The Joys of Holy Matrimony (Virtual Weaning Division)

SEOUL, Korea, March 5 - After nearly six months on the run, a Korean couple was arrested last week for allowing their child to die of malnutrition even as they raised a virtual child in an online game, the Associated Press reported on March 5. 
   Kim Yoo-chul, forty-one, and Choi Mi-Sun, twenty-five, became unreasonably mesmerized by an online game known as Prius. (This is not to be confused with the automobile of the same name, which, although it saves on gas money and protects the environment, has been shown to have a questionable braking system, and therefore tends to smash into things with alarming regularity.)
   The AP wrote: "The pair were obsessed with raising their internet child, called Anima, resulting in the neglect of their unnamed real daughter." 
   A Korean police officer told the local press that the couple, jobless and dispirited over having given birth to the baby prematurely, only fed the child - the barely living, barely breathing one, that is - when not at an Inter-nets cafe engaging in twelve-hour online gaming sessions. 
   "Online game addiction can blur the line between reality and the virtual world," Professor Kwak Dae-kyung, of Dongguk University, in Seoul, told the local press, and one is hard-pressed not to believe him: after all, as they say, if it waddles, swims and Kwaks like a Dae-kyung, then it probably is a Dae-kyung.
   Child-rearing is a blessed past-time, and is just one of the many delights of holy matrimony, an institution in which some heterosexuals have so little confidence that they feel the need to legislatively protect it. 
   Gays and lesbians eager to tie the knot ought to take note. 

Queer Notes From all Over (Equal Rights for All Excepting Bisexuals, But They Don't Count Division)

RICHMOND, Virginia, March 11 - The governor of the great state of Virginia has shown that, when it comes to equal rights for gays, lesbians and transgendered people, he is, well, all for equal rights for gays, lesbians and transgendered people. 
   There was no mention made of bisexuals, who, as usual, got the short end of the stick, but who, being attracted to persons of both genders, have twice the chance of getting a date on Saturday night, according to filmmaker and former comic Woody Allen, who made that joke, like, seven hundred years ago.
   Gov. Bob McDonnell yesterday directed state agencies of all sizes, stripes and orientations not to discriminate against gays and lesbians, the Associated Press reported today. 
   State Attorney General Kenneth Cuccinelli, who, not that this matters, is a Republican, sent a letter last week to state colleges saying they lack authority to prohibit discrimination based on sexual orientation, and ordered them to rescind any anti-discrimination that include protections for gays and lesbians. 
   It is admirable that Atty. Gen. Cuccinelli sent a letter. Letter-writing is, alas, a lost art, what with emails, texting, Twitter and the general decline of literacy in America, not to mention the fact that the U.S. postal service is considering stopping Saturday service as a cost-cutting measure. 
   That said, it is the content of the letter with which we must concern ourselves, and that content is, in a word, stupid. 
   Apparently, Gov. McDonnell agreed, in essence if not in word, and that is why he issued his directive. His directive trumped that of the Atty. Gen., because he - the Gov. - has much more power. 
   Before the Gov.'s directive reached far and wide into the psyches of Virginians everywhere, the Atty. Gen.'s letter had occasioned no little amount of agitation among, predictably, gay rights groups and, predictably, Democrats. 
   College students - who, by dint of their youth, vitality and idealism, are the Hope for the Future - rallied, but in a very modern, by which one means troublingly virtual, way. 
   The Washington Post, quoted in the Associated Press report, which was run on the Huffington Post news site - one apologizes, but one is simply too tired, at the moment, to track down original sources - reported that 3,000 people joined a Facebook page titled, "WE DON'T WANT DISCRIMINATION IN OUR STATE UNIVERSITIES AND COLLEGES!" 
   While that sentiment is to be applauded, the use of all capital letters and an exclamation point is not. 
   The Post further reported, according to the AP by way of the Huffington Post, that one protest was organized by a group at William and Mary College, in Williamsburg, Va., the second oldest college in America, the motto of which is: "We're different, and we like it that way."
   The group, called Queer & Allied Activism, launched a social media campaign, the Post wrote, "urging students to protest on Cuccinelli's Facebook and Twitter pages, and to sign a petition organized by the group Equality Virginia." 
   The group's acronym - QAA - has no meaning, and therefore cannot be called, even by a stretch, clever, but its use of an ampersand is alluring. 
   One certainly applauds the students' efforts, but one is alarmed to hear that students are now protesting from the safety of their laptops while, perhaps, sitting around their dorms or frat houses in their pajamas. One is all for lounging in sleepwear, but one also remembers the days when students actually ventured out of doors to protest injustices. 
   Alas, it is a new day. The thought occurs that maybe the weather was bad. Protesting in the snow, while offering the opportunities, during dull moments, to create snowmen, or even snow penises, can be trying.           
   But recent weather reports, you see, say temperatures have been in the high fifties and low sixties. 
   That's practically balmy for Virginia winters, or seems like it should be. One doesn't know; one has never been to Virginia in the winter or even in the spring, summer or fall, if memory serves, which it generally does not. 
                       --30--

Chatroullete - The End of Days

   First of All is, in essence, fairly modern.

   Well, no, we are not. But we have our moments. Occasionally we dip into the slipstream of current technology to see what's what. (We have an iPhone. Does that count?) Of course, the gadgets rarely work: we are surrounded by an invisible force field which breaks all things tech/mechanical. But, well, one tries.  

   And so it was that, Friday night last, we decided to check out Chatroulette, the latest in alleged social networking sites.

   Chatroulette, it turns out, is the spawn of the Devil.

   Here’s how it works. When you arrive at the site, a window pops up. The large blank part in the center is for instant messaging. To the left of that, two black boxes sit one atop the other. You click a button marked "New Game” and enable your computer’s camera. Voila: the bottom box is now a screen all lit up with your pretty face. 

   Presently – it may only take a second – a person appears in the top screen. This is your "partner" for the moment. He (or she) is looking at his screen, where you’re appearing. If he doesn't like your looks, he clicks the "Next" button to delete you. Or you delete him (her). Eventually, someone else appears. 

   Most of the people we saw sat at computers. Some were solo, others in pairs, still others in groups. The majority were in their teens and twenties. (The site requires users to be sixteen, but evidences no apparent way of checking ages.)

   A red-headed young man was the first to appear on our screen. We began an instant-message conversation with him. We mentioned that we were new to Chatroulette, and asked how it worked. We suppose we were trying to figure out the site's social mores. 

   Dumb us. Social mores. Ha ha. He wrote back a sentence or two – and then disappeared. Someone replaced him. That person vanished. A third. Same thing. This repeated itself over and over. The speed with which people appeared and disappeared was dizzying. One felt like a human pinball, but without the joys of the game. 

   Now, one is of a certain age. (Fifty-three.) A young Chatrouletter seeing a fiftyish person on his or her screen is bound to move on: they’re likely much more interested in peer conversations, and understandably so. Our experience, then, may not have been representative. (By way of social experiment, next time we’ll have a cute friend in his early twenties be the screen presence. We'll see if people stick around for him.) 

   We settled, instead, into the role of anthropologist. It didn't take long to get that Chatroulette is not just for chat. Apologies to those with delicate sensibilities, but the truth must out. My "partner" screen variously filled with the torso of an unclothed man who was holding his erect, er, member; a close-up of another swelled member; and a leering, naked middle-aged man in flagrante delicto with a woman. 

   So Chatroulette exists in part (primarily? We don't know) so people can hook up and/or engage in webcam sex. More broadly, however, it offers people the opportunity to communicate with strangers in far parts of the known galaxy. 

   But what kind of communication? It's hard to say. Chatroulette creates a venue for fast-food relationships that aren’t even relationships. It's a social networking site about which there is nothing social. Even if a connection is established - a webcam conversation, an instant-message exchange - it, too, is tenuous: when one tires of one’s new companion, one simply moves on (or they do). 

   This, of course, absolves people of exhibiting the kind of courtesy that greases (that at one time greased?) the skids of daily human interaction. There’s nary a good-bye nor a thank-you before one is deleted (or deletes). It's brutal, cold, sad.

    Indeed, we found Chatroulette's implications for human interaction dispiriting beyond belief. It’s the ultimate in throw-away culture, but what's being thrown away isn't a material object. It's a person.

   The future is now, and it sucks. 


   (If you want to go mad, visit Chatroulette and see for yourself. I'd be happy to hear about your experiences. Indeed, with your permission I'll post them. Anonymously, of course.)