Yeah, it really is hell…
Earlier this week I found my oldest daughter watching the Jerry Bruckheimer crapfest Pearl Harbor, something I actually paid real cash money to go see with the missus when it came out in 2001. (Seriously, Spruance-class hulls moored abreast and made up like WWII-era boats??) She sat enthralled by Mako’s performance as Admiral Yamamoto (He was better in Conan the Barbarian) and the inevitable explosions, surround sound and CG that followed. Caught up in the excitement, she turned to me and shouted, “We got those Japs, didn’t we, Dad?”
Parent Mode kicked right in. “Uh…Yes, we did defeat Japan.” I wondered where my copy of Tora! Tora! Tora! was, or even my bootleg of Grave of the Fireflies.
“But we got ‘em back at the end of the movie, didn’t we?” She referred to the Doolittle Raid on Tokyo in 1942, shown in the tail end of the film.
“Well, sorta. It was important that it happened, but we hit Tokyo later on.” Did we ever.
Still in Bruckheimer Mode, she went on, “But did we hit ‘em back as hard as they hit us?” O-okayyy…
A moment later I calmly opened my laptop and showed her a single picture.
A mother and baby, in what was left of the firebombed capital in 1945. Rendered to carbon, save for the spot of flesh on the woman’s back where the child had been strapped. You can find it on the Wikipedia article describing the U.S. attempt to bring an end the war before having to resort to the A-Bomb or – God forbid – an invasion.
“Did we-?” “Yes, we did. Nearly four years after Pearl Harbor.”
The gears in her head started to turn and the movie began to not matter so much. “And how many died at Pearl Harbor?”
Tap, tap, tap. “About 2,200, including a handful of Japanese pilots.”
“How many there, in Tokyo?” “Just over one hundred thousand. So, yeah…we got ‘em.”
“Oh.”
The biggest surprise to all of this was that she and I had sat down in the same room not long ago and watched Clint Eastwood’s Letters from Iwo Jima, which portrayed that battle from the losing side. Unlike Bruckheimer’’s popcorn-flick disaster, the magnificent Letters used the stories of those Imperial soldiers facing their end to portray the fanaticism which drove the Empire to near-annihilation. But the human toll of geopolitics and warfare just gets washed out with gas-can explosions, bad score and Affleck-on-Beckinsale action.
While I don’t do enough, I must confess, to monitor what the kids watch on TV, I make sure the films they watch have some sort of “teachable moment.” I won’t bore you about my son and I at opening night of Episode III: Revenge of the Sith. Fortunately, I didn’t break out the Barefoot Gen on my girl. But next time I catch her going into “rabid patriot” mode again I’ll have to sit her down…and maybe subject her to Bridge Over the River Kwai. You know, the one with Obi-Wan Kenobi.
