Don’t blame George Bush and his Hamlet-like need to avenge his daddy for our single-minded state of rabid war readiness. Blame Hasbro. In 1964, Rhode Island’s industrial pride and joy instituted a new underage draft, enlisting little boys all over the country into the action army of G.I. Joe.

Hasbro promoted our boys from foot soldiers who had to fall down and die, to commanders in chief who sent 12-inch action figures to fall down and die for them. Though the toy’s name evoked Willie and Joe, Bill Mauldin’s WWII riflemen antihero cartoon characters, Hasbro dutifully employed the mind-numbing linguistics of the Vietnam-era military when conceiving its product.

In selling the toy, then–company president Merrill Hassenfeld threatened his sales force: "Don’t you dare call G.I. Joe a doll!" According to toy historians, G.I. Joe was the first "action figure," a term that covered not only his martial intent, but also the psychosexual function of the 12-inch plastic fantasy. "Action," a euphemism for armed combat long before Vietnam, was branded onto childish gender identity, lending war the charm of snips, snails, and puppy dog tails.

Now, instead of principled responsibility, moral argument, and international responsibility, the Bush administration offers us hawkish enthusiasm, rowdy seriousness, and phallic bravado — showing that it, too, was influenced by G.I. Joe’s "new play pattern," in which boys and girls substituted imagining for doing.

It should be noted that the imaginative engineering of G.I. Joe differed from that of Mattel’s Barbie, in that Joe was "naturally" anatomically different from his commodified Oedipal-mother counterpart. While form-figured Barbie was stiff-limbed and Chinese foot-bound, G.I. Joe had "knees that bent and wrists that pivoted." Joe was a more efficient toy, because as "America’s Moveable Fighting Man," he had to get ready, take aim, and fire.

Hasbro’s ingenuity was prescient. The Nation, the New York Times, and Canada’s Globe and Mail have reported on how, in similar fashion, America’s military is making our fighting men more efficient and less susceptible to the post-traumatic stress that plagued their predecessors. Our G.I. Joes are already blessed with flexible limbs, but the Pentagon is working to make their "moral autonomy" more plastic, that is, they're creating the "bulletproof mind."

This bulletproof mind considers violence "manageable." It considers the "intimate" killing of urban, house-to house warfare just another option of "quiet professionals." G.I. Joe will now kill "in a zone," guaranteeing that he’ll "never feel sad" for the enemy or "be bothered" by the carnage he causes. This conditioning promises to increase what military historians call "the fire ratio," the regular use of weapons in combat. The fire ratio was so low on some occasions during WWII that about 80 percent of American soldiers failed to fire their weapons, unable to overcome the natural reluctance to kill.

Our soldiers’ new psychological accessory may ensure the success of military missions, but it leaves behind questions about the postwar consequences. How will a nation — and soldiers who fight a war with bulletproof minds — participate in the peacetime effort to build democracy abroad? Why will we care about an enemy whose death doesn’t bother us as much as a low fire ratio? And how will we play with each other here at home when some are moving "in the zone" of a militaristically conditioned moral autonomy?

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