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vol vii, issue 5 < ToC
From the Editor
by
Jeff Georgeson
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full contents interview with
Laurel Hightower
From the Editor
by
Jeff Georgeson
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interview with
Laurel Hightower
From the Editor
by
Jeff Georgeson
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full contents interview with
Laurel Hightower
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interview with
Laurel Hightower
From the Editor
 by Jeff Georgeson
From the Editor
 by Jeff Georgeson
Ah yes, an editorial where I play a game of imagination, find it has been coopted for evil, and basically don’t talk about what’s in the magazine at all. Or maybe I do? In a broad, philosophical way?

*     *     *
Game shows. So, so many game shows, and I’ve been watching them for, well, reasons. It sometimes seems, along with so-called “reality” television, that all we do is watch other people play often quite contrived games—not sports, but variations on quizzes mixed with some kind of “other” device, such as trying to get across a bridge by lighting the correct boxes (The Bridge, in the UK) or trying to amass the most territory by beating others in rapid-fire identification of images (The Floor, in the US), or even mixing the backstabbing (or what some might try to prettify as “strategizing”) of reality shows with quizzing (hearken back to The Weakest Link, although shows like The Traitors and The Apprentice are similar). And most of these seem like they’re teaching us one thing, underneath it all: competition is king. And there can be only one winner.

What I fear is that they merely reinforce/help create the divisive world in which we currently reside. They’re fun, you do learn things, but the selling point is too often the beating of others, the winning of the game by destroying your opponents, becoming the only winner. This is especially reflected in American society, where it seems nearly everything is based on being Number One—even academics, where we are ranked according to grades and sorted into valedictorian and the rest.

However, there are in fact game shows that encourage (gasp) cooperation, and I don’t mean “we’re cooperating to build a prize pot after which we will viciously attack one another until only one of us remains” kinds of “cooperation.” For instance, the British show The Crystal Maze was built on teams of players cooperating to solve puzzles and other mysteries in order to “win.” The Bridge, mentioned above, features teams of players working as a team to find enough correct answers to work their way across the game floor and reach the other side (although they each cross the bridge on their own, they do not work against one another). In these shows, it’s you against the game itself—not you against everyone else in the room. It’s you (p), not you (s).

How refreshing it would be (to me, anyway) if there were more shows that developed such teamwork and also didn’t set up the “us vs them” dynamic that is so prevalent in our world, especially in the West. But here’s where such hope-filled dreams run up against certain realities. I mean, I know that people in the real world do work together in teams, although it is often in a corporate environment, where the corporation is “us” and everyone outside is “them,” leading to wonderful developments that are simultaneously unavailable to outsiders or ridiculously expensive; or in sports, where again there’s a team, yes, but it’s a sort of collective individual that works against others, and ultimately there is only one winner. And I’m aware that at times entire countries pull together and work as one for sometimes valiant, sometimes questionable goals, although there is nearly always coercion and propaganda that goes into such collective action, and there is still always that “other” out there to work against. And I do realize that it may be impossible to set up a dynamic where there is only some kind of fairy-tale teamwork without something to work against (even in the game shows I enjoy, it could be said the teams work against the show itself), humans being who they are. And, finally, where it begins to really fall apart, I do know that for a team to work together, someone has to decide what that direction is, and sometimes that choice is made in horrible and dehumanizing ways—we do not all believe in the same ideals, the same ultimate goals, and often these are indeed antithetical and antihuman and require a fight. If an again-President Turnip tells us all to work together to build an electrified wall around America, to destroy abortion clinics, and to build him a palace made of gold toilets, I will not be a good little worker ant.

But if we worked toward working together in some way, rather than trying to best one another in constant battle, literally or figuratively ... would not at least tempering some of the divisiveness help?

Truthfully, I do not know. As with so many other ideas, “tempering divisiveness” has been used by the Far Right to mean “make everyone do what we want them to do, and make them stop fighting for Black Lives and others, make them stop fighting against fossil fuels, make them bow down to us.” In the UK, some politicians have used such ideas to bring in rules against protest, calling protesters any number of vile names in order to get the police to forcefully put a stop to any of what they see as defiance. And this kind of thing is not what I mean at all by learning teamwork or working together. So it is possible that what I am trying to say will remain in my imagination, locked away by the difficulty of finding words that cannot be coopted or misunderstood. But I will keep trying.

And trying is sometimes all we can do.

Jeff Georgeson
Managing Editor
Penumbric

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