Late night war movies and little children : a cautionary tale

My parents always liked to put us small ones to bed at an ungodly early hour, right up into High School age.

One exception, for no reason I could ever discern, was when I was a small child (between the age of six to almost ten) when our family was living in 1950s Victoria and Vancouver and owning a reliable TV.

I was the eldest child, but obviously still not very old, when my parents made me sit up late with them and watch late night TV, ie the TV movies presented between 9pm and midnight.

(Made me , I repeat, because as a life long scaredy cat, I was not begging to watch scary war movies, believe you me.)

My takeaway lesson, as a wee child, was that WWII consisted mostly of armed uniformed men strafing civilian refugees on the road, bombing civilian homes, torturing civilians in POW concentration camps, torpedoing without warning civilian liners or blockading and starving civilian cities.

That is when they weren't putting hapless civilian hostages up against walls to shoot as reprisals for civilian resistance action.

I wasn't just a tiny child, I was tiny even for a six year old child and as a constant newcomer to my schools was often the bullies' target.

I saw WWII as a lot like elementary school, but with guns; big guys beating up little people.

Natural penicillin, made by the sort of tiny slimey no counts you might see on dank basement walls, was the only hero this tiny child could see in these war movies, saving kids like me here there and anywhere from deadly infections, be they from bombing injuries or simply brought on by hunger and fatigue.

If my book on WWII (Upending) sounds more than a little familiar to this tale from almost sixty years ago, blame it on my parents....

in the Fifties my key influence was always TV - in the Sixties it was never TV

My partner Rebecca and I always get into disputes about me letting her son's daughter Sam watch so much videos on the computer : Peppa Pig, Little Bear, Arthur and Franklin and the like.

I myself loathe TV, rarely watch movies (but do enjoy detective mystery series from TV, as long as they are not thrillers).

I like popular music (though don't listen to it on the radio as much as when I was younger), never read fiction (though I liked it plenty until I left high school) but above all, am a total non fiction bookworm.

I read books, magazines, newspapers and increasingly, on the computer.

Rebecca is the one who watches TV or listens to CBC radio - not me --- I am the much bigger reader.

So you'd think I'd be the one to restrain Sam's TV time, but that's not so.

Because when I was small, before I could read (and even after I could read) I didn't really read much - more enjoyed simply staring at photos or illustrations and then trying to understand the short descriptive cutlines or captions below them.

Instead (from age six till I turned ten) I much preferred to play and talk with a big bunch of other kids, watch grownup movies or TV shows with my parents on the family TV or gaze out the car window soaking it all in, when our family went for long drives.

On the TV, war movies, murder mysteries, a few TV situation comedies, TV docudramas and Fifties Sci Fi movies made the biggest impression on me.

But in September 1961, that all abruptly ended - I wasn't allowed to leave our new rural home to visit other kids, there was no TV and no money to go to city movie houses or have a daily newspaper.

Print had to take up the slack and with two weeks I found I could read adult level books and magazines as fast and as easily as any adult who was a good reader.

But back in the Fifties, as a little kid, I could either not read at all, or so poorly, that I couldn't possibly hope to learn about worlds beyond my own through my print-understanding abilities.

But even as a small kid, I learned a lot about the adult world through observing the sounds, dialogue and actions of films and TV shows --- and matured in doing so.

Because even at age seven I thought A Walk In The Sun was a war movie well above the rest I had seen and I had already seen plenty by then.

Professional adult film critics (then and now) thoroughly agree with my childhood assessment.

I only wish my mother had stuck two year old me in front of a TV sometimes, instead of always outside, behind a wire fence enclosure ,to stare all day, every day, at the few cars that went past our home just beyond Dartmouth's 1954 town limits.

I was bored out of my skull - could have used some brain stimulation.

I was conceived in 1950 and was eight and a half in 1960, so I recall nothing of that decade from the simple-minded Dick and Jane books we had to read in school.

But the TV I watched at home was fully adult and its lessons taught me how to understand the adult 1950s world I saw outside my home.

As a result, I 'get' the 1950s, I really do --- and while I have much studied the 1940s, I don't get them at all.

Sam is a very smart two year old and she has no trouble separating the good children's shows from the bad children's shows - and she can tell me the plots and characters better than I can - and I watch them with her.

TV expands her mind as much as playtime and kids books do, I can see it do so in her.

And that it matches my memories of just what I can recall from a 1950s childhood - and it wasn't anything we were taught in school .

(Besides the exploding of Ripple Rock and the death of Pope Pius - interestingly, two external adult happenings brought into our simple classroom days by our teachers.)

So, no I never heard of 1957's Strontium 90 till 1962 but I saw its indirect effect on the world in all those junky Sci Fi films I saw back in the 1950s.

So let Sam watch TV and videos, I say - it'll expand her brain, not rot it ...

"Transitional Generation" : too young to remember WWII, old enough to remember the Sixties - but above all, a child of the Fifties

In most of the world that had a baby boom, it began after 1941 and it began tailing off after 1959.

My postwar "Transitional Generation" - by sheer coincidence - shares that time period with the actual baby boomers - because we find the Transitional Generation effect even in countries where there was in fact no noticeable baby boom.

But consider this : all these boomers and transitionalists share at least one thing - maybe even only one thing - in common.

For even someone born in early 1941 is still "a child of the Fifties" (age 9) in 1950, just as a baby at the other end, born in late 1959,  is at least technically still "a child of the Fifties".

Someone born in 1937 (a teenage in 1950), or someone born in 1960, can't ever share that fact with this cohort.

A shared Fifties childhood - rather than experiencing the very occasionally turbulent Sixties and Seventies with many other age groups - might be the key bond and glue for this large body of current humanity...

9.5 Theses about climate DENIERS

It is hard to nail something up , on the internet , but here it goes anyway :

(1) I believe - as a percentage - more Protestants than Catholics deny human climate change and that they do so more vehemently.

(2) I believe - as a percentage - more people of Anglo-Saxon (sic) origins deny human climate change than do people of other ethnic origins.

(3) I believe - as a percentage - more males than females strongly deny human climate change.

(4) I believe - as a percentage - more better off people than poorer people vehemently deny human climate change.

(5) I believe - as a percentage - that more native born citizens than immigrants , strongly deny human climate change.

(6) I believe - as a percentage - more people with some post secondary education deny strongly human climate change than do people with either high school or less education or those with post-graduate education.

(7) I believe - as a percentage - people who deny human climate change dislike immigration, minorities, disabled, women and gay rights, more so than do non-deniers.

(8) I believe - as a percentage - more deniers than non-deniers believe super powers should 'go it alone' rather than first helping to assemble a coalition of allies bound by a common goal.

That instead they prefer to use their nationally-exclusive super weapons against the enemy, like some WWII comic book super hero, sailing above community, democracy and the rule of law.

Which is to say, far more adult deniers than non-deniers still believe it was Captain America and not Joe and Willie that actually won WWII.

(9) I believe - that as a percentage - more whites, than non-white , deny human climate change.

(9.5) I believe - as a percentage - that more climate change deniers prefer the Fifties to the Sixties than do non-deniers.

 And that the more widely read among the deniers secretly yearn for the halcyon days of pre-1939, when Anglo Saxon empires and Anglo Saxon eugenics and Anglo-Saxon scientism still ruled the world.

Which is to say that human climate change isn't really the issue for them.

It is but a 'rally around the wagons' symbol.

A last ditch battle to decide whether anyone or anything (be it a minority group, a gender or Mother Nature herself) can ever impose any limits on a traditional ruling group to do what ever it wants, where ever it wants, when ever it wants, for as much as it wants ....