Word: heroism
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Both shows reflect the way dissent has become domesticated in America; what were radical antiwar views in the '60s are now mainstream TV attitudes. High- ranking officers and other authority figures are mostly buffoons, insensitive martinets or corrupt sleaze balls. Heroism, at least as the military tries to market it, is usually a sham; public relations is the name of the game. A lieutenant in Tour of Duty gets drunk in a bar and empties the place by wildly firing his gun. A few seconds later, a bomb explodes inside, and he is hailed as a hero. Notes a smarmy...
...Viet Nam war in 1968, but the year was a series of national traumas. After Tet, Americans suffered in their living rooms as more than 5,000 U.S. Marines held out for weeks after being surrounded at Khe Sanh, a redoubt in the chilly, wet South Vietnamese highlands. The heroism under heavy fire reminded many of the French troops who surrendered in 1954 at Dien Bien Phu. But the Marines did not surrender. In March, Westmoreland was replaced as U.S. commander in South Viet Nam by General Creighton Abrams. President Johnson announced he would not run for re-election...
Wasn't that a time? Each year of the early 1960s brought new images of heroism and horror as the civil rights movement spread through the South like kudzu. 1960: four Negro students sit in at a Greensboro, N.C., lunch counter. 1961: the Congress of Racial Equality inaugurates its Freedom Rides to integrate Southern bus terminals. 1962: in Oxford, Miss., James Meredith enters Ole Miss, its first black student since Reconstruction...
...theology, as the sticking point. Mississippi Burning is a fiction based on fact; it invents characters and bends the real-life plot; it colors in the silhouette of events with its own fanciful strokes and highlights. In focusing on the agents, Parker and screenwriter Chris Gerolmo italicize the gumshoe heroism of white officials while downplaying the roles of black and white visionaries who risked, and sometimes lost, their lives to help fashion a free America...
...many years it was taken as gospel that Marcos was the most decorated Filipino soldier of World War II. Technically that is true: while running for President in 1965 he nudged the Senate into retroactively awarding him some 20 medals for heroism, nine of them on the same day. Seagrave argues convincingly that Marcos' stirring tales of escaping from Japanese prison camps after being tortured, and then conducting reconnaissance raids for the Filipino resistance, are so much hogwash. In fact, an American commander of the underground in 1945 had ordered Marcos' arrest and execution as a collaborator...