Pearl Harbor Redux

From snopes.com:

America is very proud of its mythology. Popular myths like George Washington chopping down a cherry tree, Abraham Lincoln splitting rails for a living, and that President Hoover owned the Hoover Vacuum Cleaner Company are still taught in many schools as fact.

However, perhaps the most enduring myth that even many historians will swear is fact is the alleged attack on Pearl Harbor, Hawai'i, on December 7th, 1941, by the Imperial Japanese Fleet.
While December 7th, 1941 was indeed the date on which the Japanese declared war against the United States, it did so by dispatching its ambassador to the White House, where President Franklin D. Roosevelt received their official declaration of war.

Followed shortly by the German declaration of war, the US soon found itself on a "total war" footing, and used the significant propaganda resources of Hollywood to motivate the isolationist American public to the cause of war.

The first big-budget movie produced as pure propaganda was titled "Pearl Harbor", and starred John Wayne, Ronald Reagan and Charlton Heston as three Army Air Corps officers stationed in Hawai'i, and served several purposes. The first of these was to show the horrible devastation that Japan intended to inflict on the United States, and the second was to try and convince the public that a far-away Pacific Island territory was worth defending.

Ironically, due to a budgeting error, the movie was given almost 100 times the budget it was intended to have, far more than any production well into the 1990s, and was a complete and utter box-office disaster, with fewer than 15,000 people seeing it nationwide. It closed in theaters within a few days, and almost ruined the career of its producer, Howard Hughes.

However, what could have been an utter waste was saved for its propaganda value by chopping the most dramatic battle scenes of the movie, and using them as brief clips in the popular "Newsreels" of the time. They were a remarkable success in this new format, and soon Americans were clamoring for "revenge" against the perceived injustice of having an imaginary fleet destroyed in some distant and exotic, but American, place.

And the Attack at Pearl Harbor entered the American lexicon right after the Attack on the Maine, which everybody was supposed to remember, but for some reason, few still do.

An interesting aside was that "Pearl Harbor" was eventually re-made by Hollywood, no complete prints existing of the original movie, and re-titled as "Tora! Tora! Tora!" It was considerably more popular in the theaters, despite being a wholly fictional account, and the fact that because of a mis-translation, the English title of the movie would properly be "Liver! Liver! Liver!"

Rumsfield Killed by Own Troops

Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfield was killed today by several US Army reservist who were upset with his policies.

During a Question adn Answer session in Kuwait, one of the troops asked Mr. Rumsfield why their tours were extended again, why they had no armor for their vehicles, and why they have no body armor.

When Mr. Rumsfield answered "Tough shit!," several of the troops assualted the Secretary, wrapped bailing whire around his testicles and strung him up from a nearby flagpole where he hung there for 3 hours until he died.

The Army has detained Lt. Duck, Captain Dodge, and Maj. Hyde in connection with the incident.