Two weeks ago
was the 43rd anniversary of the May 4th Kent State
shootings. To celebrate, the university opened the May 4th Visitor's
Center, an interactive multimedia museum in Taylor Hall, and Friday night had
PBS’ Gwen Ifill host a discussion panel about the shootings’ significance in
local and national history. Events continued throughout the weekend, one of
which my wife and I were fortunate enough to attend Saturday night in
Cartwright Hall. Academy-award winning writer/director Oliver Stone spoke to an
auditorium of five-hundred students, faculty, staff, and local residents about
the importance of the shootings and his use of history in his films. It was an
interesting evening, one that got me, my wife, and students talking.
The KSU shootings took place during
an on-campus student protest of Nixon’s invasion of Cambodia. What happened
next is well-known: riots and looting of businesses on Friday May 1st
and the arson of the ROTC building on Saturday the 2nd. Eventually,
the Ohio National Guard killed four students and wounded nine others. Two of
the dead were merely hurrying to class. One was an ROTC member. The shootings
led to protests throughout the country and the Pulitzer Prize-winning photo of
the dead Jeffery Miller is forever engrained in our cultural memory. Prior to
the shootings, Nixon called the protestors “bums,” to which Allison Krause’s
father famously retorted, “My daughter was not a bum.” Neil Young would pen
“Ohio” about the massacre, and the KSU shootings provide a key sequence in
Oliver Stone’s 1995 bio-drama Nixon.
Talking
to community members about the shootings will invariably give you different
opinions. No one says the students “deserved it.” It was a tragedy, but many
feel slighted that the protests overshadow the destruction caused to the
community during that week, most of which was committed by student activist
groups from around the country. Considering the Justice Department’s dismissal
of a 30-year old audio-recording that purports to show the ONG’s order to shoot
was based on gunfire manufactured by an on-campus FBI informant, we may never
know what really happened.
Still,
four kids died.
That
was Oliver Stone’s point throughout the evening. What led to their deaths? How have
we moved on? What did those kids die for?
Stone
maintained they died in the social-civil war between “those who asked
questions” and Nixon’s “moral majority.” He emphasized that he was born into an
Eisenhower-Republican household and enlisted in Vietnam because he felt it was
his duty to fight communists. He was told all his life by the educational and
political machine they were our enemy and threatened our way of life. If you’ve
seen Platoon or for that matter any
of Stone’s work, you know that war changed his ideology. Even after the KSU
shootings, Nixon won a landslide election in 1972. Stone said those numbers show
that Nixon could lay claim to the majority, as “immoral as they might have been.”
The importance of the students’ deaths was that they died during a time when
our country fought among ourselves ideologically.
Who
won? Well, the military industrial complex is stronger than ever, and we have more
influence and control abroad. Who do you think?
Stone
made sure to point out how history changes depending on whom guides cultural
memory. Ronald Reagan knew that the first Gulf War might erase the
soured-impact of Vietnam, and that with a new enemy to fight, the old grudges
would be laid to rest. The cultural fears after 9/11 and initial enthusiasm for
the Iraq War only enabled media and government agencies to propagate American
exceptionalism and imperialist policies. Stone cited recent polls that show 51%
of American young people feel the Vietnam War was justified. This flabbergasted
him, and was one of the reasons he co-wrote and produced the Showtime
documentary series The Untold History of
the United States. He was appalled by what his kids were taught in schools,
and hopes to change it.
During
his one-on-one discussion with a JMC professor (I forget the guy’s name, oops)
Stone did not want to rhapsodize about his movies. He doubts his films have
made any real cultural impact. When asked which of his films he likes best, he
replied he can’t pick a favorite. Each is one of his babies. Stone spoke of
media bias at length, ripped Time
Magazine and Walter Cronkite, and made it known Obama has continued the
policies of Bush, Jr., albeit with different rhetoric. He said in his travels
it has been enlightening to see how America is viewed abroad and encouraged
students to get on the internet and learn to find out what foreign and
domestic policies are actually doing, and to combat disinformation. “We’re
dealing with some real scum,” he said, which got cheers and giggles from the
crowd. He finished by repeating that the KSU shootings should always be commemorated
by this campus so that we—maybe I’m going too Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young with this—teach our children
well. If not, then the immoral majority will have won, and those kids will have
died for nothing.
After
the talk, I milled about the lobby with my wife and students. A few of my kids—ah,
listen to me, calling them “my kids”—were put off by Stone’s “strong opinions.”
However, most said his words inspired them to question what they are taught. In
days since, many went to the Visitor’s Center and were deeply moved. They all
talked about the draft board, where you can “get your number” to see if you
would’ve been drafted in Vietnam. Many would have been, and they were deeply disturbed.
The
question Stone has me pondering is—What is history? Is it concrete? Moldable?
Without witnessing an event, will we ever know the exact details? Is history a
stone thrown into a pond and can we only be sure of its impact by studying the
ripples?
It
was an exciting night. When I met Mr. Stone, he signed a copy of his Untold History and posed for a picture.
I don’t know what I said to him, probably fan-boy rambling about how much I
like his movies, but after he signed my book, he told me I seemed like a very
nice young man. I’ll take that.
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