A Christmas Bob Hope show conceals an ugly side to laughter.

On a Bob Hope Christmas Eve show for the troops in 1945, I heard a musician play “taps for Japs” on a “bonsai bugle,” which was purportedly taken from a dead Japanese soldier. The show featured Judy Garland, Dinah Shore, Jimmy Durante, Bing Crosby, and many others from that era.[1]

I worked with a Vietnam vet when I was a kid. He was a chopper mechanic and “flew with his own birds” (as he said), as that ensured the mechanic did a good job. He sat on his helmet to protect himself from bullets that might come up through the bottom of the helicopter. Something else he told me that stayed with me: they cut the ears off dead Vietcong soldiers and strung them from their belts. They could exchange them for beer when they got back to base (where I presume he repaired the helicopters).

We hear and absorb such horrible images without batting an eye. How far are we from putting the decapitated heads of enemies on stakes that line the roads into town? Or hanging criminals along the Potomac?

Please don’t misunderstand, I recognize the symbolism of playing American music on a bugle taken from a dead Japanese soldier, and can understand that emotions were still raw 3 months after the war ended. I’m not judging it, just observing how unfortunate it is that we can laugh at it.

[2013-12-10]

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[1]
As Bob Hope closed the show, he said “this the first Christmas of peace in a long, long time.” Dinah sang “O Come All Ye Faithful” and “Oh Little Town of Bethlehem”;  Judy sang “It Came upon a Midnight Clear”; Crosby sang “Silent Night.”

They celebrated Christmas as Christmas. Not season’s greetings.

When a world is sick of killing, they cling to symbols of peace, love, renewal, and no one in history embodied those messages more completely and enduringly than Jesus.

Christmas is what it is. You don’t have to celebrate it if you don’t want to, but if you do, pay a little attention to what it’s all about.

 

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