My son wants to be a goon. Most kids probably have a fascination with the boss, but not mine. Faceless gooning is good enough for him. In the LEGO Batman game, his favorite character is called 'Joker Goon'.
A while back I took Isaac to historic Union Station to celebrate National Train Day. Naturally we took the train there. As always, Isaac was wearing his LEGO Star Wars shirt, a smile and his sunny disposition, made even sunnier by the fact that he was on a train.
At one of the stops an unusual family came on. It was a mother and her three children. Well, maybe... It was an older woman, probably in her forties, a boy and a girl roughly 15 and a kid about 7. Only the 7 years old looked to be developmentally normal. The rest of the family members had... something not quite right. I don't want to sound like a jerk, so I'm not going to diagnose Downs Syndrome vs. Aspergers vs. mental retardation, but it was one of those things. Wide set eyes, smooth features, etc. Only the 7 year old girl was untouched by... whatever. It's not really important, except to say that it put my exceptional 4 year old on roughly the same intellectual plain as the 15 year old boy, and when the boy noticed Isaac's t-shirt, he immediately struck up a conversation about the passion and the glory that is Star Wars.
"Who's your favorite Star Wars character?" the older boy asked Isaac.
After screwing up his tiny face into an exaggerated 'I'm thinking' expression, Isaac finally said, "Stormtrooper"
This puzzled our fellow traveler, who tried to clarify his question a bit more to keep the conversation going, "No, I mean, like, which CHARACTER? Luke or Obi-Wan or Han Solo..."
"OH!" said Isaac, faking understanding, as he so often does to look more sophisticated around people, "In that case, probably a jungle trooper or a snow trooper."
No hero, no villain. No one at the top of the Empiric food chain appeals to him, nor any heroic rag tag freedom fighter. The faceless goon who's just following orders is my sons aspirational self. A cog in the undifferentiated mass of warriors.
I can only imagine how excited he will be in a few years when I introduce him to the Borg.
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