Byron Donalds Wants A Military Like G.I. Joe But He Already Works For Cobra
Byron Donalds Wants A Military Like G.I. Joe But He Already Works For Cobra
Not a shock that a Republican wouldn’t understand a children’s cartoon.
Republican House Rep. Byron Donalds has never served in the military. There’s no shame in that choice, but it is a little embarrassing when a grown man’s idealized version of the armed services is a 1980s entertainment franchise based on a toy line.
“My position is very, very simple,” Donalds said Thursday at the Conservative Political Action Conference, a regular gathering of the simple-minded. “Go kill the enemy and come home. I’m a kid of the ‘80s so I like G.I. Joe. I just want our military to be G.I. Joe again. I think that’s what most people want. That’s what I want.”
Sir, G.I. Joe wasn’t a documentary. The heroes and villains shouted banal battle cries while firing at each other with magic laser pistols that never hit their targets. Maybe they should’ve had a disclaimer at the start of each episode, but they didn’t coddle audiences with content warnings back then. Well, now you know, and that’s half the battle.
Although G.I. Joe was entirely fictional (yes, even the episode with dinosaurs), it wasn’t John Wayne-style rah-rah patriotism, either. If Fox News had existed in the 1980s, it would’ve denounced the series as too “woke.”
G.I. Joe promoted diversity
Republicans complain that the current military is obsessed with diversity initiatives to the detriment of its mission, which is to “kill people and break things.” Sen. Ted Cruz, another veteran of war movies, mocked a 2021 U.S. Army recruitment ad that featured a woman soldier with two mothers. He posted on social media, from the safety of his home, “Perhaps a woke, emasculated military is not the best idea.” During his speech at 2022’s CPAC, Purple Heart recipient Donald Trump Jr. denounced “our generals, the great woke leaders of our military that spent 6 million man-hours training our troops about wokeness — not fighting, not killing bad guys.”
However, the G.I. Joe series actively embraced diversity. The representation is especially striking compared to other cartoons of the period. The 1983 miniseries, A Real American Hero, had two Black characters, Stalker and Doc the medic, and two women characters, Scarlett (the great BJ Ward) and Cover Girl. Scarlett was a badass.
The MRA trolls on social media would probably complain today that it’s “unrealistic” for a single woman with a crossbow to take out several male Cobra troopers. They’d label her a “Mary Sue.”
The second miniseries, 1984’s Revenge of Cobra, introduced Roadblock, the Black guy who always spoke in rhyme, and Spirit, who possessed mystical Native American tracking skills. (Not all the representation ages well.) The Jack Nicholson-inspired Shipwreck, whose name is Hector Delgado, presumably has Hispanic ancestry. Revenge of Cobra was also the debut of my son’s personal favorite Joe, Lady Jaye (Mary McDonald-Lewis), who rivaled Scarlett in badassery and appeared in the most episodes. Both women were depicted as team leader for a few missions and no one gave them any MAGA guff.
The diversity extended to personal backgrounds, as well. Scarlett was from Atlanta (kind of on the nose there). Gung-Ho hailed from Cajun country. Wild Bill was a Texan. Alpine the mountain ranger, another Black character, was from Idaho. They recognized and embraced each other’s differences and still worked cohesively as a team. The message was clear: “Real” American heroes included all Americans.
This felt like a deliberate contrast to Cobra, which was noticeably non-diverse, but their racial and cultural homogeneity didn’t give them an edge, despite what MAGA might believe. They squabbled and fought amongst themselves almost as much as House Republicans.
G.I. Joe was far less cynical than MAGA. In G.I. Joe: The Movie, Lt. Falcon (Don Johnson) is prepared to make the ultimate sacrifice after disabling a Cobra weapon that’s now about to explode. He tells his teammates to leave him behind and save themselves. Cobra was defeated and the Joes could have gone home, as Donalds suggests, but Sgt. Slaughter reminds Falcon that’s not how a team operates: “Either we all go home or none of us goes home.” Republicans can’t even understand that sentiment, let allow practice it.
G.I. Joe vs. Tucker Carlson
The recurring character Hector Ramirez was an obvious parody of Geraldo Rivera, but in retrospect, the fake news peddler has a lot in common with today’s more insidious media figures like Tucker Carlson. In the episode “Twenty Questions,” Ramirez argues on his show that Cobra doesn’t even exist and G.I. Joe itself is part of a government hoax to defraud honest taxpayers. Once Ramirez learns the truth, he immediately requests an interview with Cobra Commander, a known terrorist leader. Fortunately, only cartoon “journalists” are this stupid.
G.I. Joe predicted our political future
Marvel writer and editor Larry Hama created most of the G.I. Joe characters alongside Hasbro and wrote the file card bios that came with each figure (except for Cobra hypnotist Crystal Ball from Bangor, Maine — that was Stephen King). His brilliant 155-issue run on Marvel’s G.I. Joe comic was a best seller but also quite subversive. During the 1980s, Batman and even Superman were sometimes written like Rambo or Dirty Harry. Right-wingers who never served a day in the military are the ones who insist that troops are no more than merciless killing machines. Hama, a Vietnam War veteran, rejected this two-dimensional view.
Hama said in an interview, “I believe there is something inherently fascist about superheroes. After all, they are better than the rest of us and putting themselves above the law to do something about it. A soldier is bound by a code of conduct, international law, and hopefully, honor.”
What holds up shockingly well is Hama’s depiction of Cobra as a proto-QAnon movement that slowly grew in power, taking over the small, unassuming town of Springfield, until it threatened the entire globe. He gave the terrorist organization a disturbing yet complex motivation beyond “they hate our freedoms,” and his version of Cobra Commander is like Donald Trump but with the capacity for human feeling.
The man who’d become Cobra Commander built an organization out of white male entitlement and cultural resentment. “Big business and big government want to stamp out the little guys like me!” he rants to his son, Billy. “But I’ll show them! I’ll show them all!”
Cobra Commander builds a fortune through a pyramid scheme that he says is “based on man’s willingness to exploit his neighbors.” He tells his gullible followers that they’re not just selling vitamins and cleaning products. They’re selling the “idea of selling vitamins and cleaning products.” He’s the ultimate venture capitalist.
Soon, thousands of working-class white people are attending his hate rallies.
“If the government says that an honest man can’t work as much as he wants to and earn as much as he wants to — it’s wrong,” he says, “and we have right to fight back if we want to.”
The enraptured crowd chants, “Tell it like it is!”
Cobra Commander offers his cult nothing but petty, empty gibberish, and the willing fools lap it up. The CPAC audience is eerily similar. Donalds should check his MAGA membership card for a giant red snake. He’s definitely not an American hero, real or otherwise.
Follow Stephen Robinson on Bluesky and Threads.
Subscribe to his YouTube channel for more fun content.
It's all quite uncanny...seriously
GI Joe toys were too expensive, so we had those little plastic guys whose arms didn't move. On the plus side you could set up tons of them around your bedroom and re-enact glorious battles.
A good friend of mine did that once and showed it to his mother and asked her "which side do you think would win?" She (an immigrant from Iran) said "no one wins in a war."
Way to ruin the fun, ma!