2002-09-09 - 3:33 p.m.

Ahoy-hoi, Children of the Revolution.

I finally figured it all out.

I was watching Nootropil sort his way through the perils of Super Mario Bros. 3 (off of the Super Mario All-Stars cartridge, a bargain at twice the price. It pays to have a Super Nintendo to keep the PS2 and Dreamcast company.) and paging through James Ellroy's Cold Six Thousand, the sequel to the most brilliant piece of conspiracy noir ever written, American Tabloid (for the record, Tabloid is, for my money, a much better read because in Cold Six Ellroy is experimenting with this weird maximum-of-five-words-per-sentence format which reads too much like Ernest Hemingway after a night of sucking down benzedrine and watching Bogart films.) when the sudden inspiration struck me.

The Super Mario Bros. are right-wing goons.

That's right.

The whole "Italian plumbers" thing? PLEASE! Oldest CIA code in the book. When you need quick, verifiable wetwork uncontaminated by Agency hands, you take some of the "slush" skimmed off of your "heroin dealers" in Laos and you buy yourself some "handymen" from the local "Mafia," who take the "money" and kill "everybody they can find."

I always thought that story provided in the manual sounded a bit suspect. What business does any self-respecting plumber have invading a Mushroom Kingdom anyway?

And what exactly did Bowser do wrong? He overthrew an autocracy. Not just any autocracy. Some fragging old-world nightmarish Hapsburgian byzantine lacework of favortism, nepotism, brutality, and the blood of the commoner headed by a damned fairy princess in a huge pink gown and tiara.

It's the sort of thing any self-respecting spiky dragon turtle would hate. After all, dragon turtles are signs of good fortune, luck, and shared wealth.

So Bowser and his loyal Koopa troops, obviously a displaced minority, instill the hard-working Goombas to throw off their chains and take down the hateful monarchy. This is made especially obvious in the Super Nintendo 16-bit reanimation of the hateful bit of history. In the backgrounds of the sky levels, such as levels 5-2 and 7-2, you can see statues of goombas up on pillars. Heroes of the Revolution.

Bowser takes the gold coins the royals have heaped in huge Scrooge McDuck piles in their palaces for generations and re-distributes them across the countryside. He installs some defenses against the inevitable aristocratic retaliations, neatly using their own castles as his forts.

The hateful, servile, lickspittle Toads are promised wealth and greatness by the Princess, and also doubtless drugged in the grand tradition of the hashishin, and strike out against Bowser's peace-loving People's Army. Bowser, being the great dragon turtle he is, doesn't have them all simply executed and dumped into a mass grave. No, he simply restrains them in relative luxury in the forts.

So the Princess and her vicious right-wing forces take another tack, contacting their "friends" at Langley about the "stone in their shoe." The boys in Virginia place a carefully un-monitored call to a completely non-existent number which causes a phone to ring at the back of a dusty, broken-down plumbing supply shop with a perpetual "Closed" sign in the window. The line clicks. Again.

"Ciao?"

"Mario?"

"I don' know nobodies by 'at name."

"My apologies. Super Mario?"

"Si?"

"We have a job for you."

And there you have it. His mission? Simple. Destroy the leftist forces. Tear the wings off the air force. Crush the rebellious commoners beneath his super-powered boots. Gather up all the wealth that has been re-distributed. For every 100 coins, you get another dose of immortality serum. Take down the freedom-loving people's leader and restore the crown.

So every time you've beaten that game, you've put another puppet back on the throne at the expense of the people.

Way to go.

Sheep.

Love, luck, and Langley..

- The bitter Wheel gets greased

*****

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