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CounterPunch
December
27, 2002
War Toys &
the National Character
by PIERRE TRISTAM
Children like to see things shot up, blown up,
dismembered, distempered and digested, mayhem being their genes'
fresher remembrance of things Paleolithic than any more recent
babble-tattle on sharing, caring and hugging. So every Christmas,
while peace on Earth streaks its seasonal sleigh ride across
the sky--hopefully beyond the range of snipers and Stinger missiles--toy
manufacturers in their caves of Isengard down below unleash the
latest arsenals of make-believe weaponry. Right-thinking parents
and left-leaning psychologists get up in arms over the supposed
abuse of innocence. Manufacturers and their retailers circle
the toy tanks and plead sainthood, because they're only providing
what the infallible marketplace demands.
Meanwhile grown-ups in charge of real
armies go on their unchallenged ways, devouring a third of the
federal budget to feed a superhero war machine more lethal than
anything Gengis Khan could ever dream of, more disproportionate
with existing dangers than any imbalance of power in history.
Taxpayers right and left barely bat an eye at that lunacy, as
if a single laser-guided missile that costs more than a year's
worth of child care subsidies for an entire state were a perfectly
reasonable way to project American values, but a $44.99 toy kit
of a bombed out house will spell the end of American innocence.
The toy manufacturers, it seems to me, have it right. They're
preparing the kids for the flag-waving world of their fathers.
Their bombed out houses, their ATV-like ridable tanks, their
"GI Joe Long Range Army Sniper" are character education
at its best, because it is in line with the national character.
Military power is America's defining identity.
It's nice to pretend otherwise, at least
during the holidays. So this year's righteous fury is over that
$50 "Forward Command Post" manufactured by Ever Sparkle
Industrial Toys, a company whose ear for irony is perfectly in
tune with its ability to make a killing. The toy is generating
super-sales and super-controversies in equal measure. Commentators
incensed by "Forward Command Post"'s realistic recreation
of Beirut-haus architecture have invariably compared the thing
to "a Barbie Dream House after a mortar attack." I've
never seen a Barbie's dream house that couldn't use a good bombing,
so the comparison is more to the toy's credit than not. Where
the commentators may have a point is in the collaterals of the
kit--the sniper-nest mingling with the dining room table, where
grenades have replaced the salt and pepper shakers, the mysterious
green barrels and the not-so-mysterious ammo boxes that have
shoved out the kitchen's less explosive appliances, and, topping
it off, Mr. GI Joe himself, as confident as his conquering self
has ever been, standing proudly in the remains of what once was
a child's bedroom. A bazooka (the shoulder-ready rocket-launcher,
not the bubble-gum) juts from between the soldier's legs.
The assumption is that Joe has taken
over. He's in charge now, so everything--raping, pillaging and
fresh-squeezed deaths aside--should be OK. For ages 5 and up.
A friend sent me the war-torn pages out of the JC Penney catalogue
that advertises them so colorfully. I admit that at first I was
as incensed as the earnest Yale psychologist National Precious
Radio trotted out a couple of Saturdays ago to bomb the toy with
her own piccolo-voiced outrage, although I had an even bigger
problem with the picture of the 5-year-old kid astraddle a maneuverable
tank ("Two 6V batteries for plenty of armored' power,"
the caption says), not only because it brings back frightful
memories of Michael Dukakis, but because of a suggestion as unsubtly
phallic as it was violent. There's also the bazooka and walkie
talkie set, the "World peacekeepers battle station"
where peace's pieces add up to two M-16's, two machine guns,
a mortar tube, artillery, grenades and sandbags, for ages 3 and
up. And, of course, that "JCPenney exclusive," the
"GI Joe MP Figure," presumably to keep any other GI
from coming to his senses and running away from so much "good-old
American know-how at insanity," as Hawkeye once described
a Sherman tank in M*A*S*H.
Insane, but besides the point, and on
the whole no more damaging to a child's sense of values than
Barbie's First Prostitution Kit, as the bimbo's boas and fetish-spiked
heels can only be described, or Ken's very own pimpmobile, without
which--who knows--America's other identity, the sex-obsessed
one, might have gone flaccid. Rousseau's wussy ideals aside,
childhood has always been as much Hobbes as Barney, as much "Lord
of the Flies" as "Circle of Love." It is up to
adults to civilize, to free the humane impulse from the caveman
mentality or its slut-and-jock progeny.
Schools have tried emasculating childhood
of its natural-born barbarism with speech codes, behavior codes
and more self-esteem narcotics than the Drug Enforcement Agency
could ever catalogue. But codes do nothing when grown-up examples
don't follow. So it is with violent toys. The problem isn't the
toys themselves, or even their popularity, but the empty sanctimony
behind a campaign to discredit those toys while the toys' inspiration--the
Pentagon's monstrous appetite for state-of-the-art killware,
the White House's warmongering junta of he-men--are worshipped
as blindly cultish deities. They're the real action figures,
the real toys to worry about, because they've not outgrown the
caveman mentality, they're every child's example, and they're
in charge. Compared to them, I'll take "Forward Command
Post" any day. At $50, it's probably cheaper than a Pentagon
paper clip. And unlike its real-life likeness, its plastic figurines
couldn't hurt a fly.
Pierre Tristam
is a News-Journal editorial writer. Reach him at ptristam@att.net.
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