Word: viets
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...young may be absorbing the new atmospherics from movies and TV. Five years ago, the nation watched a crop of elegiac Viet Nam movies such as Coming Home and The Deer Hunter. At the end of The Deer Hunter, when the hero has returned home, the crowd in a dingy bar in a Pennsylvania steel town sings God Bless America, but sings it so thinly and tentatively that the hymn becomes not an affirmation of the nation but a wistful dirge, the memory of something that the war destroyed. Today, the tones of patriotism in entertainment are loud and clear...
...fascinating exercise was called Red Dawn. In the guise of a sort of right-wing adolescent version of For Whom the Bell Tolls, it is an allegory designed subtly to reverse the moral onus of the Viet Nam War. The U.S. is invaded by Communist forces (Cubans and Nicaraguans in the service of the Soviets), and the teen-age American heroes and heroines take to the Colorado hills to form a guerrilla band. The Americans become the Viet Cong, the little guys, the underdogs fighting for their own land. The Soviets become the oppressive great power (the Americans in Viet...
...Memorial Day, the President installed an Unknown Soldier from the Viet Nam War in Arlington National Cemetery, beside the Unknowns from World War I, World War II and the Korean War. In November the stark black granite slashes that form the Viet Nam Memorial near the edge of the Mall in Washington got a more traditional companion piece: a statue of three American soldiers holding their weapons in various attitudes of exhaustion. The memorial is now the most visited monument in the capital. These ceremonies at last served to convey legitimacy on those who fought the war, if not upon...
...attitudes of the yuppies are central to the new American mood. Clearly there is some relationship between doing well personally and feeling good about one's country. But that is not all there is to it: plenty of wealthy Americans were deeply depressed about their country during the Viet Nam War or the Iranian hostage crisis. At the same time, Americans just scraping by have sometimes felt truculently "good about America" at moments when the upper middle class was despairing. Today many Americans are in deep economic distress, and it is difficult for them to join in the feeling that...
...every army officer knows, morale is crucial. The U.S. learned that the hard way in Viet Nam, where collapsing spirits at home subverted confidence in the field. Civilizations can flourish or perish according to their cultural morale. What the yuppies, in concert with a man like Ueberroth, have to offer is a new energy wedded to the belief that problems are solvable...