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When I was growing up in the 1970's, I was attending a Catholic grade school full of the children of World War II and Korean War veterans. My father fought the Japanese, his brother had been killed fighting the Germans. Their father had been gassed fighting the Germans in the First World War. We played army incessantly when we were kids. Our parents _always_ bought us toy guns when there was occasion to buy us gifts: birthdays and Christmas were times to buy war toys for the boys, and we all had piles of pastic and metal weapons that reflected the fact that we were American children, stoked on the lore of warfare and the culture of weaponry. It was a strangely testosterone-charged youth culture for kids twelve years old and younger. I was ten years old at the height of my fascination for 'playing army' and for toy guns. And as for myself, I was the Arsenal of Democracy: Donnie down the street generally played 'Son of Hitler' and I played 'The Americans'. The kids on my side lined up in the basement of our house, a row home about twenty minutes southwest of Philadelphia, and accepted my plastic and metal rifles and pistols on loan. My metal bolt-driven (German-style) machine gun with heavy-guage plastic and a red plastic effect popper in the front end was reserved exclusively to me. I loved that toy gun; I got it for Christmas when I was eight years old and I played with it heavily until I broke it falling out of a tree when I was ten. I was heartbroken. I'm not sure what it says of me that I'm still just a tad mournful about it, in some childlike corner of my heart, to this very day at forty years of age. It was like a childhood talisman of manliness and power and I had conceded it to the obliterative power of accident and Time. Toy guns like it are no longer sold today, not even on eBay that I can find, and I don't think I'll see another like it. It makes me very sad. I look back on my memories of that toy machinegun with enormous fondness: little kids used to love lining up against the wall of the Bascalia Family's house (they lived on the end of another row, by the driveway on our street back to the driveways and garages of our neighborhood) and machinegun them in mass executions. I pulled back the metal bolt again and again as I hosed them down with imaginary killing rounds from my murderous war toy, and they died grinning and convulsing like laughing martyrs, completing our communal romance with the thoroughly American act of killing and dying by a machinegun. If we'd been much older it might have been sordidly sexual. Kids who were particularly good at dying received the complimentary bonus hosedown, and I continued to spray their joyously convulsing bodies with invisible bullets in morbid glee, and they died well. It only ended when they were tired of being on the ground or had to go home, or indeed when I finally tired of killing them. Even spectacles of mock-brutality become tiresome to the most Americanized, psychologically weaponized boy. What drove us to kill each other with toy guns and imaginary ammunition? Why did our fathers stockpile our toyboxes with these replicas of the tools of murder and mayhem so willfully? We were all fine student historians who watched Public Television's finest British documentary on World War II with religious ferver every afternoon. (This was only after our daily serving of Ultra Man, George of the Jungle and Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons on Channel 17 - and these were the days of VHF and UHF television.) What was this wonderfully educational program that inspired such savage, playful violence in all of the little boys on Crescent Drive? 'The World at War' was one of the most educational programs I ever watched as a child, and it has remained part of my 'media conscious' throughout my life. Its anthemic, martial and dark-toned theme is indelibly part of my musical memory, as well as many of its horrific images and its famous burning, tombstone-like logo at the beginning of every episode. It is a fine, comprehensive history of the Second World War that I enjoyed with my father on many afternoons and no doubt had a large effect on me, who am an excellent amateur historian with a taste for the lore of the past and now a sociopolitical radical. It is because of this program and others like it, largely via media venues such as Public Television and the BBC, that I have a more solid grasp of history from various points of view than the vast majority of Americans and can teach my students all of their literature in a firm historical and geopolitical context. 'The World at War' is a bulwark in my personal, private efforts at educating myself about history and the world, and I am grateful for it. Today, I'm grateful to finally own a copy of the entire series on DVD. I purchased it the other day at BJ's Wholesale (a wholesale club requiring membership but well worth the cost), $60US. It consists of 26 episodes plus supplementary materials on 11 DVD discs in a boxed set, with an excellent if relatively simple menuing system and fully remastered for picture and sound for today's media. Sir Laurence Olivier's exquisite and expressive enunciation wonderfully enlivens the highly instructive commentary and the tremendous wealth of imagery, both photographic and moving-picture, in color and in black-and-white. There is nothing that detracts from this powerful series even after more than thirty years' time since its production and broadcast in Britan, America and the world. It is truly a classic and a choice addition to the DVD library of an educationally-conscious collector. I rate it at five out of five stars, and encourage everyone so inclined to run out and purchase a copy post-haste. As for myself, I will share it with my father, a disabled veteran who continues to read constantly about the conflict in which he and his brother participated. He now also watches innumerable DVD documentaries thanks to my recent purchase of a DVD player for him after my mother's passing, on all kinds of subjects; now we can reminisce about our times as father and young son watching this fine series - and my ritual of summertime warfare and make-believe quartermaster. This boxed set is published in the United States by Arts & Entertainment (A&E) Network.
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The Alienist
jhfurnish@yahoo.com
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Review - 'Notes from a Scandal' 5 of 5 stars
