The American Spectator

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Heroism Now and Then

10.26.06 @ 12:01AM

FLAGS OF IWO JIMA
Re: Yale Kramer's The View From Mt. Suribachi:

I became a Marine in 1969. I will always be a Marine.

I think it was too bad that the most costly and illustrative battle waged by my beloved Corps was portrayed in the revisionist historical sense of Spielberg and Eastwood. It is more than unfortunate.

I think Mr. Kramer's appraisal is exactly right.
-- Tom Masles
Alamo, California

Thanks to Yale Kramer for thoroughly exposing the flaws of Clint Eastwood's politically correct movie of Flags of Our Fathers. I half expected Mr. Kramer to point to the irony of Eastwood's hubris compared to the words of his character, Dirty Harry: "A man's got to know his limitations."
-- David Bruneau

How Incredible.

Something Mr. Kramer says near the end of his piece about Eastwood's deconstruction of heroism puts me in mind of a few quotes from a great movie:

Helen: Everyone's special, Dash.
Dash: Which is another way of saying no one is...
Syndrome: Everyone can be Super! And when everyone's Super... no one will be.

Sure, everyone has the ability to be a hero, but only a few get the chance; of those few who get the chance only a few take it. Whether or not "we are all heroes in our own very special way" some people prove it.

Many of the men who died there on Iwo Jima were heroes as were the ones who are remembered for raising the flag, but a living person can explain why they did what they did.
-- Troy Harmon
(Quotes from The Incredibles taken from IMDb.com)

Thank you Mr. Kramer for your review and insights. I have enjoyed many of Mr. Eastwood's movies in the past. After your comments, I think I'll sit this one out and spend my hard-earned dollars in buying the book and reading the more valuable insights and lessons on heroism from Mr. Bradley directly.
-- Phil
Fargo, North Dakota

Clint Eastwood showed his cards, without making us pay first, eons ago, as early as everyone's favorite war movie that they were ashamed to admit that they "enjoyed", i.e., Kelly's Heroes. Eastwood is on the record saying that Kelly's Heroes could have been the greatest anti-war movie of all time but the Hollywood moguls just wouldn't let them do what needed to be done. Yeah, right.

It would appear that Clint is willfully ignorant of George Orwell's life experience dictum "to abjure violence, it is necessary to have never experienced it." Maybe Clint's only exposure to violence was a Sandra Locke bad hair day.

Yale Kramer suggests that James Bradley was done wrong by Clint Eastwood, but I doubt it. Bradley is a classic leftist revisionist, dragging tons of irrelevant "history" into his own texts, the sections in Flyboys covering 19th-century American Indians and turn of the century Filipino guerrillas being cases in point. Bradley's presumed respect for the man who gave him life probably doesn't extend to exempting him and his individual heroism from the liberal commandments that Eastwood so capably renders (and Kramer documents).

Thanks to the Internet and TAS, conservatives are forewarned that an unforgivable corruption of perhaps the greatest single memory of American men in action should be avoided. Also thankfully, the same Internet says checking out The Departed and/or The Prestige is a better use of time and money.
-- Frank Natoli
Newton, New Jersey

Letter to the Editor

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