Come on. Really. Are we seriously talking about this? Are we seriously having a nationwide spasm of moral indignation because a game known for its extreme violence and gritty content has a secret sex scene embedded somewhere within it? (Thanks to the media, millions of American kids now know about this feature, and most of them probably wouldn't have discovered it on their own. Congratulations, Hillary!) Speaking of which, doesn't Hillary Clinton have any real issues to tackle, like, say, poverty or something? I'd call her gesture quixotic, but that implies a certain nobility of purpose, and I'm pretty sure there's no nobility whatsoever driving this pandering effort to garner votes from more conservative types. Has she even stopped to think about what this sort of crusade will mean for the youth vote, which would otherwise be more likely than any other age group to lean her way in a presidential bid? I used to like Hillary Clinton a lot. I used to defend her when people made nasty remarks about her behavior while first lady. But now I'm just disappointed, because her desire to be seen espousing 'family values' has seemingly triumphed over her personal ethics. This moral posturing does not make her worse than other politicians, I know. It just means that she belongs in their ranks more than I ever realized before. Alas and alack.

Okay, enough about Hillary. I'm still baffled by the outrage over Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. This game was already labeled "M," meaning it was only intended for those 17 and older. No one younger than that should have been buying the game. So how did all these young kids end up with it? A whole lot of parents must have been purchasing this for their kids, and it occurs to me that maybe they should have paid better attention to the content labeling system instead of blindly carte blanche-ing whatever their moody teenagers happened to toss in the shopping basket. Another point of interest: in order to view the game's sex scene, you have to download a particular mod. I would imagine any kid who is smart enough to download this mod is also smart enough to know how to find (gasp!) real pornography on "the Internets," and not the silly cartoonish stuff found in GTA. After all, the sex scene in GTA is not hardcore. No genitalia are exposed. I'm guessing it's more of a Shannon-Tweed-on-Skinemax kind of thing.

I haven't played the San Andreas version, but I have played the original GTA. It was fun to drive around and try to get away from the cops, but ultimately it couldn't hold my interest. (You have to do all these missions, and that detracted from the basic Pole Position appeal for me. I have undiagnosed ADHD, you see.) Other than driving, there wasn't much to do but treat your character to a lap dance, so I gave it a try. I have to tell you, it looks pretty ridiculous. The cartoon stripper writhes mechanically around you and sometimes her leg disappears because of a display bug. It's kind of like getting a lap dance from Robocop (or worse, from a hologram of Robocop). At any rate, with this unintentional bit of comedy as my reference point, it's hard for me to imagine that the famous San Andreas sex scene is anything but hilarious. It's probably about as hot as Marty Feldman at the South Pole. But I guess that's beside the point, isn't it? The point is, somehow we've decided as a culture that the violence contained in the rest of the game (e.g., running people over, random shooting sprees) is just dandy, while a low-grade pixellated depiction of sex is the moral equivalent of drowning a kitten. As I see it, this weird, hypocritical denunciation of GTA is just one more symptom of our society's larger problem in dealing with sex issues.

In the interest of resolving some of these issues, I've set up an appointment for America to meet with a therapist. Would Thursday at 3:30 work for everyone?

Tags: politics, popculture