There's a particular form of immaturity that Gen X nerds are vulnerable to, a nostalgia for the brightly colored fantasies of our childhood, a refusal to acknowledge that it's foundational propaganda for our present dystopia.
The best exploration I've seen of it was an episode of the TV series Community, in which one of the characters, Jeff, is in a coma, and retreats to his memories of the cartoon, GI Joe. His adult sexuality and understanding of the nature of war is interpolated into his memory of the show, which ends up revealing just what absurd, disturbing propaganda it had been. It was a fantasy of having one's cake and eating it too: blissful childhood memories of propaganda about the US war machine.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G.I._Jeff
FoolishOwl
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2026-03-16 16:16:07 UTC
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2026-03-16 16:16:07 UTCEvent JSON
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