Okay, fine, but let’s look a little closer at the real context, which is always found near the bottom of anything written by the MSM. On Sunday nights, the series “True Blood” averages 5 million viewers. “Blood” might air in a different time-slot than “The Pacific” but how fine do we want to split these hairs? Most telling is that when the History Channel aired a re-broadcast of “Band of Brothers” in 2004, 4.6 million tuned in. This bears repeating…

A rerun of “Brothers” delivered 1.5 million more viewers than the heavily promoted debut of “The Pacific.”

HBO has over 30 million subscribers and it’s just a fact that Sunday night less than 10% bothered to watch ”The Pacific,” even with the dual pedigree of Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks combined with a very, very heavy promotional blitz and a lingering universal affection for “Band of Brothers.”

So what changed?

No doubt, there are all kinds of factors and to lay the blame completely at the feet of Tom Hanks’ ignorant and offensive comments would be impossible to prove and therefore unfair. However, it’s doubtful anyone wants to debate that having the high-profile face of Hanks — the face of the publicity blitz — defame our country and the troops who fought WWII and today’s War on Terror was at all helpful.

For the most part the MSM tried to spike the story through their normal sin of omission (ignoring news that doesn’t further the Leftist cause). Unfortunately for Hanks, the days of the MSM completely controlling the narrative are over. The inter-web-nets were and are all over this story, Fox News picked it up and though my work gets in the way of talk radio listening, I’m assuming it got some attention there as well.

And what was Hanks’ biggest mistake? Well, his arrogance and the bubble of his A-list life allowed him to forget the world’s changed and that the MSM can no longer make all the bad right-wingers go away; he stepped right into the ongoing and growing narrative of the anti-American, anti-troop Hollywood leftie and then found himself subjected to something completely new in the world of the stah — what the rest of us call Being Held Accountable For What We Say.

Bottom line: This was the very worst publicity the Oscar-winner could have given his miniseries at the very worst possible time.

Certainly, the $200 million HBO production could still rebound, pick up viewers as it rolls on and sell well on DVD. There’s still a lot of life there, and the merits of “The Pacific” should stand apart from the glib hostility one of its creators let slip in what he must have felt was the safe and cuddly environment of MSNBC.

Like all Americans, Tom Hanks has every right to defame our country and warriors in whatever forum he wishes. No one’s arguing that. What the actor might want to consider, though, is keeping up with the times. The days of lobbing political bombs while cowering behind your publicist and then counting on the butt-boy Leftist media to memory-hole anything that might hurt your product are over. 

The disappointing debut of “The Pacific” might have nothing to do with the words of “Our Jimmy Stewart.” However, because his indefensible comments received the kind of thorough airing in our national conversation they would not have just a couple years ago, that possibility is now lingering in the minds of every individual who invested their time, talent and millions into what must have looked like a slam-dunk just a few minutes before Mr. Hanks took a chair with Morning Joe.

The Only Jimmy Stewart

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Hanks made similarly outrageous statements in another interview, which I touched on earlier this week – comments that caught me completely off guard. As you might have read in Michael Broderick’s article from yesterday morning, “The Pacific” was a project Big Hollywood was eager to champion and cover. Obviously, we’ll have to see what Mr. Racism and Terror has in store for us on HBO over the coming weeks. But at this point you have to wonder if the Oscar-winner’s obvious issues regarding the War on Terror might not have colored what we’re about to see in his miniseries. Given the opportunity, Hanks has certainly been eager to tie together both wars into a damning but thoroughly indefensible political statement that portrays our country and military in the worst possible light.

We all assumed ”The Pacific” would be another “Band of Brothers,” and maybe it will be. But much has changed since “Brothers,” a miniseries produced prior to 9/11 (the HBO premiere was Sept. 9th, 2001). The very real Bush Derangement Syndrome (BDS) that has taken over so much of Hollywood and turned otherwise impressive filmmakers into ham-handed propagandists hadn’t quite taken hold yet. However, today Hanks is showing all the symptoms. Will this affect “The Pacific?”

Over at Hot Air, Allahpundit thinks so and writes, “If you were expecting an island-hopping reprise of ‘Band of Brothers’ in this new miniseries, expect otherwise.” 

And you can see why.

Something has changed:

But the context for Hanks’ history lessons has changed. Band of Brothers, HBO’s best-selling DVD to date, began airing two days before 9/11; The Pacific, his new 10-hour epic about the Pacific theater in World War II, plays out against a very different backdrop, when the country is weary of war and American exceptionalism is a much tougher sell. World War II in the European theater was a case of massive armies arrayed against an unambiguous evil. The Pacific war was mainly fought by isolated groups of men and was overlaid by a sense that our foes were fundamentally different from us. In that sense, the war in the Pacific bears a closer relation to the complex war on terrorism the U.S. is waging now, making the new series a trickier prospect but one with potential for more depth and resonance. “Certainly, we wanted to honor U.S. bravery in The Pacific,” Hanks says. “But we also wanted to have people say, ‘We didn’t know our troops did that to Japanese people.’”…

John Hinderacker at Power Line asks the rhetorical question: “Does Hollywood Make You Stupid?,” and then goes on to destroy Hanks’ argument:

What is happening today actually bears a considerable resemblance to the aftermath of Pearl Harbor. Contrary to Hanks’s thoughtless slander, before 1941 probably not a single American was interested in “annihilating [the Japanese] because they were different.” As evidenced by our laxity when it came to national defense. After Pearl Harbor, however, we had no choice but to swing into action–not to annihilate those who are different, but to defeat Japan and restore the peace. The Filipinos were “different” too, of course, so did we take time out to annihilate them? Um, no.

Likewise with the current conflicts. Prior to September 11, far from setting out to annihilate those who are “different,” we protected Muslims in Bosnia, tried to save Somalians from the warlords, and rescued Kuwait from Saddam Hussein. Notwithstanding endless provocations, Americans were happy to leave it at that until Islamic terrorists murdered 3,000 Americans. Once again, we had to swing into action. So, did we “annihilate” those “different” Afghans and Iraqis? No, we established democracies and tried to bring both of those countries into the modern world by, among other things, liberating their women. How can a person of normal intelligence, as Hanks no doubt is, be so blind to reality? Presumably it has to do with swimming in the perverse, liberal water of Hollywood.

Maybe “The Pacific” can rise above the ignorance of one of its creators. Having a millionaire actor label your selfless and noble sacrifice as “racism” and “terror” is one thing. But to have such a message forever imprinted on film is quite another. 

For the sake of our Veterans let’s hope the BDS and the slander it manifests in “Our Jimmy Stewart” is confined to the thoughtless actor’s fevered mind.

A friend who works in the film industry and doesn’t share my politics emailed this morning: “Hanks has been a friend to Veterans for over a decade. You’re being unfair over one comment.”

It’s not as though Hanks said this just the one time. This is twice now in two different settings. And I’ve been in love with my wife for a quarter century, but that doesn’t get me off the hook if I say something untrue and hurtful. I still have to explain, apologize or both.

And if I say it twice…

Hanks does seem to be a genuinely nice man and the work he’s done to bring American history to life on film is impressive, especially during a time when the singling out of America’s exceptionalism is more and more frowned upon in artistic and academic circles. ”From the Earth to the Moon,” “Band of Brothers,” and “John Adams” are not only artistic achievements, but in this MTV-addled culture, might be the best hope of teaching America’s youth about the unique history and greatness of this nation. And I suspect ”The Pacific,” the 10-part miniseries premiering this Sunday on HBO (which Big Hollywood’s Michael Broderick will cover extensively) will be a worthy addition to what came before.

But when it comes to leftist Hollywood, whenever Tinseltown and America meet, you have to brace yourself for it — and by “it” I mean the leftist sucker punch. Throughout, Hanks sounds perfectly reasonable, intelligent and even patriotic for a couple of thousand words. But of course that’s just the lure to get us on his side before we’re walloped with this left cross: [emphasis mine]

[Hanks] doesn’t see the series as simply eye-opening history. He hopes it offers Americans a chance to ponder the sacrifices of our current soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan. “From the outset, we wanted to make people wonder how our troops can re-enter society in the first place,” Hanks says. “How could they just pick up their lives and get on with the rest of us? Back in World War II, we viewed the Japanese as ‘yellow, slant-eyed dogs’ that believed in different gods. They were out to kill us because our way of living was different. We, in turn, wanted to annihilate them because they were different. Does that sound familiar, by any chance, to what’s going on today?”

There’s no such thing as a definitive history. But what was once a passing interest for Hanks has become an obsession. He’s a man on a mission to make our back pages come alive, to keep overhauling the history we know and, in the process, get us to understand not just the past but the choices we make today.

No matter how many times you read this passage the context is clear. By “different” Hanks is clearly referring to race, culture and religion, not ideology.

Really, we wanted to annihilate the Japanese because they were different, because we saw them as “yellow, slant-eyed dogs that believed in different gods?” I thought it was due to the fact that “we viewed them” as barbaric imperialists who had attacked us first and wanted to enslave the world.

But there’s no reason to speculate about America’s motivations during WWII because history has proven Hanks wrong. We had every opportunity to annihilate these “different” people. Instead we chose, at great expense, to rebuild Japan and return the sovereignty of that nation over to the “yellow, slant-eyed dogs who believed in different gods.” Or, as most people prefer to call them: our newly liberated allies.

And to answer Hanks’s question: No — annihilating people who are different sounds NOTHING like what’s going on today.

This country spends billions and billions of dollars on weapons designed to target the enemy and save the lives of  people who are “different” — those who are not our enemy but still manage to look different, speak languages we don’t and worship in ways unfamiliar to us. The irony is that as Hanks spoke those slanderous words, the American Military remains in the middle of two conflicts that have cost us thousands of precious lives and hundreds of billions of dollars all towards the noble goal of liberating 50 million “different” people in Iraq and Afghanistan. And we all know that had we practiced a more selfish and barbaric form of war the enemy would’ve been destroyed faster, American lives would’ve been saved, and the financial cost would not have been nearly as high. 

But that’s not who we are.

Whether they’re “yellow, slanty-eyed dogs that worship different gods” or the people of the Middle East who share the same language and religion as those pledged to murder us, America selflessly protects the innocent who are “different” and as humanely as possible seeks to “annihilate” only those — even if they’re not “different” (like, say, Germans and Italians) – who practice an ideology that actually does believe in annihilating those who are different.

You almost get the sense that Hanks suddenly felt uncomfortable talking about America so extensively without throwing a bone to his MSNBC fanbase. Or maybe he misspoke, or maybe he really does believe it. Douglas Brinkley, the man who wrote the Time profile, sure found those words important. Important enough that the excerpt above is what closes the piece – the thought Brinkley chose to leave us with.

Those rows of white tombstones decorated with little flags are the reason Americans don’t walk downtown, past the ruins where the synagogue once stood, to grab a schnitzel und ein bier from that little imbiss next to der bahnhof.  They are why there isn’t a smoking pit in the heart of Los Angeles where the Library Tower used to be.

Violence never solves anything, war is not the answer, arms are for hugging….  It’s hard to believe that there are adults out there that actually buy into such foolishness.

Memorial Day is about men and women who didn’t orient their lives to the dictates of poorly thought-through bumper sticker clichés that belong on the rear of some NPR-listening public school administrator’s Prius.  It’s about men and women who understood that sometimes doing the right thing means doing the hardest thing.

Violence can solve things.  Hitler – solved.  Tojo – solved.  Saddam – solved.  Sometimes it takes time:  Bin Laden – solution pending.  But all the earnest teach-ins and doofy drum circles in the world haven’t kept one Darfurian from being killed by the janjaweed Islamist militia.  The only thing that will ever do that is a division of Marines; until the activists call for the Devil Dogs to go in, they’re just posing.

Frequently, war is the answer.  With the sorry state of history education in America, it’s easy to see how some people could embrace the delusion that there is nothing worth fighting for.  But the Nazi concentration camps didn’t liberate themselves.  Bosnia and Kosovo’s ethnic cleansing didn’t end because Milosevic got a pretty please with sugar on top.  And the Taliban aren’t about to see the light and stop throwing acid in schoolgirl’s faces for the crime of wanting to learn to read. 

War and violence aren’t the only answers – I worked in civil affairs on one deployment and we made a huge difference without firing a shot.  Sometimes American soldiers’ arms are for hugging – I’ve seen that too – but before you can build a peace you have to enforce security.  That means a grunt standing watch, M4 in hand, with a pilot in an F-15 overhead and a destroyer off-shore.

What is ironic is that Hollywood, for all its superficial peacenik posing, gets it.  The messages of two of the biggest movies out right now, Star Trek and Terminator Salvation, are that there are things worth fighting for and dying for.  Sadly, Hollywood feels the need to cloak that truth in the guise of battles against pointy-eared space aliens and death-dealing cyborgs that look like our governor. 

Hollywood, just lose the metaphors.  It would be nice to see a straight-up movie about the sacrifices of American soldiers in the War on Terror that doesn’t replace jihadi psychos with Romulans or SkyNet. 

Memorial Day is the perfect occasion to embrace the truth.  Do not listen to those who say that it is just another day off where people do nothing but drink beer and eat barbecue with their buddies.  That’s a strawman offered up by the bumper sticker set because they fear Memorial Day’s true meaning.   

At the risk of being presumptuous, those who gave their lives for our country would want you to gather your buddies and drink beers and eat barbecue (Resolved:  Barbecued beef ribs are superior in every way to pork ribs.  Discuss.).   I plan to.  There is a reason that on Memorial Day the flag flies at half-staff only until noon, when it is raised to the top of the pole again.  It symbolizes that we honor our dead by going forward with our lives.

Honor our fallen by remembering them, and just as importantly, what they did.  We can do that best by confronting the nonsense that surrounds us by telling the stories of these brave American men and women.  When little Jimmy comes home confused because the teacher said that America is irremediably racist, you tell him about the Union soldiers who fell at Gettysburg.  When your daughter tells you her textbook says that World War II was really instigated by war profiteers, pop in the disc of the Band of Brothers episode where Easy Company stumbles onto a Nazi death camp.  When your son asks what that bumper sticker saying “End the War” means, you tell him about what the cops and firefighters had to do on 9/11.  Let the truth be your tribute.

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Hollywood movies often focus on the commanders, the captains and colonels, but they have also managed to highlight some great sergeants as well.  When you are picking out DVDs for next weekend, remember that May 16th is Armed Forces Day and consider a few selections that show the sergeant in all his gruff and grumbling glory. 

If you have never experienced the joy of going through basic training and do not plan to, your first stop should be Full Metal Jacket, with R. Lee Ermey’s legendary portrayal of a Marine drill instructor who must have missed out on the block of instruction on sensitivity.  I saw this in the theater about a week before I reported to Basic.  That was a poor idea.

The Marines I know seem to prefer Jack Webb in the more realistic The DI, but I am partial to Warren Oates as the “Big Toe” of a platoon of Army foul-ups in Stripes.  This is one great performance – as Sergeant First Class Hulka, Oates is both hilarious and moving.  You can see how this veteran NCO (his character wears the Combat Infantryman’s Badge, meaning he had seen action) truly cares about teaching his men to survive, and you kind of sympathize with him when Bill Murray’s smart-assery pushes him into slugging our hero in the gut.  Hulka’s contemptuous rejoinder to “Psycho” – “Lighten up, Francis” – is classic, as is his inventory of baffled expressions while watching the antics of his recruits.  I remember getting some of those looks myself from Drill Sergeant Whittlesey. 

And do not forget Louis Gossett, Jr. as another Devil Dog making Naval officer candidates earn the right to receive his salute in An Officer and a Gentleman. My only objection to this movie is that it made Squid School look a lot more fun than Fort Benning’s Army Officer Candidate School, but then I didn’t look like Richard Gere.

The tough sergeant turning a band of screw-ups into a well-oiled fighting machine is classic Hollywood.  The archetype is Marine Sergeant Stryker in The Sands of Iwo Jima, in which John Wayne supposedly utters the quintessential NCO aphorism “Life is tough.  It’s tougher if you’re stupid.”  But even if the Duke actually never says those words in the film, he should have, and generations of NCOs have shared that particular insight with their soldiers. 

Right up there is Clint Eastwood as another jarhead in Heartbreak Ridge.  It’s a good action flick, but what was particularly interesting is how he developed his nerdy lieutenant into a tough, confident leader who ends up saving the platoon.  But not all sergeants get to work with top notch officers.  In the miniseries Band of Brothers, Donnie Wahlberg does a great job as Easy Company’s First Sergeant Carwood Lipton, who was faced with protecting his men from a cowardly commander.  He does, but suffers a terrible fate – he receives a battlefield commission and becomes a mere lieutenant.  As Colonial Marine Gunnery Sergeant Apone in the fantastic Aliens, Al Matthews not only contends with an incompetent platoon leader, but flesh eating space bugs and Bill Paxton’s loudmouth Private Hudson.  “Game over, man!  Game over!”

The definition of an NCO is someone who makes things happen – whether or not strictly within the bounds of the regulations.  Don Rickles embraces this as the entrepreneurial and sharp-tongued supply sergeant Crap Game in Kelly’s Heroes.  Steve Martin played another NCO who didn’t let little things like rules get in the way in Sgt. Bilko.  James Caan, as real-life WWII Staff Sergeant Eddie Dohun, rescues his critically wounded officer from the battlefield and takes him to an aid station in A Bridge Too Far.  When the doctor refuses to look at what seems to be a hopeless case, SSG Dohun did what any good sergeant would do and improvised – by sticking his cocked .45 in the surgeon’s face.  The wounded officer lived.

Behind every good officer are literally dozens of great NCOs.  Even Lee Marvin could not have handled The Dirty Dozen without Richard Jaeckel’s Sergeant Bowren.  In Crimson Tide, the feuding officers vie for the support of the Master Chief Petty Officer, the “Chief of the Boat.”  Tom Hanks may have been the commander, but the heart of his company was Sergeant Horvath (Tom Sizemore) in Saving Private Ryan.

That is not just a Hollywood cliché – that is real life.  In fact, some of the best portrayals of NCOs in the movies have simply been the telling of the true stories of what they really did.  Black Hawk Down accurately shows modern urban combat as a confusing and deadly amalgamation of separate firefights involving small units led by young sergeants.  Josh Hartnett does a good job as a Ranger squad leader trying to keep his men alive, while Eric Bana and William Fichtner are Delta sergeants who take the fight right to the enemy. 

But the portrayals that best show the reality of the American NCO are that of Nikolaj Coster-Waldau and Johnny Strong as Delta Force Master Sergeants Gary Gordon and Randall Shugart.  As the movie shows, when one of the Blackhawk choppers went down, they repeatedly requested permission to fast rope in to protect the injured crew knowing it would mean near certain death.  Finally getting permission, they set up a perimeter and fought until overrun, littering the streets with the bodies of Somali militiamen and saving one member of the crew.  They earned the Medal of Honor, but I suspect that if we could ask them both would say that they were simply doing what NCOs do and nothing more.

Sam Elliot played another real-life hero, Command Sergeant Major Basil Plumley, in We Were Soldiers. As the movie shows, most enlisted troopers in the Second Battalion, Seventh Cavalry, and the wise officers as well, treated CSM Plumley with an awe verging on terror.  But when the battalion was surrounded by a division of North Vietnamese at Ia Drang, CSM Plumley stayed cool, keeping morale strong in the face of what should have been a massacre.  In the film, and in reality, these cavalrymen fought a massively superior force to a standstill.

Though I am a former cavalry commander, my favorite NCO portrayal is of an infantry sergeant in the British Army.  Zulu depicts the true story of the legendary near-last stand of a company of Welsh soldiers at Rourke’s Drift in South Africa.  The tiny band held their ground against a brave and deadly enemy force forty times their size.  As Colour-Sergeant Bourne, Nigel Greene is the ultimate NCO.  From keeping up standards in battle – “Button your tunic!” – to advocating for his exhausted men to facing down an iklwa-wielding Zulu warrior with his bayonet, Colour-Sergeant Bourne was the backbone of the company. 

Sergeants truly are the backbone of the Army and of the other services.  Right now, a young buck sergeant is leading his Marine fire team through the mountains of Afghanistan, a platoon sergeant is prepping a cavalry patrol through the streets of Kosovo, and a command sergeant major in Iraq is double checking his troops before another convoy mission.  These men and women are the heart of our military.  Take a moment to think about them as you pop in a movie and sit back and relax next weekend, safe and secure.  And raise a beer to them.  I will.