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burst of four-part h. .aony. On the far frontier of Manifest Destiny, bravery was a given, bad behavior not countenanced. Demon drink, that patronizing comedy curse of the Irish, was the only vice Ford allowed his horse soldiers.
James Jones, in ?From Here to Eternity,? saw military life as predicated on the class hatred between officers and enlisted men. For Ford, such a contention was heresy. A rear admiral in the Navy Reserve, he had an overly romantic officer?s view of the military dynamic as a homoerotic bonding between commander and commanded. His Westerns glorified the social lie that sergeants were members of a brave servant class that existed but to do for Captain Wayne and the flag they served for thirteen dollars a month. ?When the legend becomes fact,? Ford has a character say, in ?The Man Who Shot. Liberty Valance,? ?print the legend.? It is an idea that leads not to art but to the agitprop used by the haves to keep the have-nots in line.
If Spielberg owes a debt to Ambrose for his material in ?Private Ryan,? he seems even more indebted to Ford?s cavalry pictures. Once off Omaha Beach, Spielberg?s film, however brilliantly shot and edited, becomes as stereotypical and sentimentally askew as a Ford oater, with the all-purpose Hollywood squad: the Jew, the Italian, the smartmouth from Brooklyn, the hillbilly Christer, and the intellectual who can?t cut the mustard. Tom Sizemore, as the stead-fasdy loyal Sergeant Horvath, is an exact stand-in for the Ward Bond sergeant part in ?Fort Apache,? and Edward Burns, as Private Reiben, is a younger version of the raffish Victor McLaglen. But it is Tom Hanks, as Captain Miller, the perfect John Wayne surrogate, who grounds the picture in the familiar: a laconic and upright commander who accepts the proposition that orders are to be followed, no matter how superfluous they seem or what folly they promise.
THIS is a comforting notion, embraced not just by Spielberg and Ambrose but by a public caught up in the salubrious patriotism that ?Private Ryan? unleashed in the land. On the Internet, reservations about the picture incurred a torrent of opprobrium. ?Did your cappuccino fill you with too much angst to understand that this movie was
not created to entertain your'? Morgan says to Brad. ?I want you to count to 30. When you get finished, realize that in that amount of time 100s of men died at Omaha Beach so that you could piss on their memories 50 years later.? And Darren to the unfortunate Brad: ?Let me guess. You are a wannabe hippie. Take your poetry reading, latte-drinking, non-shaving, sandal-wearing BUTT to Arlington National Cemetery and then come back on line, pudboy.? Many film critics resorted to the same butch and bluster, and nowhere did this blossom faster than on the nation?s op-ed pages. ?Tom Hanks and his bunch are precisely the kind of guys who, two reels after the end of ?Ryan,? would have liberated Schindler?s factory,? Charles Krauthammer wrote in the Washington Post with a rhetorical vulgarity that he seemed to equate with grunt-speak. Maureen Dowd, praising Spielberg?s ?patriotic? movie in the New York Times, wrote, ?Suddenly, baby boomers realize that, despite a buzzing economy and a passel of luxury goods, we are going to die without experiencing the nobility that illuminated the lives of our parents and grandparents. They lived through wars and depressions, life and death, good stomping evil. Our unifying event was ?Seinfeld.? ?
I am suspicious of commentators who find parables in references to television shows; a thesaurus of topical smart references is sniggering, not thinking, a punditry for the army of the knowing. Dowd?s posturing has the air of Generational Flagellation Lite. The fact that one was born in the years immediately before or after 1948 does not mean that he or she is automatically morally inferior. Ordering up a world war or a global economic crisis seems a heavy price to pay just to test a generation?s mettle, and this welling up of nostalgia for such unexperienced challenges suggests the extent to which Vietnam remains a malignant shadow on the nation?s X-ray.
Whatever his evasions about the draft and the reserves, William J. Clinton was at least consistent in his opposition to the Vietnam War. Other members of the political class who ducked the draft?now have a new mantra: they supported the war, but they could not support the no-win policy of Lyndon Johnson and the Democratic Congress. It is a stand that exhibits a devotion to
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