Modern War Toys™

My long break is drawing to a close.  I will be away all the rest of the week and won’t be able to comment or post.  After that, I will resume my non-summer posting schedule.  It’s been a long summer with a lot going on.

I really need to clean up the stoogepen and, in fact, I started doing a little cleaning earlier this week.  I found all sorts of shit I haven’t seen in forever.  These include school books — which I really should sell before they are out of date — and comic books and toys.  Yes, toys.  Not the toys I have bought since I became an adult — my Adult Toys — like the PS3.  No, the toys I had when I was a kid.

I had a big collection of action figures and other stuff, like war toys.  You know, those green little plastic war toys that come in bags of like a billion.  They always look like this:

These toys were awesome when I was a kid.  I had wars with infantrymen and snipers and tanks and enemies.  I killed entire armies.

But these toys don’t cut it anymore, now do they?  I mean, war has changed.  It’s not about guns and bullets anymore.  War is more subtle than that today.  So, I’ve been thinking that we should update our war toys.  That’s why I have designed Modern War Toys™.

First of all, we are now liberators!  We liberate people.  We have liberated the good people of Iraq.  Now they are free.  Before we went to Iraq, they lived under the brutal dictatorship of Saddam Hussein.  Of course, we installed Saddam as dictator and supported him, and we encouraged him to go to war with Iran.  But that’s water under the bridge.

Still, liberty is not free.  It comes with a price.  Yeah, Saddam Hussein didn’t support terrorism.  And maybe he was a secular leader who supported religious freedom.  In fact, the only synagogue in Iraq — a protected and open Jewish place of worship — and a few dozen Christian churches have been bombed since we invaded, and more Iraqis die violent deaths each day now than did under Saddam’s rule.  Big deal.  Freedom is good.

So, I propose a war toy that celebrates liberation.  Something like this:

Go freedom!  Go USA!

War has changed in other subtle ways as well.  Who would have guessed that eavesdropping on millions of American citizens and reading their emails would be part of the war we are in right now?  But, this is a subtle war that we must win.

I also think we need a war toy that celebrates the fact that, in this war, we have all sorts of wonderful new tactics that we did not employ when I was a kid.  Like outting CIA agents.  And labeling people Enemy Combatants, which entitles us to imprison them forever without a trial or due process.  But my favorite has to be the fact that now we “disappear” people.  That’s right.  We kidnap them and maybe they wind up at Guantanamo Bay or maybe they don’t.  We’re not entitled to know who is at Guantanamo Bay or how they are treated, so we can’t tell what happens to the disappeared people, but what an awesome toy this makes!

Oh, and we waterboard people!  Excellent!  How cool is that?  Maybe it’s not quite torture, but it still makes for a sweet toy!

It’s good to know that Americans don’t torture anyone.  But that doesn’t mean we don’t have a sense of humor!  Who could forget Abu Ghraib, huh?  Now, that’s an excellent toy, and funny, too!

Of course, not everyone is happy.  Some people just like to gripe.  Like the fuckers who complain because we aren’t giving the soldiers any armor.  And then they complain because the same people who support this war have vetoed legislation that would bring the GI Bill into the Twenty-First Century so that it actually provided veterans with an edumacation.  Then they go on to complain because, after the soldiers get injured because their Humvees and helmets and flak jackets have no armor, they are denied medical care.  What a bunch of whiners!  Still, just to appease these pussies, maybe we should throw in a few toys that reflect soldiers’ injuries or veterans’ rights and welfare or something.

You know, not everyone is complaining.  Contractors like Halliburton aren’t complaining.  Yeah, it’s true that Vice President Cheney continues even today to profit from Halliburton and it’s true that that Halliburton got a multi-billion dollar no-bid contract.  They aren’t the big winners.  The real winners are the oil companies.

When Bush entered office, oil was $18 per barrel.  In January of 2001, when Bush was sworn in as president, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development predicted that, due to limited supply and rising demand, the price of oil would reach $28 per barrel in 2020.  How is that for funny!  Anyways, ExxonMobil posted record profits in February of 2008, with twenty to thirty percent of that profit coming directly from the war in Iraq.  ExxonMobil’s sales for the year before exceeded the gross domestic product of 120 nations.  That makes for one happy war toy!

Of course, things aren’t so great at home for all of us.  What with rising gas and food prices, record numbers of mortgage foreclosures, New Orleans still not safe after Hurricane Katrina, billions of dollars simply missing in Iraq, and a massive deficit that will make your children pay for this war.  So, Americans, you deserve some credit.  You saw all of this happening, and you reelected the people responsible.  In part, because your pastor told you to.  Good for you!  For your faith and inaction, you deserve your own war toy.

Now, I’m ready to start selling these toys but I have to make them by hand at first, so they will be kind of expensive.  Like, about ten bucks each.  But here is the deal.  If you buy all nine war toys for the introductory high price of $90 plus $10 shipping and handling, I will throw in a WMD war toy and an Osama bin Laden war toy — both pictured below — ABSOLUTELY FREE!

Also, if you can think of any other Modern War Toys™ I have forgotten to include, let me know.  But don’t expect a share of the profits.

That’s all I have to say about Modern War Toys™.  See you in a week or so.