What I Found on This Lost PS2 Memory Card Horrified Me
In recent months, a dear friend of mine made a most curious discovery. My friend, who we will refer to here as “G.L.”, found himself temporarily stationed in New Orleans. G.L. was taking an evening constitutional through his neighborhood when, glancing to the ground, he chanced upon a memory card for the PlayStation 2. Being of an inquisitive nature, G.L. picked up the memory card and inspected it. Seeing that it was in good condition, he collected the card in his pocket and took it home. Knowing that I too was of curious disposition, G.L. informed me of his discovery via email. Since he did not possess a PS2, he endeavored to send me the memory card through the postal service. He and I were most excited to see what treasures the card held.
When a spare moment presented itself, I placed the memory card in my weather-beaten PS2 and turned on the machine. I immediately went to the system browser, so as to determine the contents of the card. The save files I found looked mostly predictable, including entries for Harvest Moon and The Godfather, games which I do not own. The memory card also contained entries for various iterations of Madden football, with season files predictably labelled “SAINTS”, as well as “WAR” and “USMC”. These latter two labels may sync up thematically, suggesting that our mystery gamer is a uniformed man — perhaps even a marine. Alas, while I do own some Madden games, I do not own any of the games from the specific years contained on this memory card.
There was, however, an especially promising and perhaps even star-crossed entry for a game I do own. I perked up upon seeing this, as if I’d found a message in a bottle. What I did not know was that I was about to open a window into the dark heart of America.
The seemingly auspicious entry was for no less a game than WWE SmackDown vs. Raw 2009. G.L. and I had spent countless hours playing the commendable wrestling games in this series, perennial favorites of G.L.’s family. I located the 2009 PS2 edition on my shelf and slipped in the disc to see what treasures I might find.
Once the game loaded, I immediately went to the custom characters, figuring these would speak volumes to the imagination and creative wellspring of the memory card’s former owner. What I found was a wellspring of something, but not anything any functional human being would have treasured.
The first among the created characters was Joseph Stalin. It immediately struck me that our memory card’s original owner might be a history buff. So I proceeded to the next character. It was “Lee Oswald” — that is, Lee Harvey Oswald, the man who assassinated John F. Kennedy. This counted toward my gaining theory that the creator in question was a history buff, though these historical figures were revealing a decidedly dark aspect to said buff.
The next character was Lloyd Bonafide, a name that meant nothing to me prior to some Googling. Mr. Bonafide, it turns out, is a character created by radio personality and voiceover artist Phil Hendrie. Hendrie’s shtick involved playing a calm, rational host while simultaneously portraying several wildly offensive characters who would engage in debates with Hendrie and callers to the show. Bonafide was a Korean War veteran with ultra-rightwing opinions, the kind of character we see many Republicans playing in earnest at present. Perhaps the creation of Bonafide suggests some sense of irony — in fact, given what I was about to see, one could only hope there were some mitigating ironic sensibilities at play.
Because the next character was contemporary conservative pundit Ann Coulter, well known for her own ferociously reactionary views that would seem well-suited for one of Hendrie’s characters. At minimum, Coulter was and is a raging Islamophobe. In her Smackdown vs. Raw rendering, she was decked out in full stars and stripes, and seemingly unironically at that.
I flipped to the next character, and all at once I was staring into the craggy, angular face of the Gipper. Peering back at me through eyes narrowed to slits was an admirably accurate depiction of Ronald Reagan. By now it was clear that the owner of this memory card had entrenched conservative leanings. Only a true conservative could create such a lovingly rendered Reagan.
The conservatism came through in the subsequent characters, too. The next offering was “Leon Trotsky,” who was effectively a pirate swaddled in communist red, the letters “CCCP” scripted on the back of his vest. Then came a masked luchador who’d been given the lazy moniker of “La Cucaracha.” Whatever suspicions this evoked about latent racism turned quite explicit with the next character, one “Doctor Jew.” Even repeating the name and concept makes me bristle. This character wore trunks in the blue of the Israel flag, and had the stereotypically outsized Semitic nose along with an unsightly overplus of body hair and fat. The antisemitism was obvious. The next character brought on more bristling: a slight, pink-clad male dubbed “Sir Sodomy Fagington.” So now we can add homophobia into the mix as well. Following him was a Muslim scholar, or at least a caricature thereof, given the derisive name of “Kareem O’Wheat X”. Here now was Coulter-styled Islamophobia made explicit. I couldn’t find a direct template for this character in my Googlings, but I did see that this moniker is an oft-cited pun online amongst low-brow humorists. Up next was a black cowboy named “Cleon.” That character could be read as racist, or perhaps not — he may also be a reference to Dorsey Wright’s character in The Warriors. I would bet racism, however, on account of not only the previous creations but also, even more pointedly, in view of the next character.
This was a masked wrestler in the Golga mold (that is, of John Tenta’s late-90s Oddities rebranding in WWF) with the letters “KKK” scripted in red across the front of his lily-white shirt. He was dubbed “Theo Bilbo,” referring to the two-time former Mississippi governor and eventual U.S. Senator whose name would become synonymous with white supremacy. Like many Southern Democrats of his era, Bilbo believed in the inferiority of black people. Meanwhile, Bilbo defended segregation and maintained membership in the Ku Klux Klan.
Beleaguered, I went on to the next and last character. Rounding off this hateful menagerie was none other than Adolph Hitler.
So, in sum, if the original owner of this memory card may be called a history buff, he is evidently skewed toward an ultra-rightwing, white nationalist vision of history. His works (if we may presume him male) are anti-Semitic, homophobic, and Islamophobic. Even if these characters were created “ironically” as a comment on the pervasiveness of American intolerance, the sheer volume of unfair caricatures cancels any self-awareness. If our creator does indeed have a military background, it’s rather deflating (if not surprising) to think that such crass and bigoted visions of diversity circulate among those entrusted with protecting the very right to be diverse. This Smackdown vs. Raw save file dates back to 2009. If our creator was this legitimately bigoted then, we can only guess at what kind of monstrosity he became with the rise of Trump. Perhaps our memory card owner marched among those protestors who chanted anti-Semitic slogans in Charlottesville and other Trumpian hotbeds.
These are all hypotheses. It could be that our Smackdown enthusiast grew up and grew out of these assorted bigotries. But even if he did, this memory card provides at the very least a record of the deep-seated immaturity and malice at the heart of one average American. At the very worst, it may show how hatred permeates not just conservative politics in America, but also conservatives’ pastimes. All told, I think my dear friend G.L. didn’t just find a memory card — rather, he found the cruel and benighted fundament of America.
