"Humor! What a concept!"

I doubt if I have purchased two copies of Mad Magazine in my whole life. Maybe none. Oh, I read quite a few, often when there was a copy in the Charge of Quarters of Staff Duty NCO desk, but bought? Maybe, just maybe, the one they did 30+ years ago about "What if the US Military Went Union?" (Air Force Pilot: "Who's that guy leaning against the nose wheel of my F15 reading Mad Magazine?" Crew Chief: "He's the guy who holds the propeller and yells 'Contact!'")

And I don't recall ever even reading Mad's imitation, Cracked.

So I was surprised to see Blackfive post a link that turned out to go to Cracked magazine's blog.

I was even more surprised when it turned out to be a pretty cogent satire on media criticism of the War on terror/The Iraq War, disguised as "Why don't War Simulations imitate real life?"

The Ultimate War Simulation Game
By David Wong

Like my Grandpa always said, there were no naked human pyramids in Starcraft.

There were no whiny anti-war Hollywood types or questionable war motives or granola-munching protesters. I'm starting to think that even World in Conflict, a real time strategy game so "realistic" it takes a NASA-built Quantum supercomputer to run it, has left me woefully unprepared to fight an actual war.

Well, below is my open letter to the real time strategy gaming cartel. I want a war simulation. A real one. I don't want little cartoon tanks jostling around in a video sandbox chewing down each other's health meters, while a preteen opponent insults my sexuality using every key on his keyboard except the ones with letters. I want an RTS game that will give me a stress headache after an hour and an ulcer after a week. I want to identify experienced players on the street by their 1,000-yard stares.

I want a war sim ...

1. ... where I spend two hours pushing across a map to destroy a "nuclear missile silo," only to find out after the fact that it was just a missile-themed orphanage.
I want little celebrities to show up on the scene and do interviews over video of charred teddy bears, decrying my unilateral attack. I want congressional hearings demanding answers to these atrocities.

2. On the very next level I want to lose half of my units because another "orphanage" turned out to be an enemy ambush site. I want another round of hearings asking why I didn't level that orphanage as soon as I saw it, including tearful testimony from a slain soldier's daughter who is now, ironically, an orphan.
...
6. Speaking of innocents, I want a war sim where native townsfolk stand shoulder-to-shoulder on every inch of the map and not a single bomb can be dropped without blowing 200 of them into chunks. Forget about the abandoned building wallpaper in games like the Red Alert series. I want to have to choose between sending marines door-to-door to be killed in the streets or leveling the block from afar, Nuns and all. I want to have to choose between 40 dead troops or 400 dead children, and be damned to hell by chubby pundits from the safety of their studios regardless of which way I go.

7. I want my Mission Objectives to change every 30 seconds, without anyone letting me know. I want little talking heads to pop up on my screen--commanders, politicians, allies, military intelligence--each giving me different sets of victory parameters, all of them conflicting and many of them written in bullshit ass-covering doublespeak.


13. I want factions. Not a simple aliens vs. humans or Russians vs. Americans war orgy. I want to share the map with powerful forces who are not friend or foe or anything else, a news media, private corporations, asshole allies and friendly enemies, everyone jockeying for their own interests and me unable to bend over at any moment without turning my codpiece around first. I want a France.

14. I want fat, left-wing documentarians carefully editing only the most incriminating footage, countered only by low-IQ country music singers crooning my praises while in American flag-colored cowboy hats.

And so forth. (And, for the record, the "low-IQ country music singers" thing was a cheap shot that I do not agree with.)

I'm not saying I think that everything has been done right in the GWOT, including calling it that.

I'm just saying that some of the crap I hear people whining about is dumb. In many cases, worse than dumb, in the cases of congress critters shooting off their pie holes, it's often criminally negligent. If you wanted the troops to have better equipment, shouldn't you have appropriated funds for it? (And who cares what the opinion of a state senator was at the time?)

So now I read where a bunch of Congressional Staffers are signing up to "test fire alternatives to the M4 Carbine." I want to see what the qualification are of any aide involved in this to be able to actually render any opinion of an alternative to the M4 carbine, aside from working for a congress critter who happens to represent the district where FN Herstal or Sig-Sauer happen to be located.

Now I've gotten myself all wound up; I better end this before I break another keyboard...