This year is the sixtieth anniversary of Pearl Harbor. For the survivors, who are now mostly in their eighties or older, it will likely mark parade’s end, the last post for memories that gentle their condition. Buglers will play taps, tears will flow, and the cloying confection of “the greatest generation” will be saluted yet again. On the sentimentalizing of generations I am in lockstep with Harold Rosenberg. “Except as a primitive means of telling time, generations are not a serious category,” he wrote. “Belonging to a generation is one of the lowest forms of solidarity.” NBC plans a Tom Brokaw National Geographic special, while the other networks will show documentary footage of the carnage; old books will be reissued with new material and new books published pointing the finger and assessing the blame. The highlight of the commemoration will occur not on December 7th but on Memorial Day weekend, with the release of the hundred-and-forty-million-dollar Jerry Bruckheimer blockbuster “Pearl Harbor,” a picture with the high-tech, high-hokum content that makes Bruckheimer such a glossy and entertaining filmmaker. (My wife and I once wrote an unproduced screenplay for him and his late partner Don Simpson—about U.F.O.s—and I have a popcorn weakness for his movies: “Con Air,” “Armageddon,” “Enemy of the State.”)
Many clichés about Pearl Harbor and Hawaii have barnacled into fact. Even today, we hear, as we heard in the decades before the Japanese attack, that Oahu is the American Gibraltar, the fortress that keeps the Pacific free. This is a wishful improvement on the uneasy truth that Hawaii was, and to a certain extent still is, the headquarters of the American Raj, and Pearl Harbor the gateway to mare nostrum. Nearly a quarter of the land on Oahu is owned or controlled by the Defense Department, and sixteen per cent of the population is either in uniform or a military dependent. The result is that the military holds the strings to Hawaii’s perception of its own survival. The bedrock belief of state politics is that any curtailment of the military presence threatens not only the local economy but national security itself. Such fears reinforce a hierarchical military class structure that has endured through both peace and war in Hawaii since early in the last century, when Congress began to realize the strategic value of its mid-Pacific territory.