"Operation Wolf"

Kids learn what they live. . . . . and copy what they see.

As a boy, I entertained notions of growing up and becoming a secret ninja/commando who dropped behind enemy lines and slaughtered the bad guys that stood opposed to U.S. interests, which were in direct, slimy contradiction to young Americans' interests-- kids like mine's interests.

Me, a gleeful little sucker as I played "shoot 'em up" video games and laughed at the show, "World's Dumbest Criminals" whose episodic shenanigans were embellished with the sounds of bonks and dumb-bells and the sound of cell bars clanging shut. Not that the official and sub-contracted organ of state propaganda wasn't subtle, though-- those bracing reenactments & morality plays having about as fine a brush as the crooked eyebrows heavily painted on the turbaned villain by the make-up department.

Yes, the Hollywood studios throwing "red meat" to the skinny gawkers with lowest common denominator owl-eyed expressions lining up at the movie theaters in a pornography of righteous violence making up for life's jammed doors. And may we not forget: the young, impressionable rabble watching at home and taking part in the "Saturday Movie II" "bargain-basement mania" slot on local KPLR 11 like so many two-star, fist-clenched dreams.

Life was never so meaty as the tail-end of the '80s and the great Reagan/Bush military build-up. There it was, like a swelling bicep that flexed and rippled like pure manliness. . . . . a far cry from the slack, drooping bicep of the 1970's when the nation lost its way.

If the compass of "law n' order" wobbled around in indecisive circles with bell-bottomed feminists waving signs, cynical, loam-eyed drug culture, gays piling on in bath houses, and the sad-eyed acquiescence of Kurt Vonnegut-types with "the liberal mind-disease" when a run-down New York City teetering on the edge bankruptcy was looted in "The Great Black-Out" with lascivious Negroes groping through the streets with half-closed eyes and depraved expressions with their dicks hanging out like "The Tallywacker of Barnabus", now the reading pointed true north like a "blue-steel" hard-on, true as "Superman".

Or at least that was "the grunt's perspective", the construction worker taking his kids to the 4th of July air-show and waving the flag as Aretha Franklin sang "America the Beautiful" on the piano with a trio of soul singers who fit squarely inside "The Morning in America" portrait to assuage our more foul-minded tendencies. Behind the scenes, it was not nearly as dew-kissed. . . . . like the sun shining on the playground of an elementary school and a boy playing make-believe with the flashier jewels of the zeitgeist as he skipped about as our misunderstood husky hero.

In Washington, you had the neoconservatives, a "who's who" club of hard-liner zealots that ran the foreign policy apparatus with pseudo-philosophical/pseudo-intellectual bent like cold, joyless chess masters staring over the ocean at the U.S.S.R. "Hawks" they were, either skinny twerps or wheezing, ooze-eyed fat guys in gray suits who felt the need to exert extreme power, to endlessly deliberate and refine geopolitical strategy with the slightest change in the wind. Yes, the enemy-- that great Eastern slab-- a sinister coalition of Russians and Iranians crossing their bare, muscular arms with a gap-toothed grin, nodding their heads in significance as craggy mountainsides rose in the distance.

"Wrestlemania" couldn't have caricaturized it any better when they had "Hulk Hogan" and "Mr. T" up against "The Iron Sheik" and a 7 foot-tall Russian. It was a bit of fantasy, of revisionist thinking, to imagine the world broken down in such simplistic terms. All that existed was the wall of resistance, the mysterious iron curtain dangling like a screen of sheathing that you kept staring at, trying to penetrate the enigma with a set jaw of militaristic market-capitalism values that knew not for what-- only that it was right with simple sloganeering as a nuclear sub surfaced in the North Atlantic in salutation.

Such was the threshold of the Cold War, even as the video game industry mirrored the zeitgeist with little "brush fires" in the fish-bowl world of young people pathetically parroting slogans.

"Contra". . . . . "Operation Wolf". . . . . "Rush n' Attack" (-- a play on "Russian attack").

Just like the movies they imitated, it was the theme of a lone commando dropped behind enemy lines to rescue the hostages, destroy the enemy, and save the world with pure black n' white Arnold Schwartznegger thinking when our sponsored right-wing kletopcracies were "freedom's friends" and paramilitary drug dealers our enemies.

Blotted from memory was the international humiliation when Jimmy Carter sent "Special Forces" into Iran and the helicopters crashed in an unforeseen sandstorm and a nation of nomads, hopping up and down, thumbed their nose like the rebel fighters in "Star Wars".

(No one likes to talk about that. . . . . )

Boys of my generation were fed a constant diet of "shoot 'em up" derring-do. What words couldn't settle, bullets and grenades could-- weapondry slung with a pixilated offhandedness as munitions flew in magical quantities and no one really died, but blinked on the screen before disappearing from view. Day in and day out, kids running around and pointing their fingers-- "BANG! BANG!". And now here they are in Iraq and Afghanistan getting their asses blown off unquestioningly as the war machine groans on like a grinding meat factory.

We have trained them well!

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"You want a-nuther song? Well I ain't plain' one mutherfuckin' note until someone comes up here and puts sum money in my god-damned tip-jar! You know I only came here for one purpose. . . . . to take yor fuckin' cash! Why, I could make more profit puttin' out my meth-head neighbor's asshole and ringin' a bell, hollerin' 'Man for sale! Man for sale!'

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(Rheeee of Crickets)

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Drop "The Bard" a line at
michaeladams_s@yahoo.com