big controversies go back, uh, forever?

We, the people, are focusing on things that have very little real significance, all spoon fed to us by a willing and complicit media working busily for whoever their masters may be, and we are losing, ever more rapidly, the focus on the really important things, such as governance of the Nation.

I submit that, apart from a knowledge of and an adherence to, the Constitution of the United States, one is totally ignorant of just which “controversies” are of any importance at all. If some tempest in a tea-kettle doesn’t affect the Constitution, it’s just not worth much notice.

At the same time, I submit that whenever such tempests consume our energies and our time, we have already lost the central focus, and we really don’t give a tinker’s dam about the Constitution, our liberties, or the future.

You’d better choose. I hope you choose not to play.

The Only Winning Move is not to Play by Dennis Glover is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.