Media and the Military
During the Vietnam War the media was left unchecked and brought the
wartime images of death and carnage into America's living room. These
images served as morale killers and eventually turned much of the public
against its own government. During the Gulf War on the other hand, the
military filtered what reached the public's eye and morale was kept to all
time highs. In wartime the government should be able to manipulate public
opinion by controlling the media.
War is not pretty, and it is not for the weak at heart. Images of
war should not be broadcast into living rooms live. During the Vietnam
conflict this is what happened. Pictures and real time video of our troops
being slaughtered during battles of the Tet offensive and the siege of Khe
Sahn were sent home for all of America to see (Klein 50-51). Again, war is
not pretty and the way you keep morale up is you don't let the public know
how bad war really is.
Television is one of the most powerful tools of media and “by the
mid 1960's television had become the most important source for news for
most of the American public, and beyond that, perhaps, the most powerful
single influence on the public.” (Hallin 106) So people trusted what
reporters like Walter Cronkite were telling them. They believed it when
NBC journalists told them things like, “ the Marines are so bogged down in
Hue that nobody will predict when the battle would end…more than 500
marines have been wounded and over 100 dead since the in Hue began.” (Klein
51) Don't get the wrong idea though, these things really happened but the
public didn't need to know it.
The constitution and 1st amendment still mean something but
national security should come first. People rioting all over the country
in anti war protests should be an issue of national security. Without the
support of your homefront no country can win a war, especially a foreign
war (Franklin 250). It is impossible to get support at home when NBC is
showing them pictures of their boys getting massacred every night on the
nightly news.
On the other hand, during the Gulf War in Iraq the horrors of war
still existed, maybe not to the same extent, but they were there
nonetheless. These horrors however where kept out of our living rooms by
systematic filtering by the US army. Now the army didn't just seize tapes
and erase bad parts. Very few reporters and cameras were allowed to the
front lines.
According to Christopher and James Collier,”War turns men into beasts.” It is true because many people are willing to
Tim O’Brien states in his novel The Things They Carried, “The truths are contradictory. It can be argued, for instance, that war is grotesque. But in truth war is also beauty. For all its horror, you can’t help but gape at the awful majesty of combat” (77). This profound statement captures not only his perspective of war from his experience in Vietnam but a collective truth about war across the ages. It is not called the art of combat without reason: this truth transcends time and can be found in the art produced and poetry written during the years of World War I. George Trakl creates beautiful images of the war in his poem “Grodek” but juxtaposes them with the harsh realities of war. Paul Nash, a World War I artist, invokes similar images in his paintings We are Making a New World and The Ypres Salient at Night. Guilaume Apollinaire’s writes about the beautiful atrocity that is war in his poem “Gala.”
The Roman philosopher Seneca the Younger once said “Perjor est bello timor ipse belli”, which translates to: “the dread of war is worse than war itself”. With this quote, Seneca identifies that war has both its physical and mental tolls on its participants. The psychological and emotional scars of war do much more damage to a solider than the actual physical battles. Tim O’ Brien repeats this idea many years later in his novel “The Things They Carried”, by describing how emotional burdens outweigh the physical loads that those in war must endure. What keeps them alive is the hope that they may one day return home to their loved ones. Yet, the weight of these intangible “items” such as “grief, terror, love, longing” overshadow the physical load they must endure since they are not easily cast away.
Dylan Thomas wrote the poem “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night.” It is about a son’s plea to his father who is approaching death. Two lines are repeated in the poem and addressed directly to the father. These lines structure the first stanza and collaborate as a couplet in the last. They are repeated a lot but each time, they have different meanings: statements, pleas, commands, or petitions. Repetition and rhyme scheme are parts of prosody in poetry. The rhyme scheme is built on two rhymes and forms of a pattern. The two rhymes are night and day and the pattern is aba, and in the last stanza, abaa. Even though the poem seems to have too much repetition, the fascinating imagery is more important and readers pay more attention to that instead.
War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, written by the talented author Chris Hedges, gives us provoking thoughts that are somewhat painful to read but at the same time are quite personal confessions. Chris Hedges, a talented journalist to say the least, brings nearly 15 years of being a foreign correspondent to this book and subjectively concludes how all of his world experiences tie together. Throughout his book, he unifies themes present in all wars he experienced first hand. The most important themes I was able to draw from this book were, war skews reality, dominates culture, seduces society with its heroic attributes, distorts memory, and supports a cause, and allures us by a constant battle between death and love.
Gina Marchetti, in her essay "Action-Adventure as Ideology," argues that action- adventure films implicitly convey complex cultural messages regarding American values and the "white American status quo." She continues to say that all action-adventure movies have the same basic structure, including plot, theme, characterization, and iconography. As ideology, this film genre tacitly expresses social norms, values, and morals of its time. Marchetti's essay, written in 1989, applies to films such as Raiders of the Lost Ark and Rambo: First Blood II. However, action-adventure films today seem to be straying farther away from her generalizations about structure, reflecting new and different cultural norms in America. This changing ideology is depicted best in Oliver Stone's Natural Born Killers (1994), which defies nearly every concept Marchetti proposes about action-adventure films; and it sets the stage for a whole new viewpoint of action in the '90's.
The Effect of Mass Media on Americans during the Vietnam War When the war initially began, Dean Rusk, US Secretary of State, pointed out that: "This was the first struggle fought on television in everybody's living room every day... whether ordinary people can sustain a war effort under that kind of daily hammering is a very large question. " The us administration, unlike most governments at war, made no official attempt to censure the reporting in the Vietnam war. Every night on the colour television people not only in America but across the planet saw pictures of dead and wounded marines. Television brought the brutality of war into the comfort of the living room. Vietnam was lost in the living rooms of America--not on the battlefields of Vietnam."
War is a scary place and you don't realize it until you are actual in the situation itself. “The big soldier hissed at him to shut up but he could not stop giggling and remembering the hot afternoon, and poor Billy Boy, and how they’d been drinking Coca-Cola from bright-red aluminium cans, and how they’d started on the day’s march, and how little while later poor Billy Boy stepped on a mine”(O’brien 202)
The Civil War, World War I, the Vietnam War, World War II, and the conflict in the Middle East are all wars that have been fought over the difference of opinions, yet come at the cost of the soldier 's fighting them; Humans killing other humans, and death is just one of the many emotional scars soldiers of war face. Why do we go to war when this is the cost? For many it is because they are unaware of the psychological cost of war, they are only aware of the monetary cost or the personal gains they get from war. Tim O 'Brien addresses the true cost of war in "The Things They Carried". O 'Brien suggests that psychological trauma caused by war warps the perception of life in young Americans drafted into the Vietnam War. He does this through Lieutenant
War has been present since the beginning of human history. Likewise, war movies have been present since the movie industry began. Just like most other genres of film, war films have been created as a form of entertainment to profit a person or organization. More people are willing to spend their money and time on a feeling of action, excitement, heroism, and patriotism than gruesome and horrid images of real and common human destruction. Propaganda has been used by governments for a very long time and when motion pictures came into existence, governments almost immediately saw the new medium as an opportunity to influence the public. Governments such as the United States of America, cooperate with the movie industry to use this influence to promote a positive perception about war in order to gain support for wars. The movie industry portrays war in an exciting, glorified, romanticized, and heroic light and often demonizes the enemies; this causes an unrealistic public perception of war which leads to greater positive public opinion and support of real wars.
Mark Antony’s loyalty to Julius Caesar was one of the most loyal bonds history can account for. He had changed his political preference to accommodate for Julius Caesar’s friendship. He put his life on the line on multiple occasions to prove his loyalty to Caesar. Even though Julius Caesar’s party sought his demise Mark Antony stayed true to Caesar. After the death of Julius Caesar, Mark Antony proved his love for Caesar by giving a eulogy at his funeral. During the eulogy,which Brutus gave permission to Antony to give, Antony cleverly made Julius Caesar look good as he sarcastically destroys the reputations of the conspirators ”He was my friend,and just to me. But Brutus says he was ambitious, And Brutus is an honorable man.”(lll.ii.84-86) Antony also hunted down some of the conspirators that led to the death of his lord.
War is one of the most tragic things in our world today. It is even sadder that usually it
War has always been something to be dreaded by people since nothing good comes from it. War affects people of all ages, cultures, races and religion. It brings change, destruction and death and these affect people to great extents. “Every day as a result of war and conflict thousands of civilians are killed, and more than half of these victims are children” (Graca & Salgado, 81). War is hard on each and every affected person, but the most affected are the children.
Thomas presents death to us using a metaphor, he describes death as being “that good night” and thus makes death seem as something unknown, unseen, and unfamiliar. The portrayal of death as “that good night” suggests that death is like night time, dark and with a sense of unfamiliarity. This causes us to begin seeing death as something that we should fear and avoid or be cautious of. The first of line of the poem, “Do not go gentle into that good night” is an ironic contradiction, as it seems strange that we should not go gentle into something that is good. However, the next line of the poem which says “Old age should burn and rave at close of day”, makes it apparent that the previous line should be taken connotatively and that phrases like “go gentle and “good night” are symbolic of the dying process. When old age is mentioned in the poem in that line it makes us aware that death is imminent. References about day and night are also symbolic of life and death. Dickinson makes strong contradictions between old age and raging against death, as it is typically accepted that after a long and fruitful life, old age would prefer a gentle slip into a peaceful welcomed death. However, Thomas says otherwise, he advocates that old age should not give into the ease and comfort of death, and should instead
War destroys thousands of lives, but yet, the heroism of our fallen allows us to enjoy a privileged lifestyle, but their sacrifice often goes unnoticed. For this reason, Georgie and I have chosen war for our theme.