Barbie JOE

After reading Barbie Doll, by Marge Piercy, I looked through my son’s toy chest, and noticed a definite recurring theme: GUNS. Perhaps the modern take for a boy should be “GI JOE” or something similar. If you look at this poem in a war context it seems as if you could rewrite this entire poem by simply replacing some words. Instead of being “presented with dolls that did pee-pee,” (991) it would be something like “guns that went rat-tat-tat and miniature tanks and army men.” Then upon graduation a classmate said: You have a duty to fulfill.
The second stanza could stay relatively the same aside from going to and fro apologizing—because I know boys don’t do that! Also some rewording could be used to describe the new soldier’s shooting skills.
Finally in the last stanza, the line that sticks out most to me is: “Her good nature wore out like a fan belt.”(991) How wonderfully descriptive! This seems like a timeless statement that could be applied to everybody in the world who has encountered stress in their lives to the point where they feel they can’t take it anymore (especially GI JOE). So they blew off his nose and legs and offered them up. This statement can be the most powerful anti-war slogan of the poem. This leads to the casket description where everyone says: Doesn’t he look like a hero? Freedom at last.