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Published on Friday, August 22, 2003 by the SFGate
It's the G.W. Bush "Aviator" Doll, Just in Time to Degrade Every Notion of Heroism, Ever
by Mark Morford
Country's in shambles and economy's gutted and schools are shot and Iraq's a violent bloody mess and joblessness is rampant and it's a proud time indeed to be an American, and hence you might be asking yourself, what, pray what, can I give the hardcore lockstep pseudo-Christian homophobic Republican on my gift list?
What can you give the one who just loves bogus wars and BushCo's lies and thinks SUVs are way bitchin' and believes every bile-filled opinion crammed down their throats via Fox News and Hannity/Coulter/Limbaugh et al., hates them damnable gays and libs and environmentalists and has one hand over his heart while the other gropes the cat?
If you shouted out "a pile of Schwarzenegger DVDs!" or "Lifetime NRA/KKK membership!" or "The Complete Catholic Church Total Absolution/Multimillion Dollar Settlement/Home Enema Kit!" you're only about half right.
Because now we have a new doll, this neat little prefab landfill thing, the George W. Bush "Elite Force Aviator" action figure, to stand proudly alongside your "We Will Rock You" Animated Soldier and your civilian-maulin' "Forward Command Post" toy set from JCPenney! That's right! Collect the whole set!
It is so damn cute. It is so damn cute you almost have to shudder with nausea and ennui and soul-cringing pain and then rush right out and buy a bottle of wine and a Pyrex sex toy and a ticket to Burning Man, just to cleanse.
It's true. It's real. The Bush action figure is a genuine serious item and not, as you would fully expect, a joke, not a parody, not necessarily meant to be a gag gift you would give to your favorite rabid pro-military war aficionado to make them cheer and stroke the flag and sigh wistfully for a time when men were men and Uzis were legal.
There he is, all faux manly and squinty and artificially buffed up, his gull-wing ears toned down and the thin-lipped brow-furrowed monkey confusion so common to his scrunched little face apparently erased by expert doll craftsmen and/or a drunken 50-cents-an-hour sweatshop employee somewhere in China.
There he is, all fierce and makeshift macho and ready to be flown a handful of miles offshore to land on a carefully positioned photo-op aircraft carrier and make an entirely staged entirely bogus internationally embarrassing speech announcing the end of the Iraq war, hee hee suckers whoops sorry about all the dead U.S. soldiers and Iraqi civilians, every day, ever since.
And sure you can try to say "George W. Bush action figure" without choking on your vodka/Valium martini, but it is worth noting that it is, apparently, and tragically, not common knowledge that Shrub avoided almost all military service through his daddy's connections, skipped right by the Vietnam draft by enlisting in the National Guard and then went AWOL from that service for well over a year, and that military service is to a Bush WASP-mafia member what oral sex is to a Hilton sister: that is, degrading dirty scum work full of icky germs and heavy lifting and scary phallic exploding thingies best left to the middle classes and the plebes.
Oh my God but we love fake heroism. Oh my God but we are so easily duped by the macho and the puffed up and the synthetic and the heavily shellacked.
Here is Arnie. The big dumb Terminator. Kindergarten cop last action hero Conan the barbarian. A man with zero political experience and negligible actual acting experience and the intellectual and verbal acumen of something you find on the bottom of your shoe at a Shania Twain concert.
And here is California (or is it just the gullible media?), suddenly all agog and atwitter over the possibility that we will beat out Minnesota on disastrous thick-necked aging quasi-celeb governors who turn their respective state into an international laughingstock, a fiscal and socioeconomic disaster, more of a joke than it already is. (P.S.: Go, Arianna.)
Have we really forgotten what a hero is? Have we have been so desperately numbed into thinking it's some overpampered spoon-fed monosyllabic C-grade Texas daddy's boy who thinks the world is full of "evildoers" and "sinners" and "furriners" and a desperately lonely Condi Rice?
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