THE GOOD WAR
“Everybody was patriotic and clean,” one of the women Terkel interviewed for his book says about wartime in the 1940s. “It was the last time Americans were seen as liberators. And there was something warming about that.”
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In the first half of Michael Hildebrand and Anita Greenberg’s adaptation of Terkel’s book, we see–with the benefit of recent memories–how patriotism feeds the bloodshed. Pop songs celebrate military might. Ordinary soldiers going off to war become romantic objects. Dissent is perceived as intolerant and weak. In Hildebrand and Greenberg’s The Good War, this is underscored through period songs: “The Army Made a Man out of Me,” “As Time Goes By,” “Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition,” and many others.
By juxtaposing Terkel’s stories of innocence and doubt with the joyful songs of the day, Hildebrand and Greenberg explore the gap between wartime propaganda and reality. War has mass appeal. Those who had questions about the war–and they were few–buried them, ashamed.
Post-Panama, post-Desert Storm, we are just now beginning to talk about the results of these wars. The New York Times reports that drug traffic and drug-related violence is up in Central America, not down, since the arrest of former Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega. Panama City is still covered with tents filled with families displaced by the invasion. Saddam Hussein is not only alive, but still able to threaten his people. The Kurds are forever traumatized. Gasoline prices remain high. American-backed Kuwaiti authorities turn a blind eye to abuses against native- born Palestinians.
