REAL AMERICAN HERO

He remembers when his Nana took him shopping and let him pick out three GI Joes, and they only cost three dollars each and he could take them home and play and feel like a real American hero, as though there was justice in the world, and he hoped that the existence of a live action movie wouldn’t ruin his precious memory, and told himself it couldn’t—that he still had the toys—and a Hollywood movie-by-committee-to-the-lowest-common-denominator couldn’t change what happened, but it did alter his perception in the slightest way, and when he thought of Duke and Scarlett and Roadblock his mind flashed not only to the poseable action figures and cartoons and comics that used to provide the representation of those characters in his mind but also to images of filmic actors, yet—further still—he feared the zeitgeist had changed, so when someone made reference to GI Joe the reference did not imply a nostalgia for the past and a child-like hope of being special, of being an elite individual, not merely one in a nameless mass of no-ones ignored and forgotten, but rather to the notion of Hollywood commodity and DVDs made for two cents and sold for twenty dollars and Blu-Rays made for three cents and sold for thirty dollars, which is not to say that the three and three-fourths-inch action figures were not also commodity, made in China under criminal working conditions and marked up 400%, but when that plastic shell came off the cardboard Rank and File card and out dropped the action figure the toy became an icon or fetish of possibility, of justice; it was a hero, a real hero, an American hero who was in the right, and he could go on missions to the sand box and the neighbor’s lawn and the bathtub and Nana’s house, without the connotation of indoctrination found in the word “mission” entering into the equation, and the idol could teach you to know fire safety, which is half the battle, and could really save someone, if only through imagination in those free moments between running through mazes set up for masses, which are not designed for individual potential, and while the fact that said fetish was a representation of military might, and perhaps a might-makes-right ideology, which may have gone on to reinforce nationalistic values of American dominance and Manifest Destiny through power rather than merit or truth, for a child the potential for honor was there, the hope for good, the belief that any action taken against another body—be it politic, corporeal, or divine—would be just and for the safety of the innocent, and against a dictatorship, terrorist, criminal, or abuser, and there would be someone better, someone noble to save those who couldn’t make things right and all could go to bed knowing they’d be safe and wake up to find their hopes realized.

Christopher Alexander Hayter is a PhD Candidate in Creative Writing at Georgia State University.  He received an MFA from at San Francisco State University.   He was the winner of the 43rd Annual Agnes Scott College Writing Festival Fiction Contest in 2014.  His writing has been published in Talking River, Jelly Bucket, The Binnacle, Transfer, and Underground Voices. He is currently editing his first novel and drafting his second.