Gods at War

In one of 201o’s more heralded PS3 games, God of War III, the player controls a vengeful Spartan warrior in a quest against the entire pantheon of Greek Mythology. Through five hours, however, I find myself repeatedly cheering against the very character I am controlling. To be entirely clear, it’s not Kratos’s immorality that I detest. It would be hypocritical of me, a former Grand Theft Auto assailant, to fault Kratos for the inadvertant and occassionally intentional manslaughter of innocent digital bystanders. When you destroy a spiderweb, you’ll inevitably kill a few flies too.  Rather, my reservations reside everytime I encounter, expunge, and desecrate one of the champions of Greek Mythology–all of whom I spent a considerable amount of time as a lonely, obsessed 6th grader studying and imagining.

In the first God of War, Kratos’s revenge fueled, blood-filled quest seemed somewhat justified, if not excessively violent and immoral in its execution. His goal: to kill the God of War. The task seemed unfathomable. The notion of killing a god, let alone one Olympus’s most famous inhabitants, really seemed beyond Kratos’s reach. The game’s stage was undeniably grand and dramatic: a quest against immortality, fate, tradition, and mythology. His mission seemed doomed from the start, but seeing how it would fail inspired me to play on further through each of the monster-laden labyrinths. –spoiler alert– Unexpectedly, Kratos succeeds. He kills Ares, he disrupts the order of Olympus, and he rewrites Greek Mythology.

If we consider Kratos’s actions in GW1 the equivalent of rewriting a paragraph or two in the annuls of Greek Mythology, then by the third game Kratos has lit the annuls of Greek Mythology on fire, stopped on the ashes, and irreverently spit on them. In God of War 1, the final battle is a multi-part battle to overthrow Ares. Defeating a god was understandably difficult for Kratos. Apparently, however, killing gods –like any good hobby– only gets easier with practice. In the very first combat scene of God of War III, Kratos plucks the eyeballs out of Zeus’s brother’s head.  The God of the Sea (from whence all life came)–one of the three original brothers that defeated the titans–is mutilated by the protagonist before the player has even figured out what all the buttons do!  To paraphrase Solid Snake, “unfortunately, killing is one of those things that gets easier the more you do it.” And in God of War III, easier also means less interesting, provocative, and meaningful. Perhaps the dramatic increase in scale ought to correspondingly increase the tension and drama, but instead the escalation of dramatic scale creates what I would call an inflation of the unbelievable and thereby devalues exactly what made the first game so special. This is a crime that could be leveled at many sequels, and examples abound today since  a movie cannot be produced unless it has trilogy potential lately. Personally, the Transformers films best illustrate the lamentable inflation of the unbelievable. And, to clarify, it is straight out lamentable in escapist art when the magic that transforms (no pun intended) and teleports us to another place becomes devalued by the very magic used to teleport us.

Michael Bay’s first rendition was an awe-inspiring spectacle of computer graphic prowess. Most spectacular and horrifying of all was Megatron. He was twice as big as the Autobats–he capably ripped apart Jazz with one little tug. I distinctly recall those magical tingles of fear and anticipation surging through my legs and arms when Megatron awakes from his long slumber, and the camera pans up at his sleek metallic armor decompressing as an epic chorus cues and sings in the background ala Duel of the Fates style. Awe-inducing. 

Similarly to God of War III, the scale and scope that made the first Transformers film magical was immediately declared obsolete in the first scene of the second film. Michael Bay’s first scene basically said to his audience, “I bet you thought Megatron was scary, Transformers fans. Well, guess what, he wasn’t. This giant-wheel deceptacon is five times bigger!!!!!!!!!” Believe me, the opening scene feels just as childish as that sentence does. The scene, a lengthy megasized chase scene on top of urban China, has more explosions and destruction than the entire first film combined. Worst of all, the scene’s perpetrator is a new, unnamed, and forgettable big wheel deceptacon who makes Megatron’s size immediately obsolescent. Michael Bay’s directing in Transformers II is the equivalent of a successful baker who, upon hearing that her cookies are delicious because of their sweetness, resolves to add ten cups of sugar to the recipe. To put it simply, too much of a good thing is a bad thing. And this certainly applies to the magic of art as well. 

Essentially, the creators of God of War have demystified the Olympian Gods in a fashion identical to Bay’s demystifying of the Transformer Robots. In God of War, the plot followed a man at war with the Gods. But in God of War III, the plot seems to have entirely flipped. Kratos is a God at war with the too human feeling Olympians. After eternally blinding Poseidon, braining Hades, decapitating Helios, and crippling Hermes, I feel disgusted by Kratos. I don’t want him to win. When Hermes was pleading for his life and writhing away from Kratos in fear, I did not feel motivated to kill him at all. If the game offered a choice of resistance, I would have certainly opted for mercy in this case. But it didn’t. My only option was to catch the maimed and disgraced god in the midst of his pitiful escape. I honestly do not recall what started this war, and why killing every one of these Gods guarantees success. But as Kratos lopped off Hermes’s legs like a weary jungle traveler hacking his way through a pair of thick tree branches en route to an unknown destination, Kratos seems senseless and lost in God of War III.

Certainly, through my first five hours of play, the game does offer hints that Kratos’s path is pointless and ultimately destructive to the world since plagues are unleashed across the Grecian landscape as each successive god falls. But it’s not quite like Shadow of the Colossus when I felt bad after I conquered each of the goliaths. What made me sad in Shadow of the Colossus was that I was killing the only other living creatures in the realm that seemed to have a soul besides my protagonist and his horse; in God of War III, however,  there doesn’t seem to be any soul at all worth grieving for.

Sucking Wind: Special Interests Threaten Offshore Wind Farm Project

“Mister!” he said with a sawdusty sneeze,
“I am the Lorax. I speak for the trees.
I speak for the trees, for the trees have no tongues.
And I’m asking you, sir, at the top of my lungs” –
he was very upset as he shouted and puffed-
“What’s that THING you’ve made out of my Truffula tuft?”

–The Lorax by Dr. Seuss

It is near impossible to listen to the debate surrounding the proposed offshore wind farm in Lake Ontario without recalling Dr. Seuss’s furry, mustachioed environmental activist the Lorax. Instead of speaking for the trees, however, the opponents of the project (most of them shoreline residents) claim to speak for the fish, the birds, and the lake. Unfortunately, real life is often more complex than a children’s short-story, and the behavior of the project’s opponents would incite the Lorax’s disapproval, not commendation. In Dr. Seuss’s short story, the Lorax opposes the Once-lers unsustainable Truffula farming. The tragedy of the Truffula forest is clearly an example of bad development. In contrast, Rochester’s wind farm project requires that we clearly distinguish what constitutes good and bad development for our region.  

NIMBY (Not in my backyard) politics has been a powerful tool in environmental action that has preserved the Hudson River from pollution and ANWAR from oil drilling; unfortunately, NIMBY now stands in the way of the offshore wind farm project that will diversify New York’s energy portfolio, establish Rochester as an important landmark for renewable energy, and wean the region off more invasive and destructive energy forms like coal, hydro, and nuclear.

Like any new energy investment, there are costs and drawbacks associated with building an offshore wind farm. While the costs will be diffused across the state, benefits like job creation and investment in the Rochester area will be real. During these troubling economic times for Rochester, the opportunity to draw private investment to the area through a twenty-first century technology like offshore windmills is a blessing.

Although special precautions should be taken to not disrupt bird and fish migrations and habitats, wind farms of similar size and scale in Europe demonstrate that the project poses a minimal threat to bird migration and wellbeing. Windmill blades are so large and move so slowly that birds literally need to fly directly into them for their lives to be at risk. And as the April 18^th article in the D&C makes explicit, the farm will have a positive impact on some fish species, while most others will remain unaffected.

Failing to harness one of the country’s most bountiful wind resources with clean and renewable wind turbines would be a travesty. Unlike pristine ANWAR, Lake Ontario has long been marked by the interactions between nature and man. The lake’s resources have been tapped by the Rochester community for centuries now; why should one of its most plentiful resources be left untapped in favor of preserving a faux pristineness that has never quite existed on the busy Great Lake waterway? Rather than mar the lake’s misconceived sacred naturalness, the silent structures will likely add a unique twenty-first century beauty to the Rochester landscape.

As an Irondequoit resident two blocks from the shoreline, I shutter every time I need to rehash the Fast Ferry debacle to out of town friends. The wind farm would establish Rochester as a leader in renewable energy in the fight against global climate change, and that is something I can be proud of as a lakefront resident. If the opponents of the project do not even speak for all of the lakefront residents as they claim, how can we trust them to speak for the birds, fish, and lake too? Some of our lakefront neighbors have attempted to assume the role of the Lorax, but their actions are more akin to the short-sighted Once-lers.

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