Les Coeurs Sont Cassés

The skillful nymph reviews her force with care:
'Let spades be trumps!' she said, and trumps they were.

I grew up in a card playing family. My parents are champion Bridge players, and my older relatives used to smoke us (quite literally) in boozy poker games and rounds of Pinochle. My imagined version of those gray, Toledo days never strays far from Uncle Henry's goading voice and my grandfather--forever bald and t-shirted--announcing he'd had enough. He once put a fist through the side of his television, protesting his sour luck yet again. The younger generation played Euchre too, but also in a competitive spirit (my mother likes to claim that she never loses). In fact, other than thumbing through catalogues and cross-stitching, there is nothing antsy Campbells like to do more than plow through another round of solitaire.

And so it's not suprising that I sometimes shuffle a deck and test my luck. But, of course, living in a hollowed out, lonely world, I tend to do so via computer. First it was Omar Sharif's Bridge on my Mac Classic--[in Omar Sharif's thick accent: "West commences the bidding"]. Lately it has been online Hearts.

But Hearts is, as you may know, a cruel game in which each round consists of thirteen little dagger cuts and one big stab to the stomach. Instead of "winning" Hearts, you deliver losses to others. It brings out the anger in people. My sister, Ang, still refuses to play with any of us because of some betrayal from long ago.

So it doesn't surprise me that the "kibitzing" sometimes turns cold and mean. But something did surprise me and, I guess, this is a post about that. You see, one day I changed my profile to the vaguely African-American icon you can see above. What startled me is that, as soon as I did so, the comments directed at me became virulently racist. And these were not isolated occurences. Actually, almost anytime I play and win, someone will eventually start to resent it and toss me a comment about "my people" or about how they wished I had drowned in Hurricane Katrina. It is astounding. Look closely at the picture above and see how the adorable Forever20 begins to IM me with whatever offensive garbage she can think of. I could sermonize here about the still dreadful state of race relations in America (or indeed the world, as many of my opponents are not in the U.S.). It is just unbelievable that strangers would so quickly reveal their hate. I tend to get all English teachery with them, questioning their intelligence or their courage and suggesting that I am tracing their Yahoo ID as we play. Strange little battles ensue and, remarkably, a card game continues. What I can't tell is whether this is just a new generation's edgy banter, the coded anti-boredom devices of people who are just playing roles in a virtual world, twenty minutes at a time. I am not African-American; maybe Forever20 isn't a girl and isn't a homophobic racist. But if this is the look of postmodern smoke-filled rooms, it gives me the shivers.

Hey, Emile, I like Bicycles too.