The Last Word
Burack, Jonathan
THE LAST WORD Jonathan Burack Kid Stuff Iremember experiencing stark terror at the age of nine. The year would have been 1951. American troops were fighting in Korea, and a war map appeared on...
...In Mrs...
...It left me breathless, like the face of evil itself...
...It undermined all the cheap and futile props of optimism, all the conventional comforts of the nuclear age...
...But lately there seems to be a widespread desire to shield our current crop of nine-year-olds from them...
...What made The Day After so frightening to many was the recognition that its images of slaughter could not be routin-ized and sanitized...
...This is a bitter truth, and I'm glad Stephen has had to begin contending with it...
...That much we owe to the children...
...Frawley's fourth-grade class that year, we regularly practiced two types of air-raid drills...
...Policies based on cold calculations of mass slaughter, not flickering images on a screen, should arouse our anger and engage our commitment to act...
...It was like a weather map-daily, routine...
...American troops were fighting in Korea, and a war map appeared on television every night...
...If we've suddenly decided to spare kids from viewing violence, why was there no outcry about the harmful effects of watching the recent destruction of more than...
...Did anyone, even Ronald Reagan, think of citing "harmful effects on children" as yet another reason for barring the press from covering the invasion of Grenada...
...I can still see that old man's milky white eye...
...Air-raid rehearsals held no terror for me, only opportunity...
...But it also differed from the depressing, numbing television violence that pervades the screen...
...Kids watch it over dinner and while doing their homework...
...The advance uproar had led us to expect much more of this sort of thing...
...That wasn't what scared me, though...
...The impersonality of violence, both in reality and as depicted on the tube, has sanitized it for us...
...viewed the program might have nightmares...
...Parents were advised not to let their kids see the show, or to be sure to watch it with them and discuss it...
...When Stephen and his mother and I watched the program, we were, indeed, moved and frightened...
...In the school my stepson Stephen attends, teachers received warnings from some physicians: Youngsters who Jonathan Burack is The Progressive's Development Coordinator...
...To me, this is the biggest nightmare of all—for the rest of us...
...I resent the solicitous concern of those who want to safeguard the young from despair while accepting so much of what makes despair inevitable...
...These basement drills gave me a chance to sidle up to Sandra Cloud, on whom I had developed a monumental fourth-grade crush...
...It gives me no pleasure to see children exposed to agony and despair, but I don't believe nightmares are the issue...
...The words kids use for this type of killing and maiming tell us all we need to know about the level of alienation we have attained: People are "taken out," "blown away," "wasted," as if they were mere refuse and murder a minor pollution problem...
...the front line didn't move much from night to night...
...In fact, it was rather reassuring...
...As one Wisconsin high school student put it, "There's movies like Friday the 13th that are on television and the school board doesn't send any notes home saying, 'Don't watch this.'" Before I viewed The Day After, I doubted that megatonnage and mass slaughter could, in fact, compete with Poe's milky white eye in evoking terror among young children...
...All kids have them and all kids need to have them...
...It offered us only the narrowest and most difficult passage to renewed hope...
...I treasure the memory of my encounter with Edgar Allen Poe...
...Those nights when I crouched in my bed, listening to the wind whistle in the chimney outside my room, wrestling with the "dark side," were part of the experience of growing up...
...But we were also surprised to note that scenes of mutilated bodies and acts of individual cruelty were held to a minimum...
...200 U.S...
...They might lose all hope...
...Such unaccustomed concern for the tender sensibilities of young children puzzles me...
...The other type of drill, which involved moving all of the students and teachers into the basement, was based on the assumption that we might have an hour's warning that the Russians were coming—enough time to take cover below ground...
...What exactly was it about the violence portrayed in The Day After that had so many of us worried...
...My nemesis was an animated movie version of Edgar Allen Poe's Telltale Heart which my whole family took in one night at the Palace Theater in downtown Norwalk, Connecticut...
...Such images terrorize all of us these days...
...So what was it that frightened me so badly in 1951...
...Unlike Poe's story, these programs are often devoid of human feeling, imagination, motive, or majesty...
...I understood how it could drive a man to kill...
...After all, television is overloaded every evening with the most callous forms of violence...
...It takes the appearance of sleek steel, a computer console, a round slab of cement capping a missile silo in the plains...
...They see innocents randomly slaughtered every night—and they do not have nightmares about it...
...And it still evokes that delicious thrill of terror...
...Marines in Lebanon...
...What was responsible for weeks of nightmares and many nights when my bedroom door was left open with the hall light on...
...Thirty-two years later, I tend to visualize a different face of evil...
...In the "sneak attack" drills, we had three seconds to get under our desks and place our hands over neck and eyes to fend off flying glass...
...A great flap arose in recent weeks about whether children should be allowed to see The Day After, ABC's television depiction of the annihilation of Kansas City in a nuclear war...
...Such "terror" is the soul and substance of fairy tales, myths, legends, everything that contributes to the magic of maturing...
...Apparently, mutilation and cruelty were not the images that troubled those who tried to keep kids from seeing the film...
...The show confirmed my doubts: The ABC program simply didn't pack that kind of wallop...
Vol. 48 • January 1984 • No. 1
