Editorial/The Pearl Harbor of Their Youth
Tyrrell, R. Emmett Jr.
E D I T O R I A L THE PEARL HARBOR OF THEIR YOUTH by R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr. Last month the National Broadcasting Company presented what the Edmund Wilsons of the television art call a...
...One hundred and fifty-five thousand four hundred and nineteen were injured...
...Rather there was bewilderment and sadness...
...is a question with peculiar resonance for a generation of Americans...
...Where were you when you heard they bombed Pearl Harbor...
...That afternoon Kent State was given short shrift...
...Through all those years, involving all those men, could there not have been a few instances of American gallantry or prowess...
...In America our liberal elite believes...
...To Mr...
...The lady from NOW was very much of the opinion that women football players could be just as effective as men in the NFL were it not for "institutionalized sexism," cradle-to-grave discrimination-the kind that stunts women from birth...
...Yet the events animating the imaginations of television's Chekhovs and Ibsens have been tales of American ignominy...
...Our history too is revised, and even our language is now tampered with...
...I remember the conversation vividly...
...Last month the National Broadcasting Company presented what the Edmund Wilsons of the television art call a "dramatization" or a "docu-drama" of the Kent State shootings...
...Yet, as Alexander Solzhenitsyn tells us, in the Soviet Union no one really believes the Marxist-Leninist uplift...
...The sobering fact is that the American people are one of the most strenuously propagandized people on earth...
...Would they not make engrossing drama also...
...However, to a highly ideological elite in the television industry (an elite whose hallucinations were nicely described by Whit Stillman in last month's issue), Kent State has become the Pearl Harbor of their youth...
...From billboards and by broadcast media, he is instructed on the seemly sentiments and wholesome thoughts of the hour...
...You know that the moguls and the sages of NBC will come forth with all sorts of esoteric proofs...
...We can be sad over the loss of life at Kent State, and the deaths of our soldiers in Vietnam...
...Questioning its accuracy is an assault on dogma.an assault on dogma...
...To this day, I believe a sense of sadness is most fitting...
...In 1970 . . . the public had thought the Kent State shootings justified and the Justice Department had disposed of them with a perfunctory investigation," the historian Alonzo L. Hamby has written in his cool, scholarly history of recent America, The Imperial Years...
...Boys are taught women's ways...
...On May 4, 1970, during an anti-war demonstration sparked by the American military action against North Vietnam's Cambodian supply lines, four students were killed by harried National Guard troopers...
...We bus our children...
...is the equally resonant question for younger Americans...
...The truth is somewhat more complicated...
...Today the Associated Press tells us that a 14-year-old runaway captured in a famous photograph as she knelt over the body of a freshly fallen student "became a national symbol of outrage...
...I was in Chicago taping a television talk show with John Filo, the young photographer who snapped the Pulitzer Prize-winning picture of the kneeling girl...
...yet these younger Americans compose not a generation but an elite, an activist element which, from college campuses, opposed the Vietnam war...
...We engineer their society We send them to the school shrink...
...Is the average Russian any more strenuously propagandized...
...Forty-seven thousand one hundred and ninety-two Americans were killed in combat...
...Both are examples of the stupendous propagandizing brought down on the American people every day...
...Eight million seven hundred and forty-four thousand served there...
...We keep them from the dangerous influence of prayer...
...As for the Associated Press's talk of national outrage over Kent State, it is at one with NBC's harping on this tragedy...
...For more than a decade American forces were in Vietnam...
...Of 225 million Americans, how many have thirsted for a "dramatization" of this tragedy...
...NBC's scriptwriters could have written the drama of their Kent State spectacular into dozens of other events of the 1960s and the early 1970s, and ordinary Americans would have watched attentively...
...Yet for an articulate minority there was indeed a sense of outrage, and now that minority is intent on attributing that outrage to an entire nation...
...Why, for instance, does NBC feel the need to do a melodrama on Kent State...
...But how different is it here...
...Rozelle's apparent surprise the two groups were not on good terms...
...I do not know where I was when I first heard about the shootings at Kent State, but I know where I was a couple of days later...
...With the ardor of missionaries, its members inculcate their visions and their values into us...
...Of more immediate concern we can be sad over the shabby treatment of the veterans of that war, and over the gruesome condition of the South Vietnamese, the Cambodians, and the Laotians now living and suffering under their heroic North Vietnamese liberators...
...I, for one, shall await their sophistries with relish...
...There were others on the show-Pete Rozelle of the National Football League, a Chicago sports writer, and the head of the National Organiztion for Women...
...Is this really what the people want to watch...
...His history is always being revised...
...When we did discuss it there was no outrage...
...They are our liberal autocrats' favorite guinea pigs...
...Girls are taught manliness...
...A Kent State Massacre is one of those visions...
...Where were you when you heard about Kent State...
...Yes, I believe it is arguable that the ordinary Yank is as heavily propagandized as the ordinary Ivan...
...Since our withdrawal several million Southeast Asians have perished, and hundreds of thousands now risk their lives to get the hell out...
...It moves me to wonder...
...Filo had just come from there-but women athletes and their relations with the National Football League...
...The primary topic of discussion was not Kent State- though Mr...
Vol. 14 • April 1981 • No. 4
