The Custodians of Memory

posted at 5:40 pm on May 17, 2010 by Doctor Zero
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I was a high-school student when the movie Rambo came out in theaters.  While waiting in line for a seat on opening weekend, I saw a group of Vietnam vets coming out of a previous showing.  One of them was in a wheelchair.  I asked them what they thought of the movie.  They all indicated they had greatly enjoyed it.

Why would guys who actually served in Vietnam enjoy Rambo? It’s a preposterous movie.  You’d think the vets would have been insulted by Stallone’s superhuman antics, strolling through a thousand rounds of incoming fire and gunning down swarms of panicked enemy soldiers.  If only it had been that easy.

The feeling I got from talking to those vets is that they appreciated the respect Stallone showed them.  He wasn’t trivializing them, any more than the G.I.s who served in World War II felt the creators of Captain America were selling them short.  There were plenty of real heroes in the jungles of Southeast Asia.  Myth and legend have always helped new generations remember the heroism of their fathers.  All the soldiers of Greece and Troy are remembered through the saga of Achilles and Hector.

It works the other way around, too.  Children can dishonor the courage and sacrifice of their parents and grandparents.  Honored memory can be buried under a rotting layer of scorn.  Last night I watched the moving final episode of HBO’s mini-series The Pacific, which ends with a broken soldier healing his soul by walking through a field of long grass, with each stalk representing someone who didn’t come home from the Solomon Islands.  Then I learned the counter-programming on Fox consisted of Family Guy creator Seth McFarlane emptying his bladder on the Vietnam War memorial.

The past is a treasure easily lost in the callous obsessions of the present.  We are the custodians of memory, passing the wisdom and courage of our parents along to our children.  We can hold those memories dear and polish them to a radiant glow, as Steven Spielberg, Tom Hanks, and the rest of the team behind The Pacific did… or we can indulge Seth McFarlane treating them like garbage, heaping one more insult onto a generation of great American soldiers, who have been expected to quietly suffer the contempt of lesser men for too damned long.  There wasn’t even any meaning or passion to McFarlane’s casual disrespect – it was just graffiti, a pointless throwaway joke, on a show noted for its inability to stick to the plot.

Did Seth McFarlane write that nasty little scene himself?  Who cares?  It’s his show, his responsibility.  That’s the point.  Every storyteller is responsible for how he respects the legends of the past, heirlooms from those who endured terror, pain, and death to build the future we inhabit.  It’s up to us to tend the fabric of history wisely, and build a strong weave for coming generations to remember.  A lot of kids watched Family Guy last night.  Some of them will titter like loons every time they see the Vietnam memorial.  Some barely understood the joke, because they haven’t learned enough real history to be properly offended by McFarlane’s insult.

Seth McFarlane can scribble his nasty little insults all day long, with occasional breaks to hide under his bed and quiver when he sees Muslims coming.  There is no reason he should have a chunk of prime-time television on a major network to display those scribbles.  To hell with the half-hearted apologies.  Fox could produce an awesome hour-long special about the heroism of American soldiers in Vietnam over the next couple of days.  I’ll bet they could even get Tom Hanks into a recording studio to narrate.  If that isn’t what we see next Sunday night, instead of more Family Guy, Fox executives are the ones to hold ultimately accountable.

Cross-posted at www.doczero.org.

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