Conclusion
A policy of saying no to war toys has many drawbacks, one of which is the reality that enforcing any prohibition requires a force equal to or greater than the force of the desire for what is prohibited.
I would imagine that most adults have witnessed children's performative tantrums once denied what they most want. Whether in a store, another child's play area, or in their own backyard, children's desire is a force with which to be reckoned. Sometimes desire can be rechanneled and children's attention fixed on an acceptable alternative toy or form of play. However, when this does not work, when children's fixation on a war toy or war play is parallelto the adult world's fixation with war, then the force of prohibition must overcome the children's desire. This is one of the most difficult terrains of child rearing, and it is territory that in any militarized society is in danger of being dominated by a logic of power informed by militarist values and strategies: punishment or the threat of punishment is the only way to resolve a conflict and the world is divided up into two distinct categories, good and bad, where the bad is inherently evil and must be suppressed by the good.
Rather than try to thwart children's fascination with war play and war toys, it makes more sense to move with the force of their desire and learn to challenge, redirect, subvert, and accept the products of their imaginations in context and over time. Play is a fertile realm for understanding, not only history and politics, but the emotions of being human in a complex, highly militarized world. Children must learn equally complex strategies of social negotiation and emotional coping on the road to becoming engaged global citizens. In addition to making wiser, more connected, and more aware citizens, compassionate and engaged war play has a further advantage in that it can become a realm in which the work of demilitarization can begin.
The process of demilitarizing any one or all nations will be enormous and multifaceted. Workers will need to be retrained, desire will need to be redirected, factories will need to be refitted, and identities will have to be refigured. Toys and the world of play can become one realm where this massive project could begin to be imagined. Play is a creative place cordoned off from many of the limiting forces of reality. The demobilization and refunctioning of MIME-NET is too large a project to imagine, let alone to undertake. However, demobilizing the forces of militarism in the world of toys seems far more possible. If we cannot begin here, then where?Notes
1. John Fiske, Understanding Popular Culture. Boston, 1989, p. 14.
2. Darlene Hammell and Joanna Santa Barbara, “War Toys/PGS Briefing Paper,” in Physicians for Global Survival. http://www.pgs.ca/pgs.php/prevention/11/. Accessed 30 October 2007. PGS is the Canadian chapter of International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War.
3. For an example of militarist-styled children's bedding: BabyUniverse.com's California Kids Flying Tigers collection with its “patchwork of khaki planes, green planes, solid chambray, camouflage and solid cream [that] make up this WWII inspired bedding collection. This set features lots of high flying action for the little soldier in your life” (BabyUniverse. http://www.babyuniverse.com/ kit/baby/1148/FlyingTigers.html. Accessed 30 October 2007).
4. “Pacifist Mamas Ban Toy Soldier Wars They Rule That Wooden Guns Are Menace to World Peace,” Washington Post. 12 December 1933, p. 15.
5. John Michlig, GI Joe: The Complete Story of America’s Favorite Man of Action. San Francisco, 1998, p. 155.
6. The once trusted name in creative nonviolent toys, now even Lego produces play sets that promote fantasy fighting such as the Star Wars, Galidor, and ExoForce series.
7. One early example of a crusader against war toys was Constance Wilde, wife of Oscar Wilde, who addressed the Women’s Committee of the International Arbitration and Peace Association in 1888.
Some years later, activism among toy pacifists was so popular that the famed short-story writer Saki wrote a piece entitled “The Toys of Peace,” which satirized the trend (Ed Halter, From Sun Tzu to Xbox: War and Video Game. New York, 2006, pp. 50, 54).8. Daphne White, “From War Chests to Toy Chests: How to Change your Child’s Worldview for the Better, One Toy at a Time,” in Mothering. http://www. mothering.com/articles/growing_child/consumerism/toy_chests.html. Accessed 5 May 2008.
9. Patricia Cohen, “Child’s Play Has Become Anything but Simple,” New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/14/books/14play.html. Accessed 5 May 2008.
10. Elizabeth Gardner, “Understanding The Net’s Toughest Customer: Why It’s Worth Targeting Those Elusive 13-and-Unde rs,” Internet World Magazine. http://www.iw.com/magazine.php?inc=020100/2.01coverstory.html. Accessed 5 May 2008.
11. “Movie Cross Promotions,” Discount Store News. http://findarticles.com/p/ articles/mi_m3092/is_16_37/ai_50267681. Accessed 5 May 2008; Suna Chang, “The Toys of Summer,” EW.com. http://www.ew.com/ew/article/0,,284896,00. html. Accessed 5 May 2008.
12. Dale Buss, “A Product-Placement Hall of Fame,” Business Week. http://www. businessweek.com/1998/25/b3583062.htm. Accessed 5 May 2008.
13. Julianne Hill, “The PG-13 Trap,” Promo. http://promomagazine.com/entertain- mentmarketing/marketing_pg_trap/. Accessed 5 May 2008.
14. Richard Morgan, “Size Mattered for Product Tie-Ins,” Variety. http://www. kobinenterprises.com/webpages/presspages/rayban.html. Accessed 5 May 2008.
15. Jonathan Rosenbaum, Movie Wars: How Hollywood and the Media Limit What Movies We Can See. Chicago, 2002, p. 67; Chang, “Toys of Summer.”
16. Frederic Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalis. New York, 1991; Jean Baudrillard, Simulation. New York, 1983; Jane Kenway and Elizabeth Bullen, Consuming Children: Education-Entertainment-Advertising. Philadelphia, 2001; Kim Humphery, Shelf Life: Supermarkets and the Changing Cultures of Consumption.
Cambridge, 1998.17. Gisela Wegener-Spohring, “War Toys in the World of Fourth Graders: 1985 and 2002,” in Jeffrey Goldstein, David Buckingham and Giles Brougere, eds., Toys, Games, and Media. Mahwah, New Jersey, 2004, p. 31.
18. Ibid.
19. Roger Ebert, “Small Soldiers,” RogerEbert.com. http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/ apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/19980710/REVIEWS/807100306/1023. Accessed 5 May 2008.
20. Research conducted by Children’s Research Unit report, Youthsight, suggests that even the youngest viewers will understand that the film’s opening is a commercial (in Kenway and Bullen, p. 110): “Children from as young as three years old can recognize the persuasive intent of advertising. While at this early age, they can verbalise the role of advertising as ‘they’re trying to get me to buy it,’ by the age of five or six this has developed into ‘they are trying to sell me something.’ By seven, most children are capable of understanding exactly what advertisers are trying to achieve and, by then, children have become adept critics and prove a hard—even cynical—audience to influence.”
21. Ebert, Small Soldiers.
22. Scott Rosenberg, “Toy Gory,” Salon.com. http://www.salon.com/ent/movies/ reviews/1998/07/10review.html. Accessed 5 May 2008.
23. Ed Halter, “War Games: New Media Finds Its Place in the New World Order,” Village Voice. http://www.villagevoice.com/news/0246,halter,39834,1.html. Accessed 5 May 2008; Halter, From Sun Tzu.
24. Krista Foss, “All I Want for Christmas Is a Bombed-Out Dollhouse,” Globe & Mail/Canada. http://www.commondreams.org/views02/1123-01.htm. Accessed 5 May 2008.
25. Israel Canlapan, “Small Soldiers, Bi Ho-Hum,” Christian Answers.net. http: //www.christiananswers.net/spotlight/movies/pre2000/i-smallsoldiers.html. Accessed 5 May 2008.
26. Wegener-Spohring, “War Toys in the World of Fourth Graders,” p. 25.
27. The brightly colored handmade puppet sewn in war-torn Sri Lanka is as much a war toy as the frighteningly realistic and powerful paintball gun; one’s connection to violence and injustice is more hidden than the other’s, but both are caught in the web that is militarism.
I find just as distressing that children and adults cannot make the connections between seemingly innocuous products and global violence as the fact that children play gleefully with war toys as they are traditionally understood.28. Kerry Mallan and Roderick McGillis, “Between a Frock and a Hard Place: Camp Aesthetics and Children’s Culture,” Canadian Review of American Studies/ Revue canadienne d’etudes americaines. 35, 1, 2005, p. 3.
29. Jesse Hibbs, dir., To Hell and Back. Universal, 1955; Franklin J. Schaffner, dir., Patton. Twentieth Century Fox, 1970; Francis Ford Coppola, dir., Apocalypse Now. Zoetrope Studios, 1979; Robert Aldrich, dir., The Dirty Dozen. MGM, 1967; Rob Reiner, dir., This Is Spinal Tap. Spinal Tap Productions, 1984.
30. James Der Derian, Virtuous War: Mapping the Military-Industrial-MediaEntertainment Network. Boulder, 2001, p. xx.
31. Halter, From Sun Tzu, p. 194.
32. Clive Thompson, “The Making of an X Box Warrior,” New York Times. http:// query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9C02EEDD133FF931A1575BC0A 9629C8B63. Accessed 5 May 2008.
33. Halter, From Sun Tzu, p. 198.
34. Lance Winslow, “Unmanned Vehicle Robotic Warfare,” The Online Think Tank. http://www.worldthinktank.net/pdfs/unmannedvehiclerobotic.pdf. Accessed 5 May 2008.
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