When my brother and I were kids, our parents took us to the drive-in theater on weekends. It was an adventure. We filled a big, brown shopping bag with homemade popcorn and piled pillows and blankets on the back seat. The idea was that Chris and I would gorge ourselves on popcorn and the cartoons and then fall asleep as soon as the grown-up movie started.
But I defied the hour and the parents and stayed up, and saw all kinds of things little kids aren’t supposed to see. I saw nudity in “Little Fauss and Big Halsy” and high Kubrick weirdness in “2001: A Space Odyssey.” As the years rolled on, I saw Nazis and nightclubs in “Cabaret” and heard a lot of profanity in “Dog Day Afternoon.” I witnessed homicide, sex and lots of gunfights.
All this underage exposure warped me permanently – by giving me a lifelong love of good storytelling. A voracious reader since I was 4, I’m rarely without a book at hand (I’m currently reading Art Buchwald’s last book, a biography of Edward R. Murrow, and the latest Dana Stabenow fiction). And no weekend is whole without several movies on DVD, VHS and the tube. I love quality drama, great comedy, and any kind of plot twist.
This fall, documentary wizard Ken Burns will offer us the tale of what is arguably the greatest drama in history, World War II. The conflict engulfed the globe, and virtually no person on Earth at the time was unaffected. Countless books, movies, songs, shows and plays were born from it; its study is essential for anyone who wants to know human history.
But some people are objecting to the program, saying its content is too graphic for kids. They seem to say that studying history is OK, as long as it’s sanitized.
And history is happening now. Coverage of the war in Iraq and Afghanistan is scarier than any fictional film I’ve ever seen. School shootings are worse than video games, and real-life bombs and bullets – and their aftermath – are worse than any exposed nipple.
Humorist Erma Bombeck wrote that the worst nightmares her kids had occurred after watching not horror movies, but Vietnam War coverage on TV.
When I was a freshman in high school, my English class read “Romeo and Juliet,” and were promised we could see the 1968 movie to complement our study. Well, the principal put a kibosh on the film because it included a shot of bare buns and he thought that might harm us. Just a few months before, we’d seen relentless coverage of the fall of Saigon, of desperate people begging and clawing for a spot aboard the last helicopter leaving the embassy. We learned later of the resulting genocide of Pol Pot, and in recent years we’ve learned of the greater obscenity, that of the falsification of events by those in charge to keep that war going.
In a world beset by terrorism and genocide, it seems silly to fret over body parts and cuss words. History is bloody and war is violence and no paint in the world can cover it up.
But we can learn from it. We can be inspired by the sacrifices made by those abroad and at home to win World War II. We can marvel at the teamwork and leadership that turned the tide. Certainly we can learn the warning signs of a “final solution” and learn to never, ever let it happen again.
Those are lessons that should be mastered early. Children, with their inherent sense of fair play, should learn that adults don’t always play by the rules, and that bullies come in all forms and ages. Preparation is key to not letting the bad guys take over.
Some of those bad guys are the censors who promote war while bleeping words on television. I’m sure they’re the same folks who let their children ingest the violence that is professional football, but were aghast when they saw a wardrobe malfunction during a Super Bowl halftime show.
You can’t block knowledge. Not forever, anyway. Maybe it’s time to define what obscenity really means. I believe an honest debate about real horrors versus fictional ogres would be healthy for our country.
And I still believe that barring kids from seeing Shakespeare is a crime.
Marcia Darnell (ink@amigo.net) lives in the San Luis Valley.
