What’s Called Irony
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

What’s the difference between the war in Iraq and the war in Vietnam? For those who belong to the anti-war party, it seems, there is none. That’s why the relevance to this autumn’s presidential election of the rerelease of Peter Davis’s passionate anti-Vietnam War documentary, “Hearts and Minds,” from 1974 can just be assumed.
Thus the press materials for the film, which opens today at the Film Forum, include a blurb from Michael Moore saying that it is “not only the best documentary I’ve ever seen – it may be the best movie ever… as relevant today as ever.”
Well, you can see why he would say that. Mr. Davis pioneered the use of the propaganda techniques that Mr. Moore himself has since brought to such a striking degree of refinement in “Fahrenheit 9/11.”
In particular, Davis is a master at setting up scenes of those he doesn’t like – which is to say patriotic Americans and supporters of the war – looking ridiculous, foolish, or vicious – and juxtaposing them with scenes of those he does like – that is, the avowed enemies of the United States – looking brave, noble, and hard done-by.
That’s what they call “irony,” boys and girls.
Thus he shows us a brave, defiant communist against a backdrop of children’s coffins, insisting that the anti-communist forces can never win in Vietnam. Then he cuts to the political and banking elite of anti-communist South Vietnam – we know that they are the political and banking elite because a notice on the screen to tell us so – enjoying themselves at a Saigon country club.
“People in America will think we’re ridiculous,” says one of them. And if they don’t, it certainly won’t be the fault of Peter Davis.
In the same way, Davis cuts between scenes of high school football pageantry, or pep talks to the players from a clergymen about being “winners in the game of life” and American soldiers at a Vietnamese brothel. Revolutionary War reenactors dressed as Minutemen are intercut with clips from crude, 1950s-vintage propaganda about the communist menace. Above all, Mr. Davis is guilty – for it does seem a deep sin not only against his subjects but also against his subject, which is war – of a Moore-like exploitation of the grief of those who have lost a son in the war.
But Mr. Davis is a cleverer and more subtle exploiter than his pupil. In “Fahrenheit 9/11,” Moore shows us a bitter and resentful working-class mother who thinks that, because her son died in Iraq, George Bush must be as bad a man as Michael Moore says he is. Mr. Davis, by contrast, shows us a couple who are obviously from the New England WASP aristocracy, who are still supporting the war and President Nixon even though their son has been killed.
He was Marine Captain William “Bing” Emerson, a Harvard graduate and great-grandson of Ralph Waldo Emerson, who was killed when the helicopter he was piloting was shot down in Vietnam in 1968. His parents talk lovingly of him, showing no overt signs of grief. Yet their old-fashioned ability to keep their emotions in check is somehow far more moving than the anger and self-pity of Mr. Moore’s subject.
But part of what touches us about these scenes is the parents’ evocation of those old-line WASP values – not only of emotional continence but also of patriotism and public and military service – which are now as dead as poor Bing Emerson. Interestingly, Bing’s sister Ellen marched in one of the London protests against the Iraq war last year in her late brother’s name, according to a letter she wrote to the Independent – “Lest we forget the lessons of history.”
In these scenes, however briefly, Mr. Davis rises above crude propaganda. But even there he can’t resist labeling one interview in which the elder Mr. Emerson praises the leadership of Richard Nixon: “Filmed early in 1973” – that is, before all the worst disclosures about Watergate had come out.
Mr. Davis’s purpose is the same as Michael Moore’s. It depends on the despicable pretense that (a) the griefs of war are unknown or unfelt by war’s apologists and (b) that there is always an easy alternative. That is the hippie message, conveyed in one of the scenes of protest in the film: “All we are saying is give peace a chance.”
Well, peace was given a chance, and it couldn’t cut the mustard, boys. That’s why we went to war. But, safe in their self-righteousness, the protesters find it easy to suppose – the supposition that both Mr. Moore and Mr. Davis do their utmost to exploit – that those who make war do so because they like killing, or have some other bad motive of their own.
That’s why we still don’t bat an eye when one of Mr. Davis’s interviewees refers to the “criminality” of America’s leaders in Vietnam. Sure. Wasn’t that one of the “lessons of history”?
Well, no it wasn’t, actually. But the preservation of the illusion that it was is useful to those like Messrs. Davis and Moore, who believe that the human cost makes war never worth waging and therefore always, in effect, criminal.
This is the reason for the identikit protesters who can now be made to turn out against any and every American military action overseas. What’s the difference between Vietnam and Iraq? Who cares? The anti-warriors only go through the motions of demonstrating that either the one or the other is “immoral.” At bottom they believe that all war, indeed all application of American power in the world, is immoral.
That’s the real lesson of history.