Zartan Rides Again!

A story about personal growth

When I was in the fourth grade, I was a cartoon connoisseur. He-Man, Voltron, Dungeons & Dragons, Inspector Gadget - I watched them all. But for me and my circle of friends, there was one classic '80s cartoon that excelled them all, which was GI-Joe. For us, getting our after school GI Joe fix was serious business. Each episode would become the subject of deep, intellectual lunchroom discussion the next day. I watched this cartoon religiously; it was an act of pietistic devotion reflecting the same fervor as a branch covidian vaxxer getting her booster shot.

But there's an odd twist to the story. The Joes were supposed to be the good guys, yet my friends and I always, ALWAYS, rooted for COBRA, even though we knew that every episode was going to end with yet another "save the day" moment for the real American heroes. We found this absolutely ridiculous. Even as nine-year-olds we could clue in to the stereotyped bathos of the Joe team, full of cookie cutter plastic personnel (and I'm not even talking about the action figures). Every Joe was a formulaic square jawed dude, with the occasional square-jawed broad thrown in for good measure. Plus, how could one Joe Skystriker shoot down dozens of COBRA Rattlers? Are you jivin' me? COBRA was obviously at least a near-peer competitor to the United States in its own right. So GI Joe's constant victories against overwhelming odds seemed pretty unbelievable in a world where an equivalent military power like the Soviet Union was being manhandled by a bunch of goatherders with AK-47s in Afghanistan (which would later be repeated for the US military).

We didn't like this. It's not so much that we were directly offended by the banality of the Joes themselves, but that we were being asked to believe things so obviously implausible. Even as fourth graders, we took this as an insult to our intelligence. Being wee little Gen-Xers in training, we were far too cynical to fall for this sort of thing, so we revolted against this obvious inconsistency in our favorite cartoon.

We did this by adopting the identity of the "bad guys" in the GI Joe universe - COBRA. Seriously, we were obsessed with COBRA. During the daily kickball games at recess, we'd shout "COOOOOOBRA!" every time we were up to kick. We even took to naming ourselves after various COBRA leaders, claiming each one (except for Destro, since we all thought he was kind of a butthead). I was Zartan, the master of disguise, the commandant of camouflage, the governor general of guile, who also happened to have a really cool holographic motorcycle.

Now, we didn't understand it at the time, but what we were doing was nothing less than revolting against the modern world. Evola would have been proud. We had come face-to-face with the inauthenticity of the modern media-propaganda complex and chosen to resolutely oppose it. This was our tiger and we were going to ride it.

It certainly doesn't hurt that COBRA's backstory included a lot of elements compatible with this revolt against the modern world. The organization was started by Cobra Commander as an opponent of transnational megacorporate power and American globohomogayplex, which was a thing even in the 1980s. Cast as a "terrorist" organization, COBRA could alternatively be interpreted as a rebellion against the stultifying homogenization of world society by liberal democracy, yet one that didn't rely on alignment with the communist world headed by the Soviet Union (which is largely absent from the series). COBRA represented a true "third way" between bread lines and drug-fueled hedonism. In a sense, COBRA stood for the return of heroic Uranian values, a restoration of order from the chaos and degeneracy of which the Joes were the paladins.

Of course, none of that occurred to us back then, at least consciously. We might have had a gut feeling about it, though.

But today, it kind of feels like this is more real than ever before. The three and a half decades since the days of those cartoons have only seen the "real world" become even more fake and inauthentic. The hyperreality world of the nightly news and Regime propaganda are even more unbelievable than the Joes constantly beating the odds. The stranglehold of the global elite's transnational capitalism is tighter than ever around the necks of the common people. America's real-life GI Joes fight and die around the globe so that little brown foreigners can experience the joys of feminism and subsidized gay sex.

We live in a world where those that we are told are "the good guys" are often anything but. Is it any surprise if many folks out there begin to doubt the purity of our elites' motives? Meanwhile, those who really are the good guys - who stand for truth and righteousness, or at least a reasonable normalcy - are vilified by the powers that be. The perennial yet everlasting values of heroism, the emergence and recognition of Carlyle's "Great Man," the resolute opposition to that which falsely terms itself "progress" - these are maligned by the same set who would think to present to us their plastic, square-jawed eleutheromaniac champions as a substitute.

Like Zartan, I feel like a dissident who blended into this system for decades. When working as I did in an industry like Big Pharma - a sure and steady centerpiece of the modern world's globohomo corporate complex - one needed to camouflage one's self. For quite a while, I'd forgotten the lessons of fourth grade skepticism and gone along with the corporate program, but gradually became disenchanted, both with it and with the prevailing propaganda in general. By degrees, I regained that cynicism towards the globohomo hyperreality until eventually it all became clear to me once again. Eventually, another calling took me out of that industry and I've never looked back, or even been tempted to.

Zartan rides again!