IDYLLOPUS PRESS IS A VALIANT LITTLE ROWBOAT

Or rather marking my calendar to buy this book. You may mark your calendar to do whatever in October.

Pam’s House Blend has a post on a new book by Jim Loewen that’s due to be released in October, Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of Segregation in America”.

A quote that Pam supplies from Publishers Weeky:

Located mostly outside the traditional South, these towns employed legal formalities, race riots, policemen, bricks, fires and guns to produce homogeneously Caucasian communities—and some of them continue such unsavory practices to this day. Loewen’s eye-opening history traces the sundown town’s development and delineates the extent to which state governments and the federal government, “openly favor[ed] white supremacy” from the 1930s through the 1960s, “helped to create and maintain all-white communities” through their lending and insuring policies.

“While African Americans never lost the right to vote in the North… they did lose the right to live in town after town, county after county,” Loewen points out. The expulsion forced African-Americans into urban ghettoes and continues to have ramifications on the lives of whites, blacks and the social system at large. Admirably thorough and extensively footnoted, Loewen’s investigation may put off some general readers with its density and statistical detail, but the stories he recounts form a compelling corrective to the “textbook archetype of interrupted progress.” As the first comprehensive history of sundown towns ever written, this book is sure to become a landmark in several fields and a sure bet among Loewen’s many fans.

One of those sundown towns was Highland Park, Texas, which didn’t have a home-owning black family un til 2003. Highland Park, Texas is home to G. W. Bush and Dick Cheney, and the book reports that eleven Presidents and recent presidential candidates came from sundown towns.

So did Spam.

Spam? Really? Should I confess that sometimes as a child I was fed Spam and that I liked it? And I liked it a whole lot when it was fried? Should I confess that I never bought a can of Span after the age of 17 because (a) it was too expensive (b) I was horrified by the idea of it but also horrified that I might still like it and then (c) horrified to open the can and look at what I used to eat as a child.

We have both James Lowen’s Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong and Lies Across America: What Our Historic Sites Get Wrong on our bookshelves. “Lies My Teacher Told Me” is fairly well known, but the less popular “Lies Across America” is worth having. Following is a sizeable excerpt from the introduction.

People who put up markers and monuments and preserve historic houses are usually pillars of the white community. The recent spate of Martin Luther King avenues and monuments notwithstanding, Americans still live and work in a landscape of white supremacy. Especially in the South, but all across America, even on black college campuses, the names on the landscape and the markers and monuments glorify those who fought to keep African Americans in chains and those who, after Reconstruction, worked to put them back into second-class citizenship. What person gets the most historical markers in any state? Not Lincoln in Illinois, it turns out, nor Washington in Virginia, but Nathan Bedford Forrest, Confederate cavalry leader and founder of the Ku Klux Klan, in Tennessee. And if white Southerners were misguided enough not to be racist, they are left off the landscape entirely or converted into “good white Southerners” when remembered on it. Thus Helen Keller’s birthplace flies a Confederate flag, while she was an early supporter of the NAACP.

Other monuments express white domination over Native Americans. A later introductory essay, “Hieratic Scale in Historic Monuments,” shows how sculptors typically place Native Americans lower than European Americans on historic monuments. Lame Deer, a Dakota leader, sees the same message in the four European American faces carved on Mount Rushmore:

What does this Mount Rushmore mean to us Indians? It means that these big white faces are telling us, “First we gave you Indians a treaty that you could keep these Black Hills forever, as long as the sun would shine, in exchange for all the Dakotas, Wyoming, and Montana. Then we found the gold and took this last piece of land, because we were stronger, and there were more of us than there were of you, and because we had cannons and Gatling guns. . . . And after we did all this we carved up this mountain, the dwelling place of your spirits, and put our four gleaming white faces here. We are the conquerors.

The language at historic sites is also warped. All across the country, Americans call Native Americans by tribal names that are wrong and even derogatory. On the landscape Indians are “savage,” whites “discover” everything, and some causes are portrayed as stainless today that were drenched in blood in their own time. Distorted as well is the art on historic monuments. Whites inevitably wind up on top, in positions of power and action, while people of color are passive on the bottom.

Then there is the matter of who gets memorialized and who gets left out. All too often memorials heroify people who should not be forgotten, but who should never have been commemorated — Jeffrey Amherst for example, who initiated germ warfare in the Americas and for whom Amherst College and Amherst, Massachusetts, are named. Across America the landscape commemorates those men and women who opposed each agonizing next step our nation took on the path toward freedom and justice, while the courageous souls who challenged the United States to live out the meaning of its principles lie forgotten or even reviled. Markers and monuments in many states leave out women, sometimes so totally as to be unwittingly hilarious. The only white woman to get a historical marker in Indiana, to take one offending state, gets remembered for coming into the state minus a body part that she lost in Kentucky! Kentucky, meanwhile, erected (the right word) a female Civil War horse with an extra body part that turns her into a he! Historic sites also cover up or lie about the sexual orientations of the people who made their history if those orientations were gay or lesbian.

A special form of these omissions occurs at war museums, which present war without anguish, instead focussing genially on its technology. The USS Intrepid in New York City leaves out the Vietnam War — too “political” for its board of directors — but most visitors never notice it. Omissions can be hard to detect, especially for visitors who come to a site to learn some history and do not bring a knowledge of the site with them. People don’t usually think about images that aren’t there.

And some images don’t exist anywhere. Scottsboro, Alabama, became world-famous for exactly one incident — the Scottsboro Case — but although downtown Scottsboro boasts four historic markers, none mentions the Scottsboro Case. “Pay attention to what they tell you to forget,” poet Muriel Rukeyser once wrote, and this book does — it covers the Scottsboro Case and three events in Richmond, a city that truncates its public memory on the day that the Confederacy ceased to rule it, because of their importance — and because they are not recognized on the landscape. Nowhere have I seen portrayed the multicultural nature of pioneer settlements, where Native Americans, European Americans, and often African Americans lived and worked together, sometimes happily. Only an obscure marker in Utah offers any hint of the trade in Indian slaves that started in 1513 and continued at least until the Emancipation Proclamation. All across America, the landscape suffers from amnesia, not about everything, but about some crucial events and issues of our past.

When the landscape does not omit unpleasant stories entirely, it often tells them badly, compared even to the mediocre standards set by U. S. history textbooks. Except for the Chief Vann house, a state historic site in Georgia, historic sites and museums in the United States offer few depictions of Native American farms, frame houses, or schools, compared to the enormous number of tipis they display. Thus they portray American Indians as mobile and romantic — even when they weren’t! What tourists learn about slavery from visiting most historic sites is far inferior to the somewhat improved information that textbooks now provide to high school students. On Reconstruction, that period after the Civil War when the federal government tried to guarantee equal rights for African Americans, the landscape is almost silent; most sites that do mention it present a distorted “Gone With the Wind” version that never happened. There is little trace on the land today of the lynchings and race riots that swept the United States between 1890 and 1925, the “nadir of race relations.” All across America, monuments to the Spanish-American War, which was over in three months, say “1898-1902″; few visitors realize that those dates refer to the larger and longer Philippine-American War, which otherwise has mostly vanished from the landscape and from our historical memory.

The antithesis of omission is overemphasis, and the history written on the American landscape is largely the history of the federal governments — United States of America and Confederate States of America — and particularly of their wars.

Source: Introduction to “Lies Across America”

I’ve done my share of sparring with individuals attempting to claim that the Ku Klux Klan had nothing to do with Stone Mountain or Mount Rushmore.

Amazing the misinformation and flat-out lying the Daughters of the American Revolution and the Daughters of the Confederacy spread around? No.

Many of the Great-Field-Trip-Outing-For-The-Homeschooler ideas that come rolling around involve such landmarks and other often-touted places of historic interest. In the Deep South, historic sites are quite often focused on Civil War battles and the glorification of Antebellum life and its plantations. With these Antebellum home restorations, one is typically invited to experience the “luxury and elegance”, and the “grace and beauty” of the Antebellum south. Slavery as the muscle and bone and blood that made the Antelbellum south, if mentioned, seems often a reluctant concession.

When they say that people in period costumes will be on hand, you can pretty well guarantee what period costumes won’t be welcoming you.

The first two James Loewen books have been read several times over, whole, and in bits and pieces. If this third book is half as instructional, it will become another essential reference.

This is not a posting on how our lauded leader, Bush, was supposed to speak at the 2005 Boy Scout Jamboree last Wednesday, how security procedures had first 40,000 scouts go through lengthy security checks and how those procedures demanded that those 40,000 scouts be gathered and waiting in the arena for a full two hours prior the President’s appearance. Which meant 3 hours they had been waiting in the beastly, Virginia summer sun, without enough water, without protective tarps, basting in searing, unrelenting temps in the 90s (humidity heat index somewhere near 120 degrees), when the President’s appearance was canceled due to threatening storms, by which time Scouts were collapsing left and right with sun-sickness (which can easily be fatal), Scouts being air-vacced out to area hospitals, over 300 scouts treated and some in serious enough condition to warrant hospitalization. To add to the stress, the outermost-lying camp of scouts was 7 miles distant, and rather than being bused in they hiked to the area, 7 miles in the sun. At least that is what I read, and as they also had to be situated in the arena for two hours before the President’s arrival, that meant first a seven mile hike in the sun followed by three hours of brutal exposure to the sun in the open arena.

The President had canceled speaking at their last jamboree, four years ago, because of threatening storms (two scouts were injured by lightning strikes) and ended up delivering his address via video.

This time the President was scheduled for the following day but the Scouts requested his appearance be postponed until Sunday because they’d exhausted their medical supplies.

I imagine they, by now, were also starting to get half a brain and may have been concerned about subjecting their charges to a lengthy wait, two consecutive days, in the arena.

All for the sake of hearing lauded leader Bush speak.

But this isn’t a posting on that and how the Scouts should have known better than to subject their charges to what amounts to a torturous endurance test. This posting is about the following two images.

President Bush makes remarks at the National Scout Jamboree, Sunday, July 31, 2005, in Fort A.P. Hill, Va. Bush helped commemorate the four Scout leaders killed Monday at the Jamboree when the tent they were helping erect touched power lines overhead.(AP Photo/Lawrence Jackson)

President Bush did speak to the Scout Jamboree on July 31st. 40,000 scouts in tan shirts. President in white shirt that makes him stand out in the crowd. 3 big hot air balloons rise over the 40,000. Hot air balloons. Fun. Wow. Hot air balloons with big big words. Send messages. One is a Scouting hot air balloon. One is an “Order of the Arrow” hot air balloon. One is an Army hot air balloon.

U.S. President George W. Bush, with the backdrop of a hot air balloon, delivers a speech to over 40,000 Boy Scouts at the 2005 National Scout Jamboree at Fort A.P. Hill, Virginia, July 31, 2005. Bush delivered a pep talk on Sunday to thousands of Boy Scouts, urging them not to waver after four tragic deaths and a rash of heat-related illnesses cast a pall over their camping ‘jamboree.’ Reuters/Mannie Garcia

“Order of the Arrow” hot air balloon behind Bush. Big image of American Indian on big red hot air balloon. These images mean something. These balloons. These big ads. Great big messages on how to think about these three subjects both apart and taken together.

It’s to be remembered that the Boy Scouts admit neither gay individuals nor atheists. They claim that all is required is a belief in any god (the Boy Scout oath is made to god and country) and that they accept individuals of all faiths as long as there is an expression of faith in some deity, but I read that (of course) it is nearly impossible to be Pagan in the Boy Scouts, and I wonder how in the world they are able to absorb the broad variety of faiths that there are, the broad variety of beliefs, without absorbing also atheists.

Particularly for a group that received military funding for as long as it did. And still does.

ACLU settlement allows DoD to continue Boy Scout support

WASHINGTON (Army News Service, Nov. 18, 2004) — The partial settlement Nov. 15 of an American Civil Liberties Union lawsuit against DoD allows the military to continue supporting the Boy Scouts of America, as long as commands don’t officially sponsor Scout units.

The ACLU lawsuit, filed in 1999, alleges that the Boy Scouts religiously discriminate because the Scout Oath requires youth swear to do their duty to God and country.

The partial settlement requires Pentagon leadership to issue a letter reminding commands of its policy: DoD and it’s personnel can’t sponsor non-federal organizations while in their official capacity.

The ACLU also points out the Pentagon donates approximately $2 million to the Boy Scouts for their quadrennial national Jamboree, which will be held this year July 25 through Aug. 3 at Fort A.P. Hill.

“The Boy Scout Jamboree will still go on as scheduled at Fort A.P. Hill,” said Defense Department spokesman Lt. Col. Joe Richard. “We are still fully supporting the Boy Scouts. But, we are reminding base commanders and post officials they can’t sponsor non-federal organizations in their official capacity. It’s not a new policy, but we are reminding people.”

A Pentagon news release states: “The settlement does not prohibit the Defense Department from supporting the Boy Scouts of America. Boy Scout units are permitted to meet on military bases and military personnel are allowed to remain active in Boy Scout programs. Under the very limited settlement, applying the existing policy, the Defense Department may not officially sponsor Boy Scout units and personnel may not sponsor Boy Scout units in an official capacity. [This policy] prohibits official sponsorship to all private organizations, not just the Boy Scouts.”

The ACLU said the Boy Scouts’ policy violates the religious freedoms of those who don’t wish to swear to a religious oath. And, the government’s relationship with the Boy Scouts directly links it with the Boy Scouts’ discrimination.

Bob Bork, a Boy Scouts of America spokesman, said the Boy Scouts is a multi-religious organization, not a Christian-only group. He said they recognize just about every religion. But, he acknowledged, the Boy Scouts require a belief in a god, so atheists are not allowed to join.

The settlement does not prohibit off-duty government employees from sponsoring Boy Scout troops on their own time, officials said. They said the Boy Scouts will still also have access to any military facilities currently available to other non-governmental organizations.

Aside from this week’s agreement, the full lawsuit is still pending and is in the hands of U.S. District Court Judge Blanche Manning. In the lawsuit, the American Civil Liberties Union claims the Pentagon and the Housing and Urban Development Department violated the First Amendment’s establishment clause by spending appropriated funds to support the Boy Scouts.

The national Boy Scout Jamboree takes place every four years at Fort A. P. Hill’s 76,000-acre installation, which has served as the site since1981. The Boy Scouts use approximately 3,000 acres of land house the some 40,000 scouts and leaders who attend the event.

Engineers construct support facilities, Signal Soldiers establish communication nodes – most support of the jamboree is training that helps Soldiers when they deploy to combat zones, an Army spokesman said.

(An story written by by Chris Walz for the Pentagram newspaper was the foundation of this article.)

Source: ACLU settlement allows DoD to continue Boy Scout support

Most everyone seems to have a heart on for the Boy Scouts and would like to make it hands off for criticism because of all the good work done and the building strong morals and ethics and patriotism in young men.

At one forum on stereotypes I read some fairly long threads on the “Order of the Arrow” in which all the standard arguments were trotted out. Boy Scouts protested that they did not disrespect First Nations peoples. The scouts posting were telling others they didn’t know what they were talking about, that they were helping “preserve” American Indian culture, and also that the Scouts built strong men of moral and ethical principles who most importantly followed Christ, so, y’know, lay off.

We teach morals, tradition, and most of all we represent our Lord, Jesus Christ.

Then this,

Where do you get off discriminating such a serious and spiritual organization such as the OA? … You can fight us as long as you want but the boy scouts are the fastest growing organization in the world and the Order of the Arrow is in hot pursuit. Next time you want to discriminate against an organization, make sure you have bring a fight; not just some little whining because you don’t like us. Get over it! We stand for the Preservation of —- Native American culture and traditions and we will until the end of time.

The arguments against what the Boy Scouts and Order of the Arrow were doing were about as civil and non-combative as one could possibly get, generally focusing on how did they sincerely believe they were “preserving” a culture of which they were not a part, and how did they believe First Nations peoples felt about people who slew them and stole their land, insisting that they were now preserving their culture?

Respect is not telling an individual that everyone is scared to go near their drug and crime-ridden reservation and we scouts are preserving your culture better than you. And that is what, paraphrased, one of the individuals said.

And then there was finally this comment, and again, the person was given a civil response:

Look i dunno where you get off trying to turn people against one of the best organizations this country has to offer to it’s youth, but im about sick of your nuts! You’re really f**kin bothering me right now because your persist to fabricate these lies that all we do is advertise the Lenape culture as entertainment. THATS NOT IT AT ALL. You’re really looking like a stupid f**k because you can’t seem to see that IF IT WASN’T FOR THE OA THERE WOULD BE ALOT MORE PEOPLE OUT THERE THAT HATE OUR HONORED NATIVE AMERICANS FOR WHO KNOWS WHAT REASONS. Alot of people see native americans as mindless idiots that wouldn’t move out of our way as we came in to “claim our land”. The truth is THEY HAD A RIGHT TO PROTECT THIER SACRED LAND”. i know a hell of alot more than what you f**kin think i know and you better get off the OA’s toes before you get a boot up your ass.

Consider that the “Order of the Arrow” is an Honor Society of Scouts, ” intended to recognize those scouts who best exemplify the scout virtues of cheerful service, camping, and leadership.”

And they don’t mind telling you they’ll give you a boot up the ass too if you disagree with them.

It’s interesting to me these pictures of Bush with the Boy Scouts, Order of the Arrow and Army balloons towering over the 40,000 moral and ethical youth of nearly all religions, who include among their number those who are honored to “respect” and “preserve” American Indian cultures.

Interesting the dearth of new military recruits, and perhaps the military’s hope in drawing from the ranks of the Scouts, which would of course be an excellent reason to host them, and dangle big Army balloons over them. Interesting with America as an occupying force in the Middle East and sorely in need of young men and women to go over and fight the good fight, the Boy Scout balloon and the big Army balloon looming over the crowd of 40,000.

Interesting that the American government is considered by a number of First Nations peoples to be an occupying power and the scouts’ paternalistic attitude of granddaddying First Nations and preserving their culture for them, interesting with the Order of the Arrow balloon cozied right up there next to the Army balloon.

Which is what this post is about.

One of the last people I’d want up at a podium coddling my son and telling him what a good boy he is and how he’s proud of him would be the President of the United States, George Bush, whose watch has us sinking under the disgraces of Afghanistan, Iraq, Guantanamo Bay, the Patriot Act….

Sure, there are some good boy scouts and some good people who serve them, but Dick Cheney, who was a Boy Scout, isn’t one of them, and neither is Donald Rumsfield, who made it to the exalted level of Eagle Scout. They’re both scoundrels. And Amnesty International believes Eagle Scout, Donald Rumsfield should face prosecution by other governments for violations of the Geneva Conventions and the U.N. Convention Against Torture.

Note: Excuses for all the graphics. But that’s what this post is about.

Sheldon Rampton’s War is fun as hellarticle, posted at AlterNet, begins…

Years of writing about public relations and propaganda has probably made me a bit jaded, but I was amazed nevertheless when I visited America’s Army, an online video game website sponsored by the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD). In its quest to find recruits, the military has literally turned war into entertainment.

“America’s Army” offers a range of games that kids can download or play online. Although the games are violent, with plenty of opportunities to shoot and blow things up, they avoid graphic images of death or other ugliness of war, offering instead a sanitized, Tom Clancy version of fantasy combat.

I went to the America’s Army website, which as of last night has 170,764 registered users, to grab some screenshots and look at the fare there.

If you want to see how you might return home from the Middle East, they do have a game of some sort called “Combat Medic” where you learn how bloody warfare gets.

“Evaluate casualties and apply life saving techniques” is the caption here. The next pic (I was looking at screen shots as I didn’t want to download the game) has a soldier in the same condition (the clothes aren’t even torn) and warns you there may be multiple casualties.

You’re even warned there will be civilian casualites. “Civilians will often come under fire in combat”. Glad everyone makes it to the hospital to be treated in as pristine condition as this guy. Whatever.

But war is fun, you get to ring the courtyard bell!

And when you blast someone, it’s BOOGA time.

Who’s in the army? And what the hell is the army?

Seems the army is now all about game development. There’s a supplemental video on it at the website. “How to spot a video game developer”.

Yeah, you spot a video game developer by his night vision glasses, his pocket protector and his computer (at that point they show some computer on the helicopter onto which all the army guys have boarded, ready for their hot gun night out on the town).

Speaking of glasses, you’ll be able to recognize the army recruit by his fashionable Oakleys, which are indispensible in the field.

Not sold yet? The Oakleys don’t do it for you?

Then meet the Frag Dolls. There’s a supplemental video on them there as well. But I couldn’t hear what they were saying as the sound would cut out after the first two seconds. Same with all the other videos I tried to watch last night.

The Frag Dolls are professional gaming girls you get to play against in America’s Army game shows.

No one has ever won against them. So, boys, get out and try your skill!!!

U.S. Army Invades E3–With helicopters and Humvees, the Army offers a real-life look at its video game

Erik Larkin, Medill News Service
Friday, May 20, 2005

The U.S. Army is out in full force at the E3 Expo in Los Angeles this week.

In a tent outside the Los Angeles Convention Center, the Army is offering video game enthusiasts the chance to stand atop a Humvee and use a real (albeit modified) machine gun while playing a part of the America’s Army - Special Forces game, projected on three walls at the expo.

Earlier this week, the Army released the latest version of the game, updated with a new mission for players, called the Q-course. America’s Army - Special Forces, first released in 2002, has more than 5 million registered players. The game is used to “educate the American public about the U.S. Army and its career opportunities,” according to the game manual.

“The technology is what we use for actual training,” says Major Chris Chambers, who directed the E3 presentation for the Army. “We brought it to E3 because it’s also really cool.”

Across the street from the Army’s Humvee tent outside the expo, the Army is putting on a real-life demonstration of the game. Every morning, a group of “Golden Knights” parachutists jump from a CH-47 Chinook helicopter at 2500 feet into a parking lot across from the expo. And each afternoon, actual Special Forces soldiers use a converted auto dealership next door to run through a “grab mission” taken from one of the levels in the game with “real equipment, weapons, and uniforms,” Chambers says.

The Humvee machine gun, which has been modified with a laser to let it become part of the America’s Army game, runs all day nonstop. Each person is allowed to play for two to four minutes.

‘Frag Dolls’ Rule

The Army’s booth inside the expo is a bit more mundane, but still tries to make an impression.

“The booth looks like a mud-brick fortress that you might find in central Asia,” Chambers says. At the front, gamers can play the “America’s Army” PC game at 10 kiosks, and another eight kiosks have a sneak peek of the upcoming “Rise of the Soldier” console game for the Playstation 2 and Xbox, Chambers says.

A group of “Frag Dolls,” paid female professional gamers, take on all comers. Chambers says they’re undefeated against all challengers–including Special Forces soldiers.

Another part of the booth is set up for a “virtual urban combat experience,” he says. The virtual soldiers start out with real-world equipment, including Kevlar vests and helmets, and M4 assault rifles. After a combat briefing, “we let them kick the door in, and they’re jumping through this room and the enemy is shooting at them,” Chambers says. Of course, that shooting is coming from projected screens, again from a part of the America’s Army game.

The Army is giving away the game at E3. It can also be downloaded at no cost from the Army’s Web site.

This expensive show, run by a team of 30, is not a recruiting event, Chambers insists. It did spark the interest of one young man, a member of the staff running the convention center, he says. “He started getting pretty fired up about the possibility of joining the army,” Chambers adds.

But Chambers says he is at the expo for the same reason as the other exhibitors: to showcase the game.

“We intend to be a major player in this industry for a long time,” he says.

Source: PC World

If you live in Salina, Kansas, head out to the Tri-Rivers Fair August 10 thru 14 where you’ll be able to try your hand at the game with “on-site recruiters and plenty of fun”.

Event Details:
August 10-August 14, 2005 - Tri-Rivers Fair, Salina Kansas; KILS-FM The Zoo 92.7 & KQNS OZ 95.5 Radio Stations will be hosting the Americas Army Online Game Wireless Network with 5 Computers on site for the public to tryout AAO and receive a Free copy of the PC CDROM & AAO T-Shirts. Live Radio Broadcast, Wireless-G Free-Access to the AAO Game Server, on-site Recruiters and plenty of fun. [NOTE: Due to the Nature of the Americas Army Game, Rated T, only Age 16+ will be allowed to play. Parental Discretion is advised for viewing the Server in live action.]

Just so you know. War is big boy stuff. And plenty of fun. Thus the parental discretion warning and only over 16 need apply. Irony of ironies, I bet if you toted up an Afghanistan or Iraqi child to an America’s Army Online booth, they’d say, “Too young”. Too bad that doesn’t protect them at home where they get to experience its horrors live.

And too bad the boys who are convinced that war is a video game will be learning over in the Middle East about the body bags and amputations and brain injuries and the other fun stuff we don’t get to see on television here. Or in the newspapers.

And certainly not in the America’s Army games.

Image (by Tom Sherlock) of man cleaning gravestones in preparation for Memorial Day from Arlingtoncemetery.org.

Frag Dolls. It just now occurs to me that they’re named for defragging as in defragging a disk drive, and not for frag as in shell fragments, frag wounds etc.

Sigh.

Note: Or maybe they’re not. Maybe they are named for blowing things up.

No, the Frag Dolls, http://www.fragdolls.com/about.php, so-named for…

frag /frag/ n. & v. · n. 1 number of kills. 2 a fragmentation grenade. · v. 1 to eliminate other players in multiplayer shooters (fragging).

…weren’t content with video game kills and bloodshed. As pointed out in my prior post, PTSD (maybe death) is finding out war isn’t like it was in the army’s hot fantasy combat video games, they decided the thing to do was to serve as recruitment bait for the army, get some dollars from the army for taking on the boys and girls, men and women, the army hopes to sign on through its “War is Fun and Gaming Development” program.

These women are ripe for Operation Yellow Elephant, y’think?

The website caption for this picture reads, These glass cube things make a cute “plink” sound when you flick em with your fingernail. Yeah, and real fragmentation grenades go BOOM real loud. But that’s not so cute.

And it’s not real sexy either.

Nor does it happen on a computer monitor.

P.S. Man, I hope I don’t go and get the kick ass Frag Dolls all mad at me.

Cross-posted at Operation Yellow Elephant

Pushing America’s Army at E3 2004.

It’s only a game?

That’s what some people are saying about America’s Army.

But it’s not.

A March 2005 entry at the blog Game Matters on America’s Army - Behind the Scenes is an interesting one in which is published an anonymous gaming list post (with permission) of an individual who was involved with development and notes how the Army seems not to have expected America’s Army, at 1/3 of 1 percent of its advertising budget, to have been such an outstanding success.

What’s interesting is the developer, who was one of about 28 people working on the game initially, seems to be oblivious to social and political ramifications of one’s choices, such as in one’s work, and that one does not live in a gaming vacuum. America’s Army was initially developed in a Naval Think Tank, but hired outside video game talent to work on the project. I could be wrong but the writer appears to have been one of those hired from outside, and there’s a peculiar disconnect going on. He’s hyped that the game was in the number three spot on the Gamespy stats and discontented that the Army then began to claim responsibility for development, made some changes to the team and “hemorrhaged talent”. Rather than considering what his work means ethically to himself and the other developers and the people for whom it was created as a recruitment tool, he bemoans what he considers to be the decimation of the programming and design staff, and the politics that resulted with the Navy getting pissed at the Army that the Army didn’t mention the game was developed in a Naval think-tank.

I don’t want to get sidetracked into Army and Navy and hired-on video game developer tussles. That’s not the issue here. But I did think it would be interesting to refer to a portion of his argument before looking at how America’s Army was developed.

Excerpt:

So, one morning about a year ago, the Army shows up in force at the Naval Postgraduate School. They arrive in full dress uniform and bring generals and lawyers with them. They go to the school’s Provost and make accusations of mismanagement by the school. They make claims that the game is a failure and that the school has not lived up to its contract. Tempers flare and the Navy and the Army both agree that they should get the hell out of NPS. The Army takes their ball and goes home, and several of the team members are not invited to come along. I think the first resignation came within a month of this event, and the exodus has not stopped to this day. They’ve probably lost somewhere around 20 people since they took the game “internal”, and they’ll surely lose more before all is said and done.

At this point, I’m not sure if they’re going to be able to ever recapture what they had. The Army is basically clueless when it comes to making games and they don’t know how to treat people, especially game developers.

…

In the end, I’m happy for the experience. It was extremely valuable to me, and was a wonderful opportunity. It was unique and different, and a chance to take a shot at something that no one really had any expectations of. It was also a chance at creating a small snippet of
history. The game is far from perfect, but I’m still proud of it simply because of how much was stacked against it. I worked with some wonderful people, many of which I hope will have long and successful careers…Working on the game was a wacky adventure, and not the type of thing most game developers will ever experience. The job of a game developer is pretty strange as it is, but making a game for the Army was a down right surreal experience.

So, America’s Army was created with the assistance of outside video game developers who were aware they were working on a recruitment propaganda tool but seem to have been able to divorce this from ethical concerns, instead only approaching it as part of their art and just another job added to the resume.

It’s not so simple as that. Nor is it so simple with gamers who hone the skills of others, becoming part of the propaganda community, through participating in the team sport of America’s Army.

At its surface “America’s Army: Operations” seems like nothing more than a game made to take advantage of the recent success of games featuring realistic military tactics, but in looking into the matter many interesting bits of information are discovered. According to the official web site for “America’s Army,” Operations is actually designed to be a recruitment tool. If a player does exceptionally well at the game they may actually receive an e-mail from an army recruiter. This certainly changes how propaganda works in that it’s not a one-way flow of communication. Being contacted directly as a result of using the propaganda makes the communication two-way and far more effective. This actually may have a psychological effect on certain players because encouraging army enlistment because of the person’s abilities harkens back to how guidance counselors and family may encouraged them in the past.

….

As the quality of games increase the industry becomes more respectable and a more apparent vehicle for propaganda. For now, however, video game propaganda may be highly underestimated despite the industry’s current acceptance as an art form by a wide range of people. It is because of this that video game propaganda will prove to be most effective.

Source: Video Game Propaganda, Travis Woodside, Cal. State

Michael Zyda is the Director of the USC Viterbi School of Engineering’s GamePipe Laboratory, located at the Information Sciences Institute, Marina del Rey, California, and from 2000 to 2004 was the Founding Director of The MOVES Institute (Modeling, Virtual Environments and Simulation), at the Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey, California. This paper at Gamepipe.isi.edu, “From VIZ-SIM to VR to Games: How we built a hit game-based simulation” was written by Michael Zyda, with Alex Mayberry, Jesse McCree and Margaret Davis, and details their development of America’s Army and admits much about the game as a propaganda tool aimed at teens.

America’s Army is not just a recruitment tool, of course, it is a “training simulator”.

Program managers want games for their next training simulator or combat-modeling system. Corporations want their messaging put forward in game form. These desires are sharpened by the enormously successful career of the “America’s Army” game, the first “serious” large-scale game ever produced…

Why do so many people want games for their next training simulator?…The average “America’s Army” fan spends something like sixty hours in the game, counting those who completed the basic-combat training, and it is only one of the top-five on-line games: their cumulative hours must be staggering. Ask any parent of an avid on-line gamer–the number of kids hooked and time spent is scandalous. Games and their interfaces have become second nature to youth.

…

Games are also attractive for their immersive qualities. As a rule of thumb, there is more immersion in a typical game than in a typical training simulator. Teenagers often enter a game world before dinnertime, after which it is difficult to prise (sic) them out to eat: need more be said?…

So there are strong reasons to move our training simulations to a game basis…

One of the larger problems is the generation gap. Games mean ‘frivolous wastes of time’ to the older generation, so it is hard to convince them to buy off on such training systems or even the term ‘game-based simulation.’ Eventually this resistance will fade, but at present it is our biggest impediment. Meanwhile, we know we have to move (to game-based simulation). When we hear stories about nine-month learning curves for the latest combat-modeling system, we (cannot) but think of the five minutes it takes to drive (the latest) game. As a community, we want our systems to offer training in five minutes. We want our systems as immersive as games. We want them entertaining, so that work is play and people don’t leave. In short, we want our training systems so immersive that soldiers forget to eat.

A question asked in the report is “Why Did We Start Thinking About Games?” Seems like a given but here’s their answer…

The 1997 National Research Council report entitled ‘Modeling and Simulation - Linking Entertainment and Defense’ (Zyda & Sheehan, 1997) states that games and interactive entertainment–not defense research expenditures–have become the main drivers for networked virtual environments. To keep up with developments in modeling and simulation, that report indicated, DoD ought to examine networked entertainment for ideas, technologies and capabilities. We thought a lot about this insight when forming the MOVES Institute as a center for research in modeling, virtual environments, and simulation, and game-based simulation became a focus.

The paper goes on to discuss what individuals are going to make up the working body of the team that develop the games. People with formal education aren’t of particular interest. What’s desired are individuals with good demo reels whether they be personal, for companies or from schools. It’s remarked upon that they will be young people, the executive producer and creative director being perhaps 30 years of age.

We will have to ensure that the games people and training people get along. Put military officers in charge of the project, and we have an extra dimension of fun and understanding. One group shows up at 11 am in t-shirts and flip-flops. The other group comes in at 6 am in uniform–but leaves at 5 pm, while the gamers toil till midnight. This makes for a prickly cultural interface and requires patience and understanding…

As a training simulator, AA is a first-person shooter (FPS) game, in which play is real time and the the player’s point-of-view is through the eyes of his character. The goal of the developers was to create a game that had the appeal of “Counterstrike”, but which had a heavy emphasis on realism, “Army values and training”.

They hired three game-industry veterans as team leaders.

The first version, released July 4 2002, was a “runaway success” and a number of players “flocked” to the game. America’s Army was downloaded 500,000 times the first weekend. The Army’s servers were overwhelmed. People were having to wait days to play. When the game was introduced, one had to complete a sort of on-line basic training. The game used an authentication server that validated players’ having completed this training before allowing them into the game server, these single-player training courses being rifle-range, obstacle, weapons-familiarization and tactical. When those courses were finished, then, going on-line, one participated in a multi-player training exercise before being introduced to the additional scenarios. “Until a user had played on-line and was part of a winning team in the MOUT McKenna training level, he could not proceed to other missions.” But this caused a problem and finally this on-line-training requirement was changed so that only completion of the single-player levels was necessary.

On August 1, 2002, version 1.1.1 was released, the “Marksmanship pack”.

This release added the Army’s sniper schools and the M24 and M82 rifle positions to the game, features originally scheduled for the initial July 4th release, but fallen behind schedule. Eligibility to play the marksmanship levels was based on scores from the original rifle-range training level. A player who shot 36 out of 40 targets in the final test could try to qualify as a sniper. Only those players who passed the marksmanship training levels could take a sniper position in on-line play…AA opened the sniper role only after other team positions were filled, meaning there were only a few sniper positions available at any time. Virtual fratricide broke out as people killed team members just to steal their sniper rifles…

When visiting America’s Army on-line game I noticed the remark in a featured “blog” (not a blog at all, instead a featured testimonial), supposedly made by a veteran who played the game, that the game should be played as a team. And above apparently paints a reason for this remark.

With the release of 1.1.1, the MOUT McKenna on-line-training requirement done away with, there was a player revolt against this among those who saw the training as a badge of honor. But it was deemed as essential in order to free up bandwidth.

The army at this point added a MILES-equipped grenade to the missions, MILES being a laser-tag system used in training, and the game thus also became a simulation of a simulation, a number of the AA missions based on MILES scenarios.

With the release of 1.2.0, airborne and ranger schools were introduced.

While the airborne school came with two training levels that depicted an abridged version of the Army’s actual training…we discovered that a realistic grenade (in a game) does not necessarily equal a fun experience…

No doubt. So modifications were employed such as players being made aware of when a grenade had been tossed by a particular sound.

By the release of Version 1.5.0 in December of 2002, there had been some legal problems caused by “a Miami attorney on a crusade against violence in video games…the development team was required to make several modifications to counter the negative press generated by this man…” for which reason the word “sniper” was removed from the game, and parental controls were added so parents could monitor language, weapon usage, mission types and limit displays of blood.

The ability was added to let you know when an active member of the U.S. Army was playing the game, strengthening “camaraderie between military and civilian players”.

In a later release, a distinctive patriotic theme song was added to open the game.

A combat medic training sequence was introduced, involving three classroom lectures and a field-training exercise. A new damage model was introduced that changed the earlier scenario where, say, bullets striking a player meant suffering a percentage of damage “while the remaining portion was doled out over time in the form of blood loss.” Now a medic could treat a player and remaining damage would be avoided.

The 2.0.0. release in 2003 added the Special Forces and the Indigenous Forces roles. If one didn’t pass SF training to play in the new missions, one could play them as an indigenous soldier, which “reinforced the point that a major duty of SF units is to train and fight alongside indigenous forces in foreign countries.”

The paper notes a number of other changes and things like weapons additions to the game, and is a good outline of the course taken in introducing the general public to army training simulation camouflaged as a game. This general public–remember–acknowledged as being teens who will likely be playing 60 hours a week, entirely immersed to the point of forgetting to eat.

Not only are older teens targeted, but their younger siblings as well, who would be introduced to the game through their older brothers and sisters and grow up with an acquaintance and acceptance of it.

The paper by Michael Zyder mentions that America’s Army Version 2.0 was the last release developed by the MOVES Institute, the Army choosing to take over development in March of 2004.

How do you get the web development community to play nice with the Army and not end up feeling that their art form is being intruded on by the military? The paper says they picked and supported the best team they could find, supplying video-games for them to play, sofas for them to rest on, an open and dimly lit area to work in so that no one was isolated and everyone was thus aware of the game as a “whole”, gave them an industrial canteen, a secretary so they didn’t have to be involved in any administrative work, “and shielded them from direct contact with with the client. Result: they stuck together and worked like madmen.”

With no ethical concerns apparently about what they were creating.

Just a game.

Acknowledgments stated the development team was pictured in the 2004 Erba Buena guide, Michael Capps being original executive producer, John Falby doing all contracting, hiring, purchasing, and Rosemary Minns who as team mom kept administration away from the development team and “guaranteed the flow of sugar snacks so necessary for the game’s proper development.”

Nothing about the ethics of these video game developers working on military propaganda targeting youth and blurring the lines of entertainment and war, supposedly training them in their homes for real life military.

Except that no one can really be trained for real life war, can they?

Bringing the War Home: The New Military-Industrial-Entertainment Complex at War and Play, by Nick Turse, lists Epic Games, NVIDIA, the THX Division of Lucasfilm, Dolby Laboratories, Lucasfilm Skywalker Sound, HomeLAN and GameSpy Industries as all having participated in the development of America’s Army.

As I figure it, so much for George Lucas raining all over Iraq’s parade in a May 2005 interview.

”In terms of evil, one of the original concepts was how does a democracy turn itself into a dictatorship,” Lucas told a news conference at Cannes, where his final episode had its world premiere.

”The parallels between what we did in Vietnam and what we’re doing in Iraq now are unbelievable. “

Lucasfilm knew what it was doing when it hopped on the target-teen militiatainment band wagon. The THX Division of Lucasfilm LTD is also listed as a “partner” up at the America’s Army website. And Lucas is ragging on Iraq??

Lucas is too old to qualify for Operation Yellow Elephant, but individuals employed by his company ought to think several times over about what they’re doing. And Lucas, well, seems to me he’s not got much of a right to come down on America in Iraq and at the same time be making money off partnering with the military to produce military recruitment propaganda to teens.

If you’re against the war, partnering and making money off sending kids to fight in it seems a mite hypocritical.

The above picture of a frozen lake of water on Mars was taken by the High Resolution Stereo Camera (HRSC) on board ESA’s Mars Express spacecraft. The story is here. I tell H.o.p. about it and he goes, “Wow!!!!!!!” and we get rather excited.

I’ve just finished showing H.o.p. a few more Photoshop tricks after my illustrating for him tales from Unscrewing the Inscrutable, science for the layman, on what the skies looked like billions of years ago and the cyanos and what not. The Billions Years War. Nicely related. But I ended up needing to rephrase quite a bit and speaking in terms of balance because H.o.p. started to get the wrong idea of greens and the reds, thinking in terms of good and bad and getting confused by that. “Are they evil?” “No, no, they’re not evil!” And so I did some mighty rephrasing. We covered a few paragraphs, my painting in Photoshop the story while I told it to him, and that was that and then he wanted me to teach him some more filters I’d used and now that he’s off stapling pages together to make another one of his books, drawing, I’m going to borrow back my new metal art mousepad that I gave him this morning and get back to the work that’s waiting for me. The new metal art mousepad really is nice, makes things a little bit easier. One of these days I’ll get myself a Wacom tablet. One of these days…

More here. (I took Tattered Coat’s Katherine Harris challenge.)

I have been delinquent on posting this. Another benefit for the red oak tree is this Sunday, August 7, 5 to 10 pm. Laughingwolf.com has all the information here plus some pics from the last benefit that was rained out by Dennis the Menace. It’s my husband’s 50th birthday party and he thought it would be a good opportunity to coerce some friends into dropping a few dollars in the “Love your cool canopy” box for the tree.

Heretik notes that GSAVE, the Global Struggle Against Violent Extremism, is the New Coke and that the War On Terror is back by popular demand or Bush’s demand, which is the new popular demand.

I’d previously written that GSAVE wasn’t snappy enough. 13 syllables or 12, depending on if you split the “-is” from the “-m” in “-ism”. War Against Terror is 5 syllables. War On Terror is an even better 4. As none have good acronyms (GSAVE, WAT, WOT) then it’s best to go short form, emphatic. Plus it wouldn’t have done for Bush to go on vacation at a time when America was reeling from the news that the good fight had been downgraded to a struggle.

Bush’s speech to the American Legislative Exchange Council in Grapevine, Texas was a definitive, “Make no mistake about it, this is a war against people who profess an ideology, and they use terror as a means to achieve their objectives.”

War Against People Who Profess an Ideology is also too long. 14 syllables. I suspect, however, Bush may have argued perhaps two minutes for this phrase at some point, which is why he drug it out here. He may have been gently told that clarifiers were needed on the ideology.

Not Bush: It can’t be a war against terror. The enemy isn’t terrorism, it’s the people who use terrorism to achieve their goals.

Bush: Why can’t the war be against terrorism?

Not Bush: If we say war then people expect the military to be the winning solution, they expect a cut-and-dried victory.

Bush: I don’t see anything wrong with that.

Not Bush: We can’t give it to them.

Bush: So?

Not Bush: So, we need to call it a struggle. Struggles are indefinite, even perpetual. A struggle is a state of being.

Bush: Ok, how about the Global Struggle Against Terrorism?

Not Bush: It can’t be a struggle against terror because terror is the method. The enemies are violent extremists who profess an ideology in which terror is viewed as a viable weapon.

Bush: Haha! Good one. You even had me almost convinced there.

Not Bush: Off topic. We need you to concentrate.

Bush: How about Global Struggle Against People Who Profess an Ideology?

Not Bush (after a pause): Too indefinite.

Bush: You’re right. Like you said, struggles are indefinite. Wimpy. How about War Against People Who Profess an Ideology?

Not Bush (after a pause): No.

Bush: How about, We’re At War! ( Which really is the official phrase. “We’re at War!” Bush repeated it numerous times during his speech. We’re at war with. We’re at war against. Make no mistake, we’re at war.)

So it was decided to give Bush back his War On Terror.

And Bush could go on vacation while the nation Waged Peace in a strong, powerful, not struggling kind of way.