All speech is — metaphorically and literally — code. By this, I mean it is a message you must decipher using clues and context, yes, but it is also the programming code that drives the game of humanity. When a friend explains the plot of a movie to you, your brain takes that code, unscrambles it, and executes it into a set of moving images playing in your mind. Your friend, thus, is your brain’s programmer, and the quality of the movie that plays in your head is dependent on your friend’s skill as a coder. This is why friends are so powerful and dangerous.
I enjoyed listening to Corey Booker’s 25-hour speech. While I listened, I fried several delicious sunny-side-up eggs and piloted my drone around my house to see if I could find any of my missing Evangelion miniatures. All the while, my mind compiled and executed a program of solidarity with an efficiency that put me in mind of a eurasian beaver compiling a dam in the Sozh.
Senator Booker’s skill as a coder is, in this humble game designer’s opinion, quite promising. He’s also an effective voice and performance capture actor. I could feel the organic nanites of my mind working tirelessly to take a more compassionate, politically active form in mechanical response to his human-readable instructions.
But then, after a mere 25 hours, the speech ended. My hands, which his calls for action had driven to make eggs and pilot drones, fell to my side. My organic nanites, with no passionate verbiage to incite a mechanical response, fell into disarray. My heart ceased to beat for a moment. I felt adrift — an executable with no source. An actor with no director. A soldier with no country.
This leads me to my foremost critique of Senator Booker’s speech: not enough history lessons. Yes, Senator Booker spoke of the present-day United States eloquently and with the precision of a hummingbird striking a bee balm’s bud. But where is the historical context for everyone learning about this “United States” place for the very first time? I suggest that Senator Booker could have spent at least ten hours explaining how Pearl Harbor, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and 9/11 led the United States to its current state of emergency. Perhaps he could have employed archival footage as a visual aid.
I must end my column here in accordance with draconian word-count restrictions, but I look forward to casting Mr. Booker in the role of “Senator Doctor Strangecountry” in Death Stranding 3.
