JUST THINK. . . 

Oh God! Not again! Oliver Stone is making a movie about Richard Nixon, and I can just see the aftermath. Stone's truth about Nixon (about which I have no inside information) will be "perfectly clear"--as Nixon himself would have put it. And waddyeknow, Stone might actually stretch and/or twist a fact or two to get his point of view across. 

What I dread is hearing from all those writers and journalists-- not all of them obviously--who in some purist fashion can't stand it when people like Stone overreach and present a version of history that may or may not agree with what those critics accept as THE FACTS. I have sat through an infinity of discussions--in some cases was lectured at--about how Stone's method in JFK violated the literary principle of factual literacy. 

Hogwash. Someone first has to convince me of what a fact is. As a social science doctoral candidate almost half a century ago I retain a disturbing memory of the application of the scientific method to knowledge. An opinion was not permitted if it could not be backed up by proof and facts. Nobody needs to remind us that that methodology has become the mainstay of American scholarship. Philosophical discourse has been pushed aside. Just witness the disproportionate resources in university budgets that flow to the social sciences. Unsurprisingly, with the intensity of the social sciences' focus on proof and fact, our society in many ways has become a warehouse for technological knowledge and information and hardly the fount of wisdom. Positivistic thought processes impede thinking, that then allows the facts of propaganda often to become known as THE TRUTH. 

Following JFK's assassination and despite dozens of ensuing and related mysterious deaths, demand for the truth seemed feeble. The Warren Commission, assigned to provide us with the truth about the assassination, pulled back and never produced. Onced again: Why no outcry? Was something being hidden? Or, better put, what was being hidden? What is it about the American people that they could not demand of their writers and journalists--their intellectual leaders, so to speak--what the "facts" were? 

The facts get lost in most discussions of JFK and his death in the tragedy of Vietnam. First, compare the dominoes that McNamara and the "best and the brightest" would have had us buy into with their "facts." Then consider the real dominoes that did fall thanks to Vietnam, thereby scarring this nation to this very day. In the 1960s, our unruly youth merely sensed that something was askew--no facts involved. That something was so huge that to be heard they resorted to very unpopular and offensive methods. Not only did drugs become routine, but schooling lost its preeminence and has been sliding as a priority ever since. Even violence became all too common. 

The government had overreached--a no-no in a democracy. Then Lyndon Johnson, not trusting that the electorate would accept additional taxes to cover the cost of that increasingly dubious and escalating war, thereby handed us still another fallen domino: inflationary economic distortions which killed off three previous decades of dynamic growth without inflation. Talk about paying the cost! The taxes would have been as nothing. 

Where were the literary critics and journalists then demanding of the Warren Commission, the McNamaras and the Bundys--as they do now of Stone--why they were so selective about their facts? (And why so mum when the likes of these liars were later honored by being made the prestigious heads of the World Bank and of the Council of Foreign Relations and the Ford Foundation?) 

The real dominoes of Vietnam continue to fall. "Never Again" became the cry of most Americans following upon that helicopter fleeing from the top of our Saigon Embassy. But should "Never Again" be allowed to become the diktat of foreign policy generally? In the case of Vietnam, a war with many facts but no satisfactory explanation, "Never Again" was indeed a valid reaction. 

However, this remaining superpower has a leadership role to play in the world, especially with the multilateralism proving so ineffective at this very moment in Bosnia. The heritage of Vietnam ties Washington's hands--another fallen domino. Americans must come out of the closet and recognize their responsibilities. After all, what is a superpower for? It is not an honorific. 

Just as too few writers--usually described as marginal-- caused Americans to think seriously about the JFK assassination and later about Vietnam, I hope than Oliver Stone's film on Nixon also makes us ponder that evil man and why at the end we eerily returned to idolizing him. In relying on the facts of propaganda, we never get to the truth. In the final analysis, few other movie makers generate discussion the way Stone does--especially with JFK. Those dreaded Stone critics notwithstanding, as long as Americans have trouble knowing how to think about troublesome subjects a few Stones on the scene won't hurt. 

~~~~~~~~ 

By STANLEY K. SHEINBAUM Publisher, New Perspectives Quarterly  



Copyright 1995 by Center for the Study of Democratic Inst.  Text may not be copied without the express written permission of Center for the Study of Democratic Inst.

Sheinbaum, Stanley, Just think...., Vol. 12, New Perspectives Quarterly, 09-01-1995, pp 64.