Back in the Day

I’ve been thinking a lot about where I came from and some of the facts don’t add up anymore.

For instance, growing up I was never allowed to have G.I. Joe toys. Guess what my favourite show was? G.I. Joe. I was six in 1986, at the absolute height of it’s popularity, and I couldn’t have them. All my friends played with G.I. Joe, though, so I’d go over to their houses all the time. We would get together in groups and everyone would bring their favourite Joes with them. I, of course, brought nothing, having nothing to bring, so they instantly hated me. I was forced to play with their least-awesome Cobra figures. I’d get maybe one toy with maybe it’s leg broken off, and all it’s accessories missing, and I’d have to pretend to fight off the entire Joe army, jet planes and battle ships and all. Needless to say, it was bullshit. That, “everyone but me,” theme followed me for the rest of my life and set the stage for many future disappointments, all foreshadowed by a $5 lump of plastic most kids end up blowing up with firecrackers.

The reason I wasn’t allowed to have G.I. Joes is because my mom said they glorified warfare, which is absolutely true. That’s the whole point of G.I. Joes. She said that because that’s what her step-dad told her, and he was a decorated war hero. He had supposedly come back from WWII with a different outlook going in as a doe-eyed youth, and had serious misgiving about his actions over his several tours of duty. He hadn’t become an anti-war proponent, but he was strictly against any future generations doing what he did.

Only, it was all bullshit. Going through his personal belongings after he died there was a very different picture of the man who bore his will down on his grandson. Firstly, there were the medals: rows of them. He’d threatened to send them back many times, mostly over alleged slights like the Queen knighting the Beatles. He kept all of them. If you were ashamed of something you’ve done, why would you keep the award recognizing you exclusively for it? Then, there was the memorabilia from his stint during the war. This included piles of documents. Some cartoons I saw amounted to little more than hateful propaganda. One image depicted a soldier bayoneting three enemy soldiers at once. He kept this around, but I wasn’t supposed to play pretend with half-snake people who shot lasers at dudes in Hawaiian shirts riding crocodiles, because it promoted violence. Then there was the souvenirs: fascist Italian flags and Nazi coins. If he’d been in Vietnam, he’d practically have a necklace of human ears. Of course he kept the other keepsakes like the binoculars and machete: who wouldn’t? A machete is a machete. Just ask Machete. Plus he was a proud member of the Eagles where he’d hang out with his war buddies every week, and he never missed a Remembrance Day where he could put on his uniform.

So if war was so bad, why was he dedicating every day of his life basically to commemorating the one he’d been in? What kind of double-talking horseshit was this?