Poetic IronYee

Senator Leland Yee carved out a niche for himself as one of the nation’s leading legislative opponents of violent video games. It was a useful cause for him throughout his career. His original base of support was among first- and second-generation Chinese-Americans in San Francisco and its suburbs, very concerned with their children’s futures and distrustful of the larger popular culture’s chaotic and hedonistic sides. As he worked to make a California-wide name for himself, building up to a run for Secretary of State, it fit well with both nanny-state liberalism and social conservatism, one of the few trans-party issues an American politician can find these days.       

       It’s also an issue with no strong opposition. The game community has never been able to mount an effective, broad-scale defense of its more violent products. Partly that’s because its corporate leaders and legal representatives chose early on to stick with a defensive position reminiscent of Big Tobacco in its “cigarettes don’t cause cancer” days, insisting that video games never have any effect of any kind on anyone’s behavior; it’s a position that’s worked well enough in court over the years, but it prevents them from making any plausible claims about the positive effects of games and makes it essentially impossible for them to function as members of a larger society, collaborating on discussions of social, psychological, and moral issues. I think it’s partly a cultural issue, too: the traits that lead people to become passionate gamers (like, say, a love of mastering systems of invariant rules in order to achieve clear-cut victories) are not the traits that lead people into political activity, which is always about distasteful compromise and partial success. 
       Whatever the reason, video games are one of those things—like pornography and gambling for most of their histories, like distilling liquor at the end of World War I—that are hated by a minority and enjoyed by a majority but produce hardly any political champions willing to fight for them publicly. Which makes them a fine tool for ambitious politicians with a talent for on-camera moral earnestness but little to offer in terms of the nuts and bolts of governance.
       Yee was also a loud advocate of gun control. That’s a position with a very strong political opposition, but it’s also a fairly safe one for a California Democrat, and it worked well with his anti-video-game bills to enhance his image as a protector of children and families.
       I’m using the past tense, of course, because Senator Yee was recently arrested by the FBI for conspiring to sell illegal weapons across international borders. More specifically, for conspiring with Chinese gangsters and New Jersey mafiosi, whom he knew to be murderers and drug dealers, to sell billions of dollars worth of machine guns and portable rocket launchers to Muslim guerrillas in North Africa and the Philippines.
       Which, really, is about as vile as an act of official corruption is likely to get. Almost worthy of the villain in a video game.    
       Now, I do want to honor the sacred American journalistic tradition of pretending to think that the accused might be innocent until a jury pronounces him guilty. And I do want to add that the transaction never actually took place, that the New Jersey mafiosi were in fact undercover FBI agents, and that the whole deal was concocted as part of a sting. But you know that the FBI doesn’t go arresting prominent elected officials unless it has a very strong case. And Yee’s connections to the Chinatown mobs and willingness to do anything for campaign contributions are known from other sources. I could add “allegedly” to several of the following sentences, but it would feel disingenuous.
       One of the more illuminating moments in the very long FBI complaint comes when Yee tells his new Mafia friend, “I’m a gun-lover,” and says he wishes he could live the life of the gangster. I’m not offended that a public official’s private values are very different from his public positions; the idea that a legislator should vote from his own heart of hearts rather than from what his constituents want runs counter to the whole idea of representative democracy. Nor am I personally appalled that someone loves guns or envies criminals. Love and fantasy are complex matters, and I’m not sure any of us can be pure in heart without a great deal of repression. 
       But I am struck by what appears to be another case of something that I’ve seen over and over again in writing about the cultural histories of media and violence. In condemning something, we amplify its glamor. In demonizing any aspect of the human imagination, we give it more power in our own minds. It’s often the moral watchdog who becomes more pruriently obsessed with the very taboo he’s watching against.
       I’m hesitant to make too much of this psychologizing. This could all be simple political cynicism on Yee’s part: tell parents whose votes he’s courting and the thug he’s trying to cut a deal with that he shares their values, whatever they may happen to be. Indeed, the one character trait that emerges from every story about Yee is that he was so consumed by a passion to advance politically that he would do just about anything for votes and campaign cash.
       Still, I do think there’s a larger truth revealed here, whatever the individual circumstances may be. We are a nation in which guns, money, and power are infernally interwoven. We are also a culture shot through with a fascination for violence. Even when we abhor it in reality and work to eliminate it from daily life, it holds a place in our art and imagination that it won’t surrender easily; in fact, the harder we try to eliminate from reality, the more powerful it can become in fantasy. 
       And we are a species that has never once, anywhere, been able to will away our own animal nature—not through indoctrination, education, or legislation. The more we try to make ourselves believe that our own violence is something simple and removable, the more perversely ironic will be its reminders that it is anything but.