My Mom vs. Tom Hanks

[Note: I hit PUBLISH instead of SAVE so this thing went live before it was
 ready. If you have encountered it in its various versions before this one
 I apologize. I was greatly annoyed when I wrote it. I still am.]

I already linked to this Hot Air post about Tom Hanks. The rea­son I am com­ing back to it is I thought about my entirely reg­u­lar mother. Mom. Dur­ing WWII she rose to the occa­sion in an heroic fash­ion. And that made me think that Tom Hanks needs to be taken out back and horse­whipped. The hah-​​ha part about not know­ing his­tory in the linked times arti­cle. hah-​​hah. hah-​​hah. If you don’t know what you’re talk­ing about (hah-​​hah-​​ha) then kindly absent your­self or at least remain mute.

Espe­cially if one of your pre­vi­ous rôles has pos­sessed you and you have become, not a child who has turned into an adult, but some­thing like the reverse.

This is what my pre­vi­ous post meant when talk­ing about how drift­ing along on a cloud of wealth and celebrity can rot your brain.

My mother was a civil­ian employee of the Army and lived on the west coast. This was when the Air Force was part of the Army. There was a pic­ture of her and Andrei Gromyko, who would later be the for­eign min­is­ter of the U.S.S.R., stand­ing in their over­coats on the tar­mac, chat­ting, a cou­ple of B-17’s in the back­ground. She was not one of the igno­rant clingers that the Obama admin­is­tra­tion is so fond of skew­er­ing. Yet, when I asked her what she remem­bered most about the war, the one thing, she said

Every morn­ing I’d get up, put the cof­fee on, and look out the win­dow to see if the Jap fleet was on the horizon.

So, Tom, it wasn’t about peo­ple who looked dif­fer­ent. It was about get­ting invaded, just like China. Just because you don’t get it, Tom, don’t read, Tom, don’t know much about his­tory, Tom, doesn’t mean the coun­try, prior to you, was filled with pet­ti­fog­ging racists. Just because, in your weight­less world, you hear that Amer­ica is an impe­ri­al­is­tic, cap­i­tal­is­tic, bru­tal, racist, bug­ger­ing can­cer on the world, it is not nec­es­sar­ily true and doesn’t, really, have to be repeated to sully the mem­o­ries of the peo­ple who fought WWII, in order to advance what­ever agenda you’re after.