Little Tin God by Geoff Carter « The Pen in Hand Blog

Illustration by Michael DiMilo

By Geoff Carter

When I was growing up, back in the sixties, we used to play war all the time. We’d grab our plastic carbines, helmets, fatigues, and run around the backyard pretending to shoot each other. Amidst cries of “Got you” and “Did not” and “Only grazed me”, we became—in our underdeveloped little minds—heroes.

In about 1964, Hasbro came out with their G.I. Joe action figures (the product that coined the term—boys didn’t play with dolls back then). My brothers and I got the Army guys, sailors, and marines with all their accessories and continued our mock heroics on a different, more detailed, scale. My brother even had a Russian soldier.

Television shows like Combat, Twelve O’clock High, and to a lesser (and weirder) degree, the wartime comedies Hogan’s Heroes and McHale’s Navy also added to our fascination with the American fighting man. Add to that the Revell model kits of warplanes, battleships, and tanks, and it seems in retrospect that a large chunk of our childhood was absorbed in learning about ways people killed each other. Not the why of it but the how. They why came after, during the Vietnam conflict.

As we grew older, we played Risk, Parker Brothers’ game of World Conquest, and some of the more advanced Avalon Hill strategy games like Panzerblitz, Gettysburg, and Jutland. Then, as images of the Vietnam War began coming into our homes (right around the same time Hogan’s Heroes was aired), the truth about war began to emerge for us. War wasn’t a game or a drama or an aspiration. It was mangled limbs, dismembered bodies, dead children, and burned-out villages. It was pain, suffering, and sometimes downright murder. We watched as some of the older neighborhood kids had to go off to war. This realization was part of our growing up.

As adults, we eventually learned the more about the true history of warfare through the non-fiction works of Cornelius Ryan, Ian Toll, Rick Atkinson, and others. We watched the horrors of Nazi Germany unfold in films like Judgement at Nuremberg or Night and Fog. We learned.

We learned war wasn’t about John Wayne storming the ramparts and that moving game pieces across hexes represented fields drenched with blood and bodies. We learned the reality of it—some of us firsthand—and the necessity of it. We learned war must be the last resort but is sometimes the only option. Our culture started to reflect that reality. Films like Saving Private Ryan, Dunkirk, 1917, and All Quiet on the Western Front did not—like John Wayne’s Sands of Iwo Jima—glorify war but instead gave graphic and realistic depictions of horror and carnage. We learned. We grew up and put away our childish war toys.

Yet some—like our present president—seem mired in the pre-adolescent fantasies of battlefield glory even though, when presented with the opportunity to serve his country, Donald Trump did not because of bone spurs—a “disability” that mysteriously disappeared after the draft.

This past weekend, President Trump insisted on holding a grand military parade to celebrate the Army’s two hundred fiftieth anniversary—which also happened to fall on his seventy-ninth birthday. Mentioning a military parade he had witnessed in France and no doubt influenced by ostentatious demonstrations of military power by his autocratic buddies Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong-Un, Trump proclaimed he wanted one of his own—for America, of course. Perhaps because Donald Trump is so new at playing the autocrat, his self-serving and narcissistic exercise of a parade was something of a bust.

“Three dozen horses, 28 Abrams tanks, 6,700 soldiers, and millions of taxpayer dollars later, and Donald Trump’s military birthday parade was still a flop at best” (The New Republic). In kind of a sad turn that was perhaps seems reminiscent of his younger days, Donald Trump threw a party and nobody came. Most of the cool kids—reportedly over five million—were off at anti-trump No Kings rallies. Back at the parade, various news outlets reported empty bleachers, people leaving early, and even some anti-Trump demonstrations at the event. It was reportedly so quiet that onlookers could hear the creaking treads of the tanks going by. Music was interrupted by announcers naming various battalions as they went by.

Although the Republican propaganda machine insists that the Army’s 250^th anniversary parade, which (although he denied it) Trump co-opted for his 79^th birthday celebration, had more than 250,000 people in attendance, other crowd estimates were much lower. Time Magazine stated only “tens of thousands” came to the parade while The New Republicpoints out that many of the attendees were there for the Army anniversary celebration, not to support the president.

Donald Trump seems to think of the U.S. military as an extension of his ego and another one of his shiny possessions. Personally, I’m a little surprised he hasn’t ordered them decked out in gold lame uniforms embellished with brass buttons bearing his likeness.

More practically, Trump seems to think the military should be his own private police force. Last week, he deployed 700 Marines to the streets of Los Angeles, which he claimed was in the midst of an insurrection. He seems to think of the five million Americans serving in the armed forces as his toys—his G.I. Joes and Janes, if you will.

As I watched Donald Trump standing at the podium, staring down at the men and women in uniforms, and the huge tanks and—robot dogs?—pass by, he reminded me of a spoiled rich kid hauling out his expensive toys for all the other neighborhood kids to look at. He looked as if he thought the soldiers below belonged to him—and he’s been acting like he believes that. He has unnecessarily—and illegally—deployed the California National Guard and the Marines to Los Angeles to intimidate and bully—two of his strongest social skills—protestors there. He has threatened to send troops to other major “democratic stronghold” cities like Chicago and New York City.

No one of sound mind would dispute that President Trump is using the office of the presidency to stoke—and stroke—his own ego, consolidate personal power, and to rake in as much money as he can. Like Veruca Salt in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, he wants it all. While his own arrested emotional development is the source of his constant need to preen and to be admired and to be feared—I have an army. You better watch out!—he is not the real danger to this country. He is a figurehead, a court jester wearing the crown; he is a child.

And now, just a few days ago, perhaps smarting from his disappointing birthday celebration and awed by television footage of Israeli bombs hitting Iran, he is making noises about dropping a bunker-buster bomb on an Iranian nuclear facility. Apparently, the boy wants to play with his toys.

While his possession of the launch codes is always a scary thought, the far-right political machine that would institute Project 2025 and strip our nation of its democratic principles and institutions like the courts, the DOJ, and the Department of Education is the real danger. Trump is the fool; it is the kingmaker who must be feared.