Who's really ignorant?
In conducting some Google searches relating to the Private Francis Lupo story, I ran across Bill Gallo's review of Flyboys, the WWI dogfighting action flick in theaters now.
Whether or not the movie is any good cannot be discerned by reading the review, entitled "Flight of the Ignorant," as Gallo is too busy reminding the reader that a) war is horrible, and b) the film does not do an adequate job beating this drum. The pilots in the film are dashing, heroic, and glamorous, and live far from the terror of the trenches. Gallo believes the result glamorizes war in general and WWI in particular.
I have not seen this film but I think I can still take issue with his review on a couple of counts. First, that it "conveniently overlooks the ugliness of WWI."
This movie, as I understand it, is about the air war. Had it stopped to do justice to Verdun or the Somme, there'd likely be no time for planes. Is the state of public education today so bad that this sort of context and widening of scope is necessary to do a CGI movie about WWI aerial combat?
Lest his readers get the idea that war is good, Gallo tries another tactic with which I take umbrage, namely that of "debunking by misdirected tangential attack," as I like to call it. Many years ago I was thumbing through a book of socialist "myths" at a bookstore and encountered the "myth" that "WWII was a 'good' war." Naturally all sorts of casualty statistics were cited, as well as many examples of cruelty on the part of the Allies. Then they cited little factoids whose relevance baffled me. The one I remember is that a certain percentage (now forgotten) of American servicemen soiled themselves in combat.
Did that make the war bad? Of course not. But soiling oneself is a "bad" circumstance, and since that circumstance was caused by the war, apparently the authors thought it added to the evidence.
Back to Mr. Gallo. Afraid that viewers would get the idea that pilots were heroes, he's sure to debunk that myth with his own tangential misdirection:
A country singer who crudely bad-mouths the President of the United States on foreign soil during wartime may be a hero to the left, but a man who volunteers to fight a war his country has not yet joined, and dies in his fighter craft while not on an actual mission, is a screw-up.
In case we still did not understand his point, Gallo closes by calling the war the "bloodiest, most useless atrocity in the history of mankind." Well. I suppose I have yet one more criticism. The war was indeed bloody, and wasteful, and unprecedented in the scale and nature of the carnage and slaughter. But useless?
What was the alternative to the West? Cede Belgium and France to Germany? Perhaps, in hindsight nearly a century later, there was a path that could have been followed to avoid the war. But once commenced, at risk was nothing less than freedom and democracy. Millions of French, British, Canadian, Australian, and Americans fought and died because so much was at stake. It's a pity that so many of us today choose to use those freedoms to denigrate the contributions of those who came before us.
Whether or not the movie is any good cannot be discerned by reading the review, entitled "Flight of the Ignorant," as Gallo is too busy reminding the reader that a) war is horrible, and b) the film does not do an adequate job beating this drum. The pilots in the film are dashing, heroic, and glamorous, and live far from the terror of the trenches. Gallo believes the result glamorizes war in general and WWI in particular.
I have not seen this film but I think I can still take issue with his review on a couple of counts. First, that it "conveniently overlooks the ugliness of WWI."
As for that other, less convenient World War I—embodied in the grim, futile slaughterhouses of Verdun and the Marne—well, there’s no point in revisiting that old mess, no use even thinking about the hundreds of thousands of dismembered corpses rotting down there in the mud. Because the romantic heroes of Flyboys are figuratively and literally above it all.
This movie, as I understand it, is about the air war. Had it stopped to do justice to Verdun or the Somme, there'd likely be no time for planes. Is the state of public education today so bad that this sort of context and widening of scope is necessary to do a CGI movie about WWI aerial combat?
Lest his readers get the idea that war is good, Gallo tries another tactic with which I take umbrage, namely that of "debunking by misdirected tangential attack," as I like to call it. Many years ago I was thumbing through a book of socialist "myths" at a bookstore and encountered the "myth" that "WWII was a 'good' war." Naturally all sorts of casualty statistics were cited, as well as many examples of cruelty on the part of the Allies. Then they cited little factoids whose relevance baffled me. The one I remember is that a certain percentage (now forgotten) of American servicemen soiled themselves in combat.
Did that make the war bad? Of course not. But soiling oneself is a "bad" circumstance, and since that circumstance was caused by the war, apparently the authors thought it added to the evidence.
Back to Mr. Gallo. Afraid that viewers would get the idea that pilots were heroes, he's sure to debunk that myth with his own tangential misdirection:
The real history of the Lafayette Escadrille—a corps of mostly American volunteers who started flying for France a year before the United States entered the war, in 1917—contains as much screw-up and absurdity as actual heroism (for instance, the squadron’s first casualty lost his life while flying a crate of oranges to a wounded friend)
A country singer who crudely bad-mouths the President of the United States on foreign soil during wartime may be a hero to the left, but a man who volunteers to fight a war his country has not yet joined, and dies in his fighter craft while not on an actual mission, is a screw-up.
In case we still did not understand his point, Gallo closes by calling the war the "bloodiest, most useless atrocity in the history of mankind." Well. I suppose I have yet one more criticism. The war was indeed bloody, and wasteful, and unprecedented in the scale and nature of the carnage and slaughter. But useless?
What was the alternative to the West? Cede Belgium and France to Germany? Perhaps, in hindsight nearly a century later, there was a path that could have been followed to avoid the war. But once commenced, at risk was nothing less than freedom and democracy. Millions of French, British, Canadian, Australian, and Americans fought and died because so much was at stake. It's a pity that so many of us today choose to use those freedoms to denigrate the contributions of those who came before us.
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