Sighhhh.... I only wish the villians of my youth were accurate reflections of real life ones. When I was a kid, terrorism wasn't the horror that it can be today. Terror was unthreateng, incompetent, blue, and consisted of just one entity. Yes I speak of none other than that terrorist organization.determined to rule the world: C.O.B.R.A.
Their only objective was to rule the world, that's all. They were essentially a heavily funded international street gang. They didn't have any religious or political affiliation (unless you consider world-domination a politic). Their organization didn't spring from the leftovers from a U.S. miltary project in some other country, or from an oppressed class resorting to violence to get their views heard. They were a hooded space alien, a snake-wearing genetic experiment, and a guy with a metal head.
They didn't attack any particular group, they just went after the money. They didn't make their objective the death of innocent civilians, and even if they did crash your fancy-dress ball in search of gold watches and pearl necklaces, you could rest assured that they wouldn't actually hurt you at all, no matter how much posturing and threatening they may do.
The worst one would have to worry about is perhaps being subjected to hallucinogenic ballons, as opposed to say... radiation poisoning. Their plots were so ludicrously ineffectual that the best they could hope for was that the governments of the world would surrender power just to get them to stop being so annoying.
And they were certainly more politically correct than your modern-day terrorist group. They had high-ranking women officals (who were also hot), and I swear I even saw a few female foot soldiers, but that may have been just my overactive childhood imagination running away with me. It was pretty whitewashed in terms of ethnicity, but I bet they would have taken anybody who actually wanted to join, and they never expressed any sort of prediliction for attacking any type of minority groups, or expressed racist or homophobic sentiments. And maybe I presume too much, but I'm pretty sure about 1/4 of that group was gay, which is about half that of G.I. Joe's rate, but good nonetheless. I bet you can't find too many real-life gay-friendly terrorists. And even if none of the Cobra dudes were gay, as least they dressed up super-fabulous!
I think the government should secretly fund a new terrorist organization. I propose the formation of C.O.B.R.A. I'm sure it won't be too hard to find a megalomanical dope to wear a metal mask all the time and make up off the wall schemes to get rich which result in lots of custom A-10 Thunderbolts being blown up, and line of blue-suited white boys with thier hand over their heads being marched off to prison in front of the rifles of laughing G.I.'s. It would ruin the name of terrorism and make all those genuinely involved in the practice so ashamed that they'd give it up in humiliation of being associated with those yahoos.
That or the U.S. could adopt a policy of becoming positively involved in the rest of the world and not simply backing those who best serve our economical interests, but which do you think is going to happen first?
