Donald Trump. Its characters go through hell in the course of its three hours, and yet the film concludes with them sitting at a bar mourning the loss of a friend to the madness of Vietnam. Slowly and quietly, then not so quietly, they break into “God Bless America.” The Deer Hunter also beat out Coming Home , a movie about a California housewife with a martinet military husband who does not fulfill her sexually. She only finds satisfaction with an anti-war Vietnam vet in a wheelchair. Her husband intends to kill them but instead drowns himself in the Pacific Ocean in a happy ending that could only have warmed the heart of its star and producer, Jane Fonda. But Coming Home did not go away empty- handed. Fonda won the Oscar, as did Jon Voight for playing the paraplegic. (Decades later, Voight would proclaim Donald Trump the greatest president since Abraham Lincoln, suggesting there will be no reboot of Coming Home anytime soon.) Nothing, save Trump-hatred, has ever united the American cultural left the way hatred of the Vietnam conflict did. But even Hollywood could not resist the siren song of a bunch of wounded steelworkers intoning “God Bless America,” an anthem written by an immigrant boy named Izzy Baline who spoke only Yiddish for the first six years of his life before growing up to become Irving Berlin. And so it would be over the next 40 years, as the anti-Americanism of Oliver Stone and Michael Moore was garlanded by
From Top: Coming Home, The Deer Hunter, Stripes. Image source: IMDB.com
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