I had mentioned renting the Pianist this week. I never finished watching it. Don’t get me wrong, it’s very, very good. Also, it’s a depressing, awful, hard to watch film because it does such a good job of displaying how horrible what happened in Poland prior to and during World War 2.

I was thinking back to my childhood, when I was a kid all the war movies were about World War 2. Vietnam was going on but, World War 2 was this “good war.” Everything was displayed in very black and white terms - we were the good guys (we being the U.S.).

Korea wasn’t big in the movies (a couple of Twilight Zones, an Outer Limits and the Manchurian Candidate) whereas WWII (they even had this way of referring to it double u, double u, two) had Patton, The Dirty Dozen, Kelly’s Heroes, The Battle of the Bulge movies that would run in primetime on network TV on a Sunday night (big event before the days of cable). There was also Combat (which I was never a big fan of) which I think took place during WW2.

In the seventies after Vietnam wound down, the country had a very different outlook on war. The tone changed quite a bit and managed to stay like that until Reagan sent troops into Grenada.

In the seventies, there was MASH (the TV show - Altman’s film was late in the sixties), The Deer Hunter, Coming Home, Apocalypse Now. World War 2 seemed to fade from the consciousness of the country until Saving Private Ryan was produced. That was another hard movie to watch.

It’s funny, our country took little baby steps as we got back into the whole “war” thing. Greneda, Panama a bunch of other things. This Halbersham book is great as it talks about what went on in the nineties.

Now we’re the big boy on the block. Mess with us (see U.S., us!) and we’ll knock you around. It makes me think about this Kissinger book I had read about the behavior of nations as members of a group. Kissinger proposed, when a member nation becomes more powerful than the other members of the group, weaker members form alliances to offset that strength.

I think that’s happening now in some ways. In my mind though, there’s a difference between being strong, using that strength wisely and being a bully. It’s a very fine line and I don’t know if our country is doing such a good job walking that line.

I also wonder sometimes how real things like World War 2 are to people under 30. If it’s ancient history to them (and therefore something like a story of a type) or if those atrocities have a life. The generation which fought World War 2 is almost gone, theirs is a big legacy.