The Constitution of the United States of America has been sorely troubled over the last eight years of the Bush administration. Hopefully, but not yet fully clearly, the Obama-led team will play more honestly with the American people, and the world. It would be nice to hear, for example, that the
harsh interrogation techniques used on detainees are not only being stopped but are also going to be investigated for potential indictments against those that ordered them, allowed them, and administered them in contravention of international law against torture.
Bush makes his first trip out of the US in March 2009. It is a soft trip in that it is unlikely that the Royal Canadian Mounted Police will arrest him on landing in Alberta, Canada, but woe betide him if he decides to go further afoot at some time to a country like The Netherlands. It is extremely likely that there are countries out there who have in-camera indictments already filed against Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and others.
And while a return to Constitutional law will be nice, you also have to wonder why it can also be such an ass (
Oliver Twist: - Mr. Brownlow: “The law assumes that your wife acts under your direction.” Mr. Bumble: “If the law supposes that, then the law is a ass, a idiot! If that's the eye of the law, then the law is a bachelor.”). The
First Amendment gives citizens rights in freedom of religion, freedom of expression, freedom to gather lawfully, etc. It also, tacitly, gives the government rights to break up gatherings held for unlawful purposes. What it does not give, in this electronic era the Founders could never surely have foreseen, is control over game content.
The Duchess is a great movie full of pageant, romance, cruelty, revenge: an unflinching vignette of a society that was so full of its own position and so totally ignorant of the remainder of the world; where servants were invisible, where wives were owned – and less well regarded, one gathers, than one’s dogs. In one scene in the movie the Duchess forgets who is the boss and the Duke chases her furiously through their London home and rapes her.
Marital rape is, hopefully, no longer that kind of problem in the UK, but it still remains a serious problem in Southern African nations and in male-dominated societies like Korea, Japan, and Malaysia (where it is still not a criminal offense). In a landmark decision in January 2009 a court in South Korea finally
convicted a man of marital rape, and even then, although this was a rape at the point of a knife, the court suspended his jail sentence because the man expressed remorse. He was, shortly after,
found dead in his house, an apparent suicide.
Japan is a country with a strange culture, mostly inherited from China and changed for its own identity. It is okay to be drunk in public; it is okay for a man to drop off for some fun on the way home from the office; being fondled by a stranger is something that happens to women on public transport; it’s acceptable to look at girlie magazines in public.
And, of course, that porn culture,
hentai, together with violence, is widespread in video games. But the unspeakable ultimate was surely reached recently. The Belfast
Telegraph – the dominant newspaper in Northern Ireland – investigated a game that was being offered by a third-party seller on Amazon in the US.
The game, called RapeLay, is
described by Giant Bomb thusly: “RapeLay is a 3D rape simulator by Illusion Soft, makers of the Artificial Girl series. The player takes the role of a rapist who stalks a mother of two named Yuuko Kiryuu for a while and eventually rapes her. Once he is 'done' with the mother, the rapist gets his hands on Yuuko's two daughters, Aoi and Manaka.”
After all that (which started with groping on a train) the game player can go into a free-form mode and choose other victims to rape, invite other players to share, force abortions, throw victims under trains…
Not surprisingly, the game was intended for the Japanese market only and the games being offered on Amazon were “slightly used.” An unfortunate descriptor in the circumstances.
Amazon
pulled the page immediately upon being told about it. But what kind of sick mind puts this kind of stuff together in the first place? And in a country where genitalia have to be censored, in this case pixelated, by law?
Sometimes, it seems, not
only the law is an ass.
