ABC, which Tom Hanks called home during his Bosom Buddies salad days claims, “Hanks Angers Conservatives.” But Victor Davis Hanson takes exception to the legacy media’s attempting to claim that the backlash against Tom Hanks’ racialist remarks to Time magazine when promoting his series on World War II in the pacific that’s currently airing on (Time-Warner-owned) HBO is purely partisan-driven:
Tom Hanks said this to Douglas Brinkley in a Time interview: “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?”
Some of us dissected this nonsense point by point. In subsequent remarks Hanks did not back away from his theses that the Pacific war was predicated on racism (I wonder whether our WWII alliances with China and the Philippines, or our prior alliance in WWI with Japan, were as well?), and thus similar to our attitudes in the current war on terror. (Racism apparently explains the American effort to foster democracy in Afghanistan and Iraq, and save Muslims in Afghanistan, Bosnia, Iraq, Kosovo, Kuwait, and Somalia.)
What was strange is the media’s reaction to the reaction. Why is being appalled by Hanks’s infantile philosophizing a “right-wing” or “conservative” reaction? Would not liberals as well be angry that in blanket fashion, Hanks had reduced veterans’ efforts in the Pacific after the surprise attack at Pearl Harbor (and to be followed by a magnanimous peace that fostered autonomous Japanese democracy) into largely a racist rage to annihilate?
At Big Hollywood, John Nolte notes that Hanks’ inserting his Bally loafer into his mandible may have cost his show viewers. “Ratings Disappointment: Did Tom Hanks’ ‘War of Terror and Racism’ Comments Damage ‘The Pacific?’”, John asks.
I know I decided to skip the series, at least for now, after Hanks’ remarks.
I think it is fair to say that Hanks is a history-challenged fool.
I certainly won’t be watching The Pacific solely because he called Leckie (author of “Helmet for my Pillow”), Sledge (author of the astounding “With the Old Breed: At Peleliu and Okinawa”) and my father (who participated in the Okinawa campaign and did occupation duty in Japan after the war) racists. My father doesn’t have a racist bone in his body.
It is disappointing, to say the least, in that I’ve read both books multiple times and was thrilled to hear that a miniseries was being made based upon them.
I was particularly interested in one specfic scene (which may or may not be in the series). In Sledge’s book, he describes (in an italicized section at the end of a chapter) watching a kamikaze attack on a U.S. cruiser (I believe it was the USS Birmingham, but I cannot verify it because I don’t have the book handy). Sledge describes the air being so still that a single column of smoke rose from the ship until it his denser air, then it spread out in a circle, sort of like a spinning plate on a stick.
After my father borrowed and read the book, he read me that passage. Then he said he remembered that attack vividly, as he was on an LST anchored right beside the cruiser. He watched the plane circling above, picking out a target, then watched it dive. It was only at the last moment that it became clear it was going to hit the cruiser rather than my father’s LST. He said that was the most scared he was during the entire war (and he is one of the relatively rare ones who served in both the Atlantic and Pacific). When I asked him how far away the cruiser was from his ship, he gestured to a gas station about 75 yards away and said, “About as far as that gas station.”
As an aside, I remember playing with a crude watchband my father brought home from the war — it was made from part of the wing of a kamikaze that had hit a neighboring ship and had been brought back to my father’s ship by some of the crew that had gone over to help fight the fires the plane had ignited. I have no idea if it was the kamikaze Sledge describes, as I only know about the watchband from having read my father’s diary when I was a kid (he’s never mentioned either the watchband or the diary to me).
Back on topic, Hanks isn’t fit to wipe my father’s butt, and I won’t watch another thing he has anything to do with.
Niall Ferguson also makes Hanks’ point in “The War of the Worlds.” Mainly, that racial antagonism played a major role on all sides in both the European and Pacific wars. That when Americans and Brits learned of the fire bombings of Dresden and Tokyo, they said, Good, the bastards deserved it.
My Dad was born in 1924 in rural Mississippi, he spent over 25 years in the armed forces, and raised a family of six kids on one income: his.
There was one word I never heard him say (nor any of his friends, for that matter), even when under great duress, and that word is largely unprintable today, unless your a rapper. It was racial. Here’s a man with a high-school education from the poorest state in the Union during the Great Depression, making more of his life than Hanks can dream of, and he breaks the preferred narrative of lockstep racism in the rural south.
I once asked Dad how people felt about the Japanese during WW II. He said, “If they hadn’t bombed Pearl Harbor, we wouldn’t have known about them at all. You can’t hate anyone that far away.”