By John C. O'Connell
Millions of people went to see Pearl Harbor, the movie, this weekend. If they went for the spectacle, the computer-generated graphical arts, they were probably entertained. There was the inevitable love story and the predictable rivalries, the expected explosions and the anticipated depictions of gore. There was plenty of sound and fury; plenty of
superficial dialog and dramatic visuals to enjoy. It's good to suspend your mind and engage your eyes alone once in a while.
But people who went for an education ought to be disappointed; it was comic-book history.
Of course, real airplanes didn't fly in between hangers sideways, and the two hot-shot flyers didn't go on any Tokyo bombing raid after shooting down Zeros over Pearl. And Long Island's Mitchel Field had one L and wasn't surrounded by mountains, even in the '40s.
Some people revel in movies that reduce historical events to politically correct, sensitivity-conscious nonsense with all the depth of a soap opera. See that man of one or two expressions, Mel Gibson, in Patriot and you know all about the agonies and heroism of the American Revolution. See Gone with the Wind and think you know about the Civil War. See Pearl Harbor and you experience the horror of war as it was almost 60 years ago. Not likely.
The only people who know war are those who have been in one. There isn't any movie that shows you just the way it was. There aren't any special effects that are "just like" you were there.
We're becoming so thin-thinking. If it's not visually appealing, it's boring. It seems our sources are all flat: tv, movie screens and Internet monitors. Our attention spans for the hard-to-fathom notions of bravery and sacrifice, commitment and complicated love are so short. Personal imagination gets more limited every day that we subjugate it to that of a graphic artist with photo-manipulation software.
For the lazy-minded, those who missed the lesson on critical thinking, what seems real, becomes real. For those who've bought into the destructive myth that all opinions are just as right as any others, even those unsupported by fact or graced with absolute truths, a cinematographer's lens can replace an historian's eye.
Movies and documentaries aren't the same thing; just like celebrities and heroes aren't. When we confuse them, we spoil the pleasure of good entertainment and destroy the value of heroism and courage.
This Memorial Day in Valley Stream, as elsewhere, real heroes marched. Veterans of America's wars paraded down streets to strangers' applause; veterans were there who've smelled the stench of gunpowder and felt the sickening wet of flowing blood and held comrades as they died.
But Memorial Day is even more than Veterans Day. On Monday we gathered to remember those who learned the ultimate lesson of war: not only how brutal war can be, but how final. Those brave souls march no more.
