HISTORY HIJACKED

By Charles Krauthammer

It took more than a year, but in the end common sense and fear of Congress prevailed: the Smithsonian Institution canceled the exhibit it had planned at Washington's National Air and Space Museum to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima. The exhibit, whose theme was American vengefulness and Japanese suffering in World War II, had led outraged veterans' groups to engage in endless negotiations with the curators to produce a script of at least minimal dignity and respect for history.

My reading of the exhibit script last August led me to a different conclusion. I figured that with curators who could describe the Pacific war thus: "For most Americans ... it was a war of vengeance. For most Japanese, it was a war to defend their unique culture against Western imperialism," there was no point in negotiating. You don't amend such tendentious anti-Americanism. You kill it. You scrap the 600-page commentary and follow the advice of General Paul Tibbets, pilot of the plane that dropped the bomb: display the restored Enola Gay in reverent silence, with only a few lines explaining what it did and when.

Last week Smithsonian secretary Michael Heyman did exactly that. No doubt alarmed by the fact that 81 Congressmen had written in protest and that hearings were being planned on this exhibit and perhaps other trash-America exhibits at Smithsonian museums, he announced that Air and Space would display the Enola Gay with only a simple explanation of its mission and a video memoir of the crew.

It was a victory for good sense. It was marred, however, by the way Heyman justified the cancellation. He claimed that in principle it was a mistake to combine a historical commemoration with historical analysis. This in itself is a dubious proposition, but Heyman compounded the damage with his elaboration that "veterans and their families ... were not looking for analysis, and, frankly, we did not give enough thought to the intense feelings such an analysis would evoke."

The idea that the men who stormed Iwo Jima and withstood the Kamikazes are creatures too tender to tolerate analysis of the war they fought is more than patronizing. It is intellectually dishonest. The vets would have welcomed analysis of the Pacific war that was minimally accurate, that gave due attention to Japanese depredations and American sacrifice, that was not corrupted by such revisionist nonsense as the suggestion that we might not have dropped the bomb on Nazi Germany because Germans are white. The issue is not that veterans cannot stand analysis but that the analysis offered by the Smithsonian was a disgrace.

And not the first such disgrace. Four years ago, the National Museum of American Art produced an exhibition on America's westward expansion that mined every artifact for evidence of white racism and rapacity. Former Librarian of Congress Daniel Boorstin called the show "perverse, historically inaccurate, destructive." These exhibits are not accidents. They reflect the extent to which the forces of political correctness and historical revisionism, having captured the universities, have now moved out to dominate our museums and other institutions of national culture.

The Republican revolutionaries in Congress have bravely pledged to put a stop to this. They promise, for example, to eliminate such federally subsidized beachheads of the academic left as the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities. (The nea, you will remember, funded Piss Christ and the Mapplethorpe show. The neh, more recently, helped fund U.S. history standards that contained 19 references to Joe McCarthy and McCarthyism, and not one to Robert E. Lee or Thomas Edison or the Wright brothers.) The endowments' grantees of progressive and independent vision live, of course, at the teat of the taxpayer, a parasitism the new Congress promises to end.

These promises will soon be broken. Even revolutionaries don't like to be called philistines. There is already talk of compromise. Congress will probably make a few symbolic cuts and declare victory. It will have achieved nothing. As soon as this storm passes, the grass will grow back.

Conservatives on the Hill seem unable to make the principled argument that while government ought not police the arts and the humanities, government has absolutely no obligation to subsidize the academic left or, as with the Enola Gay, offer it the platform of the country's most revered national institutions.

Academics and artists have every right-and every commercial incentive-to outrage the bourgeoisie and undermine its values and history. Bourgeois society, on the other hand, has no obligation to collaborate in its own undermining. Why can the vaunted revolutionaries of the new Congress not make that simple case?

The Enola Gay affair has given the American people a rare glimpse into the corruption of our institutions of national culture. Perhaps our timid revolutionaries will use the upcoming hearings on this fiasco to show some courage: call cultural corruption by its name and cut off the subsidy. Not cut-cut off. Zero out. Let heads, and agencies, roll.