The first politician I ever hated and the first non-Presidential political figure I ever knew the name of where one and the same person. Joe Lieberman was that man, and he is now dead. No matter how far back in time I go looking for an image, he did always look like the Crypt Keeper. As Lovecraft put it, ‘That which is not dead which can eternal lie, and with strange aeons, even death may die.’

What Tipper Gore was to music, the evangelicals to role playing games or sexuality, or Adam Schiff to national security, Joe Lieberman was that for gaming. When I was a middle school kid who just wanted to frag to take the edge off my increasingly hormonal and frustrating existence this guy would always show up in the news to create some moral panic and have all the adults freak out about a form of entertainment and, yes, art, that made life a little more fun. Despite the fact that movies and board games had failed to make humankind more violent, Lieberman just needed some tail-end Satanic Panic energy to set him apart from the pack. This would go on to become his brand and one of the centerpieces of his career. Of course his real lasting legacy would be to become immortalized in Postal 2.

Lieberman would continue on to become an internet censorship advocate and a voracious neoconservative ideologue along with his BFF John McCain. His path down the hating on gaming to chickenhawk war advocacy pipeline would soon be followed by Hillary Clinton. It seriously begs the question at the societal level, why do so many warmongers fear depictions of fictional violence? Why is the view of the dangers of make-believe so existential and hyperbolic for the same people who spare no thought to the very real world consequences of military interventionism, sanctions, and escalation? I don’t have the answer to this question, but I feel like it is an issue worth exploring. Looking at so many of the safteyism-coded issues of the day, its easy to see how they appeal to the messianic mentality and the insecure.

It is also worth noting that I, a kid who loved the color black and playing Doom, Quake, and Postal, ended up an advocate for foreign policy restraint. This wasn’t in conscious reaction to Lieberman when it happened (he was already old news by that point), but it goes to show just how if there is any relationship here, it is in the exact inverse of how ole Senator Droopy Dog imagined it to be. I even got to talk about him and his delusional calls for war with Iran on a radio show a few months back. But now he is dead, and gaming still lives. It is positively thriving. I am going through my second playthrough of the Resident Evil 4 remake right now, and heads are popping all over the Spanish countryside even as the real world continues to sour on the schemes of our endless war-loving elite.

Anyway, I like to imagine the last thing he heard before we was dragged down to the fiery pits and forced to play Quake III deathmatch for eternity against Iraqi pro gamers previously killed in the wars he championed was the Postal menu music.