There’s a cute little gift shop on 42nd Avenue in South Minneapolis called Wasteland. There isn’t much to the place, and the hours are erratic. It seems mostly to be a storefront reserved for the editorializing of its eccentric owner. In lieu of a strong geopolitical or psychosocial opinion one way or another, the window celebrates the season—festooned, for example, with valentines in a good February, or St. Patty’s shamrocks for a peacetime March. Needless to say, the past six months have given the shopkeep plenty of inspiration by which to arrange her display.
Early in the year, we walked by and noticed the window was filled with dolls, toy figurines, and action figures from every walk of fantasy-life: everything from farm animals to stormtroopers to kewpie dolls. They were staging a protest, each holding a little tooth-picket sign with an anti-war slogan. A mutant ninja turtle held the largest sign, which acted as a kind of caption for the whole mob. It said “Toys for Peace.” And we misunderstood the slogan, at first, as a kind of Food for Oil corollary. What if Iraq had been carpet-bombed, we thought, with toys instead of cruise missiles and bunker busters? After all, if we want them to forcibly accept democratic capitalism, why not cut to the chase and litter the whole Middle East with Nikes and Coca-Cola and Nintendo?
A month ago, our friend Kurt Andersen visited Vietnam, just as the first bombs fell in Baghdad. Writing in the New York Times magazine, he found his vacation instructive. Seeing the bright storefronts, the sidewalks in front of Hanoi convenience stores stacked with 12-packs of western soda, Andersen had an epiphany: We may have lost the battle in Vietnam, but we apparently won the war.
That is, if winning means opening new markets for capitalism. But that war, much like this one, hardly proved the veracity of our geopolitical paradigm. (Not a single WMD turned up yet. Hmm.) If terrorism is the visceral response to American imperialism and hegemony in Arab lands, and if this war was about stamping out terrorism, then there’s a pretty good chance that we’ve won this battle but may yet lose the war.
On the other hand, we pride ourselves these days in courageous thinking. And we think Wasteland is onto something. What would happen—really?—if instead of approaching global problems with a hammer, we came at it with grease? If, instead of marching into Baghdad with bayonets, we brought Barbies? Think of the money, the diplomacy, and the innocence that could have been saved if we’d spent $80 billion on toys, clothing, and food for the Iraqis.
Then again, we’re not entirely convinced that raising the standard of living and putting playthings in their hands will help at all. Look at how Gopher fans made Dinkytown look like Basra—after winning a hockey game.
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