Those who fail to learn from Pokemon history are destined to repeat it.
Over the past week, a new, even more disturbing reincarnation of the Japanese trading card game — Pokemon Go — is sweeping the nation.
It had been 20 years since this scourge first made its way to our shores, and for those who had the misfortune to have pre-teen kids at the time, you remember well the psychological wounds it inflicted on the adult human, although the kids, oddly enough, seemed to have suffered no long-term ill effects.
I had two kids in that age range at the time and even all these years later, the mere mention of Pokemon causes me to exhibit a nervous tic.
Admittedly, all parents must suffer from some sort of kid-obsession trauma. If your kids weren’t of the “Gymboree” era, they may have succumbed to the clutches of “Barney the Dinosaur” or have fallen into the cult of “Teletubbies” or any of the other subsequent marketing-driven horrors designed to turn children in the zombies and parents into heavy drinkers or crack addicts.
But of all these childhood obsessions, Pokemon is the most insidious and ruinous and inescapable.
From the moment the first Pokemon cards hit the department and toy stores, kids lost their little underdeveloped minds.
They would beg, plead and make all sorts of promises that no child could ever be expected to keep (“I’ll even ask for seconds on artichokes!”).
As a responsible parent, I approached the matter gently. Pokemon, I realized, was not something you could reasonably expect a child to quit cold turkey. So I tried to ween them off of the cards, bribing them with other toys, candy, anything.
It never worked. Finally, when they appeared to be going into some sort of withdrawal seizures, I relented. My kids would collapse on the floor right there at the checkout stand as soon as the purchase was completed, tearing into the packets and pulling out the cards, wild, almost inhuman, looks in their eyes. Heroin junkies displayed more dignity.
Then, of course, there was the first Pokemon Movie (1998). The kids had to go, and so did one of us parents. I lost that argument.
How can I describe that? I felt like Alex in the movie “A Clockwork Orange” being forced into a movie theater and exposed to a never-ending series of horrifying images.
It was an hour-and-a-half of torture. When I got home with the kids, I fixed my wife with an icy stare and pronounced, “I’m playing golf Saturday. In fact, I may play golf Sunday, too. Do you have any problems with that? Do you?” She never said a word.
Then there was the evening our domestic bliss was interrupted by a knock on the door, and I found a neighbor mom standing there, hands on her hips, one footing tapping maniacally on the stoop, staring bullets at me.
“Your son!” she spat. “Do you know what your son did?”
I felt sick.
“Uh, no. What?”
“He cheated my son out of a Charizard card!”
“A what?” I said, trying hard not to laugh.
“A Charizard card,” she said in an accusing tone. “He traded him two Scratches for a Charizard.”
She paused, as if to allow the gravity of the offense to sink in.
I said nothing.
“My son is just little,” she continued. “He didn’t know any better.”
She demanded restitution and the trade was nullified over my son’s strenuous objections. “A deal’s a deal, dad,” he protested.
But these are the kind of concessions you make for neighbors.
The neighbor mom stomped off triumphantly with the Charizard clutched tight in her fist.
I think I got my first DUI the next day.
Now, 20 years later, Pokemon has emerged from its well-deserved ashes. Pokemon Go is sweeping the nation like some deadly virus for which there is no vaccine.
Our new national nightmare has begun.
Slim Smith is a columnist and feature writer for The Dispatch. His email address is [email protected].
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