Brad Olson: The More Things Change...

The line it is drawn. The curse it is cast. The slow one now will later be fast. The times they are a-changin'.

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Bob Dylan was right.

About 35 years ago, when John Wayne starred in The Green Berets, a project that he had moved forward passionately from its outset, he was berated by critics. It was a World War II-genre film about Vietnam, meaning that it characterized war as a dirty and hellacious business that was nonetheless heroic and necessary. By 1967, that was an impossible notion to ascertain -- to some critics, it was even profane.

Renata Adler, writing for The New York Times, called the film "so unspeakable, so stupid, so rotten and false... that it passes through being fun, through being funny, through being camp, through everything and becomes an invitation to grieve... for what has happened to the fantasy-making apparatus.... Simplicities of the right, simplicities of the left, but this one is beyond the possible. It is vile and insane." Other critics were similarly angry and indignant, and Wayne defended the film and its message with temerity, the same way he stood by everything he did.

There is a curious development in our culture of late, a development typified by the scads of war films that have recently been released across the country. A few of the films, particularly Black Hawk Down and We Were Soldiers, portray conflicts other than World War II in the same vein as The Green Berets. Yet, apparently, after Sept. 11, this is not nearly so egregious or profane as it once was.

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As the present now will later be past, the order is rapidly fadin'.

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When many of the 1960s misfits and activists hit graduate school, they brought the same tenacity and skepticism of the status quo to the academy. Nowhere has this been more obvious than in the discipline of history, where these scholars spawned what was spuriously referred to as "revisionist" history.

The heroes and legends of the nation's past were no longer sacred. Thomas Jefferson, instead of Founding Father and penman of the Declaration of Independence, was slave-owner and philanderer, even the father of an illegitimate child with one of his "properties." Manifest destiny was not so much our final triumph over European imperialism as it was another chapter in the legacy of conquest (so named by Patricia Nelson Limerick), complete with the pillaging of Indians and the exploitation of immigrants.

The trend continued all the way into the '90s, where college history textbooks circulated with such names as Myth America: A Historical Anthology. Interestingly enough, the beginning of the end, or at least of the qualification, of this trend and movement began years before Sept. 11. Our country was in a new gilded age of prosperity (so called by The New Yorker's David Remnick), and suddenly, the legends became heroic again.

Stephen Ambrose, his plagiarism notwithstanding, authored many of the works that marked the reversal of this "revisionist" movement. Among them were Undaunted Courage: Meriwether Lewis, Thomas Jefferson, and the Opening of the American West, a strong defection, even in its very title, from the findings of the new history. And of course, since Ambrose is essentially a World War II historian, many of his books told the stories of heroic groups of soldiers fighting and dying for our great nation. It may have been pure coincidence that he wrote the books and that Simon and Schuster published them, but there was a reason so many people bought and read them.

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And the first one now will later be last.

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There is no such thing as "revisionist" history, because all great developments and contributions to history are revisionist. History, as it goes, is by nature less about the past than the present. It is driven by the present.

Because this is true, movies like We Were Soldiers can sweep the box office and mesmerize reviewers. Revisiting The New York Times, A.O. Scott said that "Like the best war movies -- and like martial literature going back to the Iliad -- it balances the dreadful, unassuageable cruelty of warfare and the valor and decency of those who fight."

The point here, and perhaps the deeper meaning of Dylan's anthem, is that times change, and they change and they change. Somehow, though, the naysayers will always be around to believe that the world should go on just the way they like it. They will stand in the doorway and block up the hall. But it will never matter.

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For the times they are a-changin'.

Brad Olson is a senior History major from Huntsville, Texas.

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