Here We GOOOO!

It was a long time coming. Decades, even. The stretching path was set by an ancient impulse: human mastery. The runup wracked body and spirit. So much relied on its completion: stature, self-confidence, mental equanimity. Triumph was never sure; aging faculties of involved players threatened failure. Victory could be nothing but total.

So it commenced. In the early hours of February 28, 2026, my children as witness, I finally achieved the 120th star in Super Mario 64. With a raging Chuckya on my tail, and only 4 feet between shining trophy and bottomless sky, I made one final leap toward fulfillment. Ok, I thumbed the joystick slightly and tapped the “A” button. But Mario’s pixelated form still obeyed my digits, nabbing the celestial token before busting his patented spin’n’v-flash and hilariously stereotyped Italic cry “Here We GOOOO!”

At last: great golden resolution. A day to remember down my quickening years.

Oh, and President Donald Trump launched a “decapitative” blitzkrieg, in tandem with the Israelis, on the Iranian government, killing Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and dozens of senior apparatchiks, tossing a lit match onto an already volatile Middle East.

An impressive, jaw-dropping, lung-tightening, stomach-heaving, frisson-inducing bombardment. But, really, how does it compare to scrounging 100 coins on Rainbow Ride?

The last time I 100%-ed Super Mario 64, I was eight years old. The last time a Republican president promised a humble, prudent foreign policy, I was ten. Then 28. Then 37. How I look forward to candidate Marco Rubio promising a “real” war machine retrenchment in the 2032 race. And, once again, a fringey coalition of podcast iconoclasts, granola-crunchers, blue-joke droppers, outright antisemites, and skinny-jean-wearing right-wingers will join hands to pull the switch for yet another dovish Republican. “No more forever wars!” they chant, forever disappointed. Soon enough, they’ll shrink back to the default excuse of unreconstructed Marxists: “Real America First has never been tried!”

It’s a diminutive feeling, sitting cross-legged on your finished basement’s floor, carpet pills sticking to pajamas, playing a pastel video game about a plumber fighting a dinosaur, craning your neck upward at a bright television, while the world outside ignites in awesome conflagration.

The superfluousness of notching an electronic register within a disposable battery. Is this really what a man does while his country is under bloody arms? Instruct a polygonal mustachioed fellow to jump on a turtle? Performing a backspin-into-wall jump to reach the next tilting platform in a towering grandfather clock, delighting a couple of giggling girls?

I’m lucky. All American men are so lucky. No bayonet at our throat, sergeants marching us off to dry out in the Persian desert, all so the world is safe for the internal combustion engine. No draft, no conscription, no being black-bagged on the street and whisked off to Fort Benning. We’re free to zonk out watching YouTube Shorts of F-35 firebombing Tehran before swiping to DoorDash to procure some Taco Bell gutrot.

How long such comforting decadence lasts is the question. Donald Trump isn’t a pacifist. As Matthew Schmitz lays out, the President has never been anything less than an “Iran hawk.” Libertarians who believed a noninterventionist would finally occupy the White House were engaged in wide-eyed wishcasting. Nor is Trump a democracy-promoter, a liberal conciliator, or a cheerleader for the puffed-up fakery of “international law.” He’s unashamed of America’s military arsenal; gunboat diplomacy is just hardline business negotiations. His administration isn’t stacked with postgrads who copy and paste sophistries to make PrSMs seen like slingshots loaded with plushies. The country’s now run by a bunch of Schlitz-sucking fellas who spent college afternoons “pwning noobs” in Call of Duty.

The Iranian inferno is now spreading into multiple conclusive nodes, neither of which Pentagon analysts can predict with certainty. A video game with internally coded outcomes, this isn’t. Meanwhile, Americans disapprove of the fiery coup by a chasmically wide margin. The only thing hated more countrywide is the default tipping screen at Starbucks.

What happens now is a secret too precious to divulge. Trump is playing phone tag with reporters, mouthing off a slide-rule schedule of when the campaign ends and when troops will, presumably, go back to overthrowing South American dictators. Four weeks, six weeks, another month to facilitate a peaceful transition to democracy, a few more years to fully uncork the Abadan refinery. Soon, an outgoing Trump will assure us that Iran only requires an occupying American force to really turn over a new Western leaf, a promise President Newsom will reluctantly assume.

So far, three U.S. servicemembers died in as-of-now unknown circumstances to bring Iran freedom-by-fire. Mario belched up three green-toadstool “lives” in my quest for the final lambent prize. I can now rest, Peach’s castle conquered, shelled baddie deposed, the Mushroom Kingdom saved. No discernible end to America’s sixth (or is it seventh) MidEast adventure on the heat-hazed horizon.

Here We GOOOO, indeed.