The administration's hawkishess provided the political rationale for parental complicity, and the White House's deregulatory agenda helped television become the most influential - and most invasive - marketer of kids products, more and more of which were violent and military-themed. Reaganism abetted this dawn of the 'the military-entertainment complex,' as Wired magazine called it. With the Pentagon shaping movie screenplays, investing in video games, cooperating with toy marketers, and eventually working with baseball-card companies to publish Desert Storm trading cards, 1985's classic sci-fi novel 'Ender's Game' seemed more prophecy than fantasy. But for a generation that grew up on 'Reading Rainbow,' 'Memory,' and Speak and Spell's 'E.T.' Fantasy Module (geranium has only one r!), games and entertainment were teaching tools, and the militarization of childhood that started in the 1980s made the little green men, cap guns, and Boy Scout retreats of old-time Americana look positively pacifist.

'In an open society, such as the United States, the hidden and integrated nature of the propaganda best convinces people they are not being manipulated.'Įxactly, and neither I nor my parents were supposed to think much about what the 1980s were teaching me and every other kid in our basements-turned-bunkers. 'Propaganda is most effective when it is least noticeable,' writes public relations expert Nancy Snow. I was just punching in up-up-down-down-left-right-left-right-B-A, then happily mowing down anything and everything that moved. All I did was cheer.Īnd when I played 'Contra' on my Nintendo NES, I wasn't questioning the premise of a game named after violent terrorist death squads in Nicaragua that were being funded by the Reagan administration's illegal CIA cash transfers from Iran.

When I rented Hollywood's first PG-13 rated production, 1984's 'Red Dawn,' and I saw the teen heartthrobs protect America by racking up execution after execution, I didn't know the movie would also become the Guinness world-record holder for violent acts depicted per minute in a film. Joe Snowcat tank to indiscriminately fire one of its six missiles at the Cobra soldiers who so often held my LEGO city hostage, I didn't think that if this were real, it would probably leave a smoldering pile of blood and limbs and innocent victims.

Let's be completely clear: I did not consciously know I was a devout militarist in 1988 at the young, impressionable age of 12.

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