The Daily Cartoon and Live Briefing: Wednesday, February 28, 2024

Notably: There was a time in my teens when I couldn’t go to sleep without a few doses of M*A*S*H. When my parents caught on and found it excessive, I just taped (as in audio: video was still in its infancy) the episodes and listened to them in bed. Of course we all watched the final episode, on this day in 1983, when we took a break from all that outrage over Reagan’s love affair with El Salvador’s terrorists and their mirror image in Nicaragua, thinking people my age would not finish the decade before ending up in the maw of one of his wars. There were “M*A*S*H bashes” everywhere, and everywhere, the Times reported (in a story that made the front page of the Metropolitan section, but not 1A: that would never happen today. It’d be all over the front page, displacing anything more serious), “the mood was a peculiar mixture of sadness, celebration, homage, sentimentality and hilarity.” As I recall, and Super Bowls aside, it was the single-most watched television show in American history, and remains so to this day, bested only by 10 Super Bowls, and only because the population has grown significantly since then. It drew 106 million viewers, besting the Carter-Reagan debate of 1980 by almost 30 million viewers. Over the years M*A*S*H lost its lustre for me. Its early years were always funny, but the sappiness, the preachiness, the sanctimony even, gradually took over the show, to the point of making Alan Alda difficult to bear. It’s either that or war is not so easy to satirise when it’s a daily norm. M*A*S*H had been a reaction to Vietnam, but even Vietnam now seems so 20th century. One of the key scenes in “Goodbye, Farewell and Amen,” the scene that explains why Hawkeye finally cracked up and ended up in the loony bin for a while, shows Hawkeye getting angry at a Korean woman as the whole M*A*S*H gang is returning from some kind of picnic. The bus has stopped, turned off all lights, gone all quiet to avoid detection by North Koreans or Chinese, but the Korean woman is holding a chicken that won’t stop clucking. Hawkeye loses it. The chicken finally stops. Of course it wasn’t a chicken. It was the woman’s infant. She’d strangled it. So he loses it, and we get some fine scenes with his psychiatrist, the great Alan Arbus, known as Sydney Friedman in the show. It’s not just fiction: E.B. Sledge, in With the Old Breed at Peleliu and Okinawa, tells a similar story. A soldier had cracked up. A corpsman killed him to keep him quiet.

—P.T.

 

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And I was married. I caught a train for Birmingham, for the other reunion. Because Liz was waiting in Birmingham, I chose to be discharged from active duty at Pensacola, and we rode down from Birmingham together, on the same slow, dusty train, stopping, as you always did, at Flomaton, and on down to the Gulf. But it wasn’t simply convenience that had brought me back to Pensacola. I wanted to return just once, just for a few days, to that place where I had learned the only skill I had, and where I had been happy in that timeless world of young men, before the dying began. Perhaps the impulse to return is a sign that one has grown up, an acknowledgment of the way the good times pass us. We go back in space because we can’t go back in time.

–From E.B. Sledge, With the Old Breed at Peleliu and Okinawa (1981).

The Cartoon and Live Briefing Archive.