Too Angry?

It’s been pretty interesting watching the media handle Howard Dean. First there was a rush to anoint him as the nominee. They couldn’t say enough about his unorthodox fundraising and how he dared to take Bush to task for the war and other issues. Then right after the military caught Saddam the tone changed. All of the sudden there was a spate of stories about Dean, questioning whether he was the guy for the Democrats or not. These stories were all the same, posing the question, “Is Dean too angry to win the presidency?”

Apparently the idea that enough people in the country might actually be angry with what the current administration has done over the past three years is a ludicrous. All these articles predict that if Dean gets the nod that it could spell doom for the Dems. His anger, you see, will drive away all those middle-of-the-road types. Ah, yes, and the Democrats have enjoyed sooooo much success cozying to the right. Surely the path to victory is to be only slightly left of Rumsfeld and his ilk.

I’ve got news for them: they’ll never defeat the Republicans by being just like them. If they had any balls, they would embrace the idea of being an actual party of opposition. I don’t want some chucklehead telling me that he too is for tax cuts for the rich and that he too supports the war despite its bogus pretexts. Fuck that. I want the guy who will stand up and call the Bush Administration on their lies and take them to account for the horrendous damage they’ve done to this country since 2000.

I swear, 9-11 was the biggest gift Osama could have possible given Bush and Rummy. Brand new American martyrs and a golden excuse to drape the president in the flag and use people’s fear of terrorism to go hog wild with their hideous agenda.

So yeah, give me the angry guy. Give me the guy who might actually rouse some people out of their apathy. There are a lot of disenfranchised lefties out there and no mainstream politician has made an attempt to get those votes in recent memory. Maybe getting angry is just what this country needs.

And for the record, it remains to be seen if Dean is that guy.

4 thoughts on “Too Angry?

  1. It’s interesting to read this post, nearly a decade and a half later.

    ‘There are a lot of disenfranchised lefties out there and no mainstream politician has made an attempt to get those votes in recent memory.’

    Speaking from the dark timeline that is post 2016 America, that changed, this time around, but the presumptive Democratic nominee is the most milquetoast centrist imaginable.

    Anyway, I found this post when I searched “In Nomine” on your website. I was hoping to ask your thoughts about an old adventure you wrote /way/ back in 1997: “No Dinero” for an In Nomine supplement, Heaven and Hell.

  2. Awesome!

    I’m writing an essay about the depictions of race and racial tensions in table RPGs.

    “No Dinero” was the first RPG scenario that I encountered that made special mention of racial tensions as a key plot point, was where I learned the term gentrification. The Revelations cycle that “No Dinero” was a part of also prominently featured Islamist terrorist groups as a major plot feature… before 9/11.

    Two lines in “No Dinero” that really got my attention, even when I was reading at age 15, was one of the minor story beats that if the player characters were vessels (bodies) that were identifiable as Caucasian, they would stick out in the predominately minority neighborhood. I’m was (and am) white, my group was universally white and male. We had picked white male vessels for our characters because it had never occurred to us to do otherwise.

    The other storybeat was that several key human NPCs in the adventure had little interest in the War, except as it furthered the interests of the community they were invested in; the ultimate battle between good and simply not as pressing as the need to make sure the rent was paid and food was on the table.

    That looking at the adventure, the presence white bodied interlopers, entities that were convinced that they knew what what was in the best interest of the community casts an interesting parallel between the War and race relations in America Add to that the metanarrative of demographics in the RPG hobby meant that predominantly white players would instinctively cast themselves as these interlopers.

    So my questions are:

    1. How much of that was intentional?

    2. Where there experiences (that you feel comfortable sharing) that you drew upon writing that adventure?

    3. Have you seen any general developments in how race/racism is handled in RPGs in the two and a half decades since?

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