Remembering Pearl Harbor

Back in the early '80s, when I was a paste-up monkey at a printing company in Lakewood, California, I used to work on the official quarterly publication of the Pearl Harbor Survivors' Association.

Being young, stupid, and in the on-deck circle for a major-league drug addiction that would see me through the rest of the Big Hair Decade, these old guys were just another job to me. I enjoyed their vintage photos of shit getting blown up, and some of their first-hand accounts made for compelling reading.

One of the articles I remember to this day put forth the then-controversial theory that FDR had deliberately goaded Japan into attacking us, in order to join up with his buddy Churchill in England's battle against the Nazis. (I made a really awesome photo collage of cool shit blowing up with FDR's face superimposed over it, an apparently maniacal leer on his face. Did I mention about being young and stoopid?)

These days I'm of the opinion that FDR did exactly that, and more, that it was the right thing to do. Personally, I'm convinced FDR was expecting to take an ass-whupping at one of our smaller, remote Pacific bases, closer to Japan. I am quite certain he didn't think his manipulations would end up costing us almost our entire Pacific fleet. But the threat posed by the Axis powers (Germany, Japan and Italy) demanded intervention, and without direct provocation, America - by a large margin - had no taste for getting into "another European War."

History lesson over.

Anyhow, that Sunday morning dawned 64 years ago today. And the war that followed took America from being the post-Great War isolationist enclave that we were at the time to the biggest swinging cock on the international block that we remain today.

So I would like to take a minute to remember the American servicemen and women we lost that day, and encourage anyone reading this to do the same. Their sacrifice was not in vain, as long as we (as a nation, if not a specific administration) continue to honor the ideals they gave their lives to defend.

God bless them, every one.