Denigrating Whac-A-Mole

There are many ways to characterize the ongoing roaming mayhem in Iraq, but pundits and politicians alike have been likening it to a kid’s arcade game involving a big mallet.

It's a trend noted last night on “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart” with a compendium of clips that includes Tim Russert asking “isn’t it the equivalent of playing whack a mole?” CNN’s John Roberts saying “It’s almost like a huge, country-wide game of whack a mole,” and Ryan Crocker, the U.S. Ambassador of Iraq describing the current tactics similarly: “What we are now positioned to do with the surge at full strength is whack a whole lot of moles simultaneously.”

Of course, doing that would be not keeping in terms with the original intent of the game they are all misinterpreting so deeply: Whac-A-Mole (which is not spelled either Whack-A-Mole or Wack-a-Mole).

Using an arcade game term for a deadly explosive battling is tasteless enough – likening the blood and death and dismemberment to the smacks of plastic headed moles at the carnival shows how removed pundits and politicians from the smoke and dust and carnage on the street.

But the metaphor isn’t even correct.

Hitting one mole in the game, originally developed in 1971, does not make other moles come up elsewhere.

The way the game, developed by Bob’s Space Raiders, is made, the plastic moles (in sunglasses) pop up on their own terms, zip back into the five holes just as quickly, and if you hit them with the mallet before they disappear, you get your points.

Hitting one doesn’t make others come up, in other words; they’ll come up on their own until your quarter runs out. They’ll just keep coming faster and faster and in groups of twos and threes before the game’s over.

As happy as I am to see it in the news, I’m a little protective of Whac-a-Mole because it is my game.

I’m no good at any other arcade or any videogame unless you count solitaire. That whole field developed without me. I suck at Wii. I grew up playing pinball, which is a little like saying you grow up playing the gramophone.

Anyway, when the Whac-A-Mole game I started to play when it appeared at the Showbiz Pizza, a place where mechanical band plays over the din of arcade games and the scent of bad pizza (rather like Chuck E. Cheese).  I soon became an expert there though, finding a way to go after the moles the way pitchers go after the strike zone:

It’s a Zen thing.

You don’t stand there with your oversized mallet expectantly, or look at the individual holes in wait.

Rather, you stare at an invisible spot in between the five holes and kind of go in a trance, letting your arm react before you have time to think to strike. Works every time and I have an attic of bad stuffed animals to prove it.

Of course, saying Whac-A-Mole is my game so often has more recently turned to failure, especially at those places at big carnivals or some beachside Funland where several machines are all strung together and you play against others for one big prize. Walking away dazed and empty handed from these games, often $1 a pop, I have often wondered:  Have I lost my touch? Or have they started to make these Moles wilier than they once were?

I have learned in recent years it is better to not mention my penchant for this game (admittedly a weird game to specialize in), lest I be beaten so publicly at the board or worse, recruited to Iraq for my expertise.