High life
War cry
Taki
If this wer New York
e a more just world, people like Jane Fonda would not have been allowed ir? Perfect their sun tans on Memorial Day. alas, it is not, thus the profiteers of the ann-Vietnann-war movement were free to pursue the good life while the nation -1'1,13notired those who answered its call to l ,. duty and paid the ultimate price for doing b bring up the name of Jane Fonda cause one of the networks had the bad zste to show a film of hers over the eekend, although in fairness I'll take the network scheduling over the Memorial Day under Chancellor will resume his tele- ision column next week.
weekend anytime. I watched The Longest Day, The Sands of Iwojima, Back to Ba- taan, and In Which We Serve, and by the time I went to bed on Monday night I was ready to take on the commie-pinkos single- handed, which imagine was the reason the films were made in the first place.
Which brings me to the point I'm trying to make about Hollywood and modern film makers. I don't know why but once upon a time, mute/-Europa refugees like the Warner brothers, Samuel Goldwyn and Harry Cohn made patriotic films praising the cotintry that had taken them in and given them the opportunity to live like free men. Those moguls were basically crude, uneducated men, who were known to ruin an actor's or actress's career on a whim, yet intellectually honest enough never to doubt the debt they owed to the United States, or to those who kept America free, the ones that F. Scott Fitzgerald once described as American country boys dying in the Argonne.
Well, as everyone knows, those were the good old days. After the moguls died off, the young whippersnappers took over, and the rot began. Total rejection of everything American became the order of the day, and the young whippersnappers made sure we got the message. Films made in Hollywood rejected traditional morality and religion ad nauseam, film-makers probably being aware of the fact that Oswald Spengler had listed total rejection of morality and religion as one of the harbingers of the death throes of a culture. In other words, the New Hollywood knew exactly what it was trying to do.
Who are these People creating the diver- sion for Americans? Almost all are white males, with vast incomes, (98 per cent) ur- ban, university educated, and politically ultra-liberal. Four in five see nothing wrong with homosexuality, 50 per cent are atheist, and only 20 per cent attend church; 99 per cent of them believe that they should con- trol America's popular culture in order to advance their own concepts of social reform. (The statistics are those of Patrick Buchanan, a man, needless to say, not from Hollywood.)
Given the above facts, it is no wonder 'We're rich! Ws Perrier water!'
that I hate the movies only a bit less than I hate American television. Every small-town inhabitant is more often than not depicted as a red neck by today's film-makers, every soldier a sadist. Priests are usually closet perverts, while businessmen are total crooks. How long American society can re- main healthy if its popular culture con- tinues to celebrate such rubbish is open to question, and there are those who believe it is already too late.
I kept thinking of these things while watching all the old war movies over the weekend. Even the networks had the decen- cy not to show modern war films that denigrate the American fighting man. For my part, I had a house party and my guest of honour was a friend who won two Silver Stars in Vietnam, Special Forces Captain Chuck Pfeiffer.
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