Sinclair's "Stolen Honor"
New York Times film reviewer Alessandra Stanley dares to stare into "the film John Kerry doesn't want you to see." She comes away from "Stolen Honor" twisted and shriveled into an evil twin of a good NYT reporter (at least I suppose that's how her piece must look if you're a Democrat).
But she makes a good point: forget the Kerry business. This is a documentary that it's time for America to see, to confront the experiences of Vietnam POWs, and to spark a national discussion of whether, or how, they were betrayed. Before it's too late and the last one sinks into senility in a VA home.
In the end, she finds, the anti-Kerry element of the film is a distraction, and not a very effective one, from what really shines through as "the real subject of the film: the veterans' unheeded feelings of betrayal and neglect."
POW-MIA flags are ubiquitous; one flies beneath the U.S. flag at the courthouse here. But a lot of the prominence given to that issue in the 1990s was based on running down vague, and likely false, stories of men still held in captivity. It almost seemed like a displacement, like the veteran POWs, stonewalled by their inability to communicate the awfulness of what they felt to a country that, guiltily, didn't want to hear it, shifted to a mythical crusade.
The entire program can be seen on the Internet on a pay-for-view basis (it costs less than $5) at www.stolenhonor.com.
***
As for the matter of Sinclair, I think their initial move was foolishly partisan, and their back-down position is contemptible. On the other hand, I see no reason for continuing federal control of the "fairness" of a TV media that has become incredibly diverse and fragmented since the days of three big networks that reached into every home in America.
Most people who are still media consumers in America are aware of the "biases" of the various outlets they scan. I know where I stand in relation to Dan Rather, the editors of the Philly "Inquirer," the columnists in the "Wall Street Journal," CNN News, Little Green Footballs weblog, etc. Why pretend they are impartial and balanced? The British run an open political process with a blatantly biased press. We can handle it, too. Let the cat out of the cellophane bag. Let Sinclair run "Stolen Honor" and let ABC run "Fahrenheit 9/11" and let them both pay the price in advertisement loss and public contempt.
But she makes a good point: forget the Kerry business. This is a documentary that it's time for America to see, to confront the experiences of Vietnam POWs, and to spark a national discussion of whether, or how, they were betrayed. Before it's too late and the last one sinks into senility in a VA home.
What is most enlightening about this film is not the depiction of Mr. Kerry as a traitor; it is the testimony of the former P.O.W.'s describing the torture they endured in captivity and the shock they felt when celebrities like Jane Fonda and Tom Hayden visited their prisons in North Vietnam and sided with the enemy.
The former prisoners - now old and graying - are not just talking about their sense of betrayal by fellow Americans. They also seize the Kerry candidacy as a chance to recall their experiences: the kinds of torture they endured and the ruses they invented like tap-code communication between cells to boost morale. Illustrated with black-and-white film clips of prisoners in the "Hanoi Hilton" and sepia-toned re-enactments of starving men being led through dank, dark prison corridors, those recollections resemble the slow-paced, detailed documentaries that fill the History Channel.
But the History Channel tends to focus on the heroic moments of World Wars I and II. The Vietnam War is almost always revisited through its moral and strategic ambiguities and its effect on American society in the 1960's and 70's.
This film is payback time, a chance to punish one of the most famous antiwar activists, Mr. Kerry, the one who got credit for serving with distinction in combat, then, through the eyes of the veterans in this film, went home to discredit the men left behind. The film begins with dirgelike music and a scary black-and-white montage of stark images of soldiers and prisoners as a deep voice sorrowfully intones, "In other wars, when captured soldiers were subjected to the hell of enemy prisons, they were considered heroes." The narrator adds, "In Vietnam they were betrayed."
... One former P.O.W., John Warner, lashes out at Mr. Kerry for having coaxed Mr. Warner's mother to testify at the Winter Soldier Investigation, where disgruntled veterans testified to war crimes they committed. Calling it a "contemptible act," Mr. Warner, who spent more than five years as a prisoner, tells the camera that Mr. Kerry was the kind of man who preyed on a mother's grief "purely for the promotion of your own political agenda."
In the end, she finds, the anti-Kerry element of the film is a distraction, and not a very effective one, from what really shines through as "the real subject of the film: the veterans' unheeded feelings of betrayal and neglect."
POW-MIA flags are ubiquitous; one flies beneath the U.S. flag at the courthouse here. But a lot of the prominence given to that issue in the 1990s was based on running down vague, and likely false, stories of men still held in captivity. It almost seemed like a displacement, like the veteran POWs, stonewalled by their inability to communicate the awfulness of what they felt to a country that, guiltily, didn't want to hear it, shifted to a mythical crusade.
The entire program can be seen on the Internet on a pay-for-view basis (it costs less than $5) at www.stolenhonor.com.
***
As for the matter of Sinclair, I think their initial move was foolishly partisan, and their back-down position is contemptible. On the other hand, I see no reason for continuing federal control of the "fairness" of a TV media that has become incredibly diverse and fragmented since the days of three big networks that reached into every home in America.
Most people who are still media consumers in America are aware of the "biases" of the various outlets they scan. I know where I stand in relation to Dan Rather, the editors of the Philly "Inquirer," the columnists in the "Wall Street Journal," CNN News, Little Green Footballs weblog, etc. Why pretend they are impartial and balanced? The British run an open political process with a blatantly biased press. We can handle it, too. Let the cat out of the cellophane bag. Let Sinclair run "Stolen Honor" and let ABC run "Fahrenheit 9/11" and let them both pay the price in advertisement loss and public contempt.
