Sorry, but this is a post about Conan, and I’ll understand completely if you want to click right past it. It would be possible these days, when pop culture and pulp culture are respectable fields of academic study, to gussy up the attraction that Conan the Cimmerian had for me during several weeks in the early 1970s. But no. I’ll give it to you straight: Conan was simple and visceral and I was entering a world that was complex and, um, mental. I would only learn later just HOW mental, believe me. Simple and visceral: to face the enemy, destroy him and then on to wine, sex and song.

This was a boy’s fantasy, I suppose. No planning ahead, no negotiation, no “meaning.” Cunning was allowed, perhaps, but not reflection: Conan was Peter Pan with muscles and a serious libido, and reading Conan was a momentary escape from the fate of adulthood. Robert E. Howard, his inventor, sketched a world with enough space for my imagination to start percolating, where I could dispatch my foes without a second thought. And then, pretty quickly, it came to an end, the stories exhausted, and I moved on and started slipping into an adult world that Conan would have put to the sword — and for good reason!

This came to me as I read Seth Schiesel’s story in the New York Times about a new Conan video game. Schiesel must have his own Conan intersection, because he knows the material. Early in the story he quotes from a key Conan text, “Queen of the Black Coast,” considered by Conan connoisseurs to be absolutely prime Conan.

Let me live deep while I live. Let me know the rich juices of red meat and stinging wine on my palate, the hot embrace of white arms, the mad exultation of battle when the blue blades flame and crimson, and I am content. Let teachers and priests and philosophers brood over questions of reality and illusion. I know this: if life is illusion, then I am no less an illusion, and being thus, the illusion is real to me. I live, I burn with life, I love, I slay, and am content.

Except that Howard was never content himself.

A Texas kid, he boxed and wrestled and made himself into a professional writer, part of H.P. Lovecraft’s Weird Tales circle, but we would now diagnose him as clinically depressed. With his beloved mother on her deathbed, he shot and killed himself in 1936 at the age of 30. Of course, Conan was never content either, at least not for long, otherwise he couldn’t have starred in a series of action-adventures, the first Sword and Sorcery hero.

I wonder how deeply Howard believed in Conan’s “philosophy” as expressed in “Queen of the Black Coast” and elsewhere in the Conan stories. The words seems so inadequate, but I suppose you could argue they were enough to propel an Austrian immigrant, who intoned words a lot like them in a pair of Conan movies (“I vont to hear da lamentations of their vimmin”), to the governorship of California. For some reason we elect guys like Conan, or at least guys who make believe they are guys like Conan, to high office in this country. Very high office. It’s a bit of a puzzle. In a big, powerful, post-industrial superstate that alleges to be a democracy, we are attracted to the guys who claim to have the biggest swords, guys who pepper their hunting companions with buckshot, declare victory where there is none and I suspect have a hard time digesting red meat at this point. I imagine them musing: “Hmmm. Iran. What would Conan do?” I started to type “Make my day,” but that would have led me into a Dirty Harry reverie and another president who believed in make-believe. Let me just say, I don’t blame Conan for this. Not much, anyway.

The video game is apparently a good one, a massively multi-player game that allows thousands of gamers to wander Conan’s world of Hyboria slaying the bad guys and taking their pleasures where they find them. It makes perfect sense to me as a video game, a world of its own, where the fantasy can be shared and things seem more real, more visceral, than they do in the books, which can be silly and simple-minded, the characters raided and ransacked from almost any available mythology, the plots repetitive and obvious. I wish they were better, but obviously they were — are — good enough to give a kid a break from his algebra or his stupid little job. Conan’s a transgressor, and for a few minutes, he can be one, too, without flunking out or getting fired. And I suppose that makes him Conan the Useful. Perhaps certain politicians could just play the game and get Conan out of their systems THAT way.