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In This Issue

• Water On The Knee
• The Annihilator of Mathematics
• Demonic Speak-n-Spell
• The Fed Interviews Jon Voight
• Letters to the Feditors
• Sam Jenning, or: Eating Children For Profit
• Immigrate This!
• Where In Our Hearts Is Carmen Sandiego?
• The Life and Times of Carmen Sandiego
• Redder Rabbit?
• Good Golly Fucking Gumdrops, I Like Candy!
• The City’s New Hot, Sexy, Superhot Nightclub!
• Where's Waldo?
• Logical Journey into Eugenics
• Think Columbia Sucks? It's Your Fault, Doofus.
• A Farewell to Harms
• A Farewell To Bill
• Tracy Briskit, Fed Queen
• Make Your Own Safe Space!
• Columbia Trail: Safe Space, Bathroom in 347 miles
• Cook with Barney!
• THEY Watch
• The Staff of 21.8
• The Staff of Volume 21

Throughout the ages, humans have defined themselves in opposition to that which they believe is outside of themselves. The mind must grapple with the idea of evil, and many minds protect themselves by creating an “other” onto which to project this potentially dangerous element of the human psyche. The Salem Witch Trials are a good example of this, as well as Christianity in general. Society has changed a lot since the Salem Witch Trials…Or has it? In this paper, I postulate that we are still teaching our children these primitive practices, ironically, with the help of technology, namely the popular “edutainment” computer game “Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?”

    “But,” you may say, “this program is simply a fun way to teach children geography! I played it as a child and it didn’t teach me to project evil onto the ‘other!’” That is where you are wrong. This “game” is ingenious in that it operates on an extremely subtle level, as The Learning Company readily admits in the epigram of this paper. It is indeed a “program”…of dominating the will. With Foucaultian discipline, the children who participate unconsciously in this “program” of “learning” are irreparably deformed. Whether they are competing on the TV show or in the computer game, they must submit to question after question in order to gain acceptance as more knowledgable than their only allies against adult conformity, their peers. Once they are sufficiently alienated, the show’s final round begins. It is a grueling ordeal, the preparation for which entails no less than the memorization of the name and location of every last country in the world (except for Australia and Antarctica, which are effectively marginalized due to their perceived cultural insignificance). The task of essentially incorporating the world into one child’s mind entails a sublimation of the self in order to make room for the information, a sublimation they perform happily if never quite completely. The endgame is largely un-winnable, and trains the children watching to feel even more incompetent than the child-geniuses who made it onto the show, a mechanism which is likely to inspire a “bad conscience” in both the participants in the spectacle, and the viewers thereof.

    If, on occasion, a child does win, they are allowed to travel anywhere within the Continental United States. As if the imposition of this boundary were not enough in a show that ostensibly widens children’s horizons, the child inevitably responds with “Boise, Idaho!” or some other such provincial location, further demonstrating the narrowing of the mind which has ensued as a result of this rigorous training.

    Having built up this “bad conscience,” we must now focus it upon that elusive “other,” namely Carmen Sandiego herself. This character, firmly rooted in the Imaginary, becomes  everything the children are not. According to Wikipedia.org, “the creators wanted a female ‘heroine’ whose name sounded exotic but was unmistakably simple to pronounce.” This speaks volumes to the underlying meaning of the mysterious woman. The vaguely Hispanic name gives her an ethnic flavor, while still keeping her “simple” enough to be used for the white male establishment’s purposes. She is perfectly engineered in every way.

    The gender component is impossible to ignore here. From Eve onwards, woman has always been viewed in the popular imaginary as the source of all maladies. The quotation marks around “heroine” are no coincidence; Carmen is, in fact, the anti-heroine. An ever-accquisitive woman, she travels around the world stealing larger and larger things: the beans from Lima, the Mekong from the jungle, and things as large as Mount Rushmore and Big Ben in an outlandish attempt to satiate her ever growing feminine “lack.” This “lack” is felt intensively by young males blossoming into puberty, and they desire to possess her, capture her, and strip her of the stolen items, presumably to replace them with an object of their own (however vaguely defined it may be in their twelve year old minds). According to Wikipedia, “rumors, spread through AOL chatrooms (circa 1994), state that Carmen went ‘commando’ under her trenchcoat.” This speculation on the topic of her undergarments is further proof that males will inevitably project their sublimated desire onto her, the perfect fetishized object, so near and yet so far. This desire is further compounded by the child-contestants’ nightly exhortations to Rockapella, a comprehensive cross-section of male testosterone levels, to “do it.”

    The fact remains, however, that Carmen Sandiego can never be caught. One can get every answer right, discipline oneself to the utmost, and even win the game within its defined parameters, but she always slips away to wreak further havoc on the World Psyche. This serves as the ultimate proof that Carmen Sandiego, a nebulous character at best, is ultimately the projection and enactment of desires which exist not out in the ether, nor in the platonic essence of a war-torn African nation as simplified into a large, brightly colored map, but within the hearts of each and every one of us. This reflex is undeniably human, yet were there no vehicle for it, I submit that it would die out along with other such outmoded practices as animal sacrifice. Therefore, I encourage the complete withdrawal of all children from “the program” as the first step towards transcending this conundrum. This radical reconceptualization of self will be all that much easier if “the program” is exchanged for immersion in the disembodied, amoral, and elemental universe of numbers contained in the following show, “Square One.”