Fatigued

My usual train commute the other day offered me quite a trip.  Back to 1981, in fact. It all started when I took note of this shirt worn by the lady seated across from me.

She was wearing a rather fashionable looking, kind of fitted olive-green denim shirt that recalled the image of Army fatigues, to this day probably one of the U.S  post-war culture's most common hipster designs, homogenized now after well over fifty years to the point of haute-couture style.  

In my mind, this is one of those things that defies explanation, even though I'm well aware of it's socio-commercial genesis.  It likely began amongst the angry counterculture youth, some of whom never quite changed out of their army duds when they came back from their traumatic Vietnam draft experience.  For some, their military garb was something they'd continue to wear as their badge of honor.  In some cases, the girlfriend would adopt perhaps the shirt or outer coat, the equivalent of the schoolgirl cloaked in her track-star boyfriend's letter jacket.  Before long, the army fatigue shirt would, amongst youth, many too young to know of America's twentieth-century war histories first hand, simply become a costume accessory to the peer counterculture hard-rock image.  Were the drab olive-fatigue shirt actually a representation of, say, prison garb, to the trend-chasing kids it would make no difference.  So long as no disco cassette touched their boom box.  And in the world of today of course, where the ear-iconic late 1960s riffs of Cream and The Doors have morphed their way ubiquitously into daytime syndicated AM conservative talk-radio venues as commercial-transition decor, associations are strictly what the immediate bearer makes them.

Even I can't admit first-hand connection to the great wars of the mid-to-late 1900s.  But even as a youth uninterested or unseduced by hard rock, heavy metal, and all the substance-coveting that went with it (certainly the visible compound amongst my junior high school peers), I did in fact like army fatigue-wear a great deal  But quite clearly, I knew why...

In my earliest formidable years, way ahead of myself, I was a kitten in a family of sitcom-loving adult cats.  Entertainment for me on Saturday nights meant regular visits with the Norman Lear and MTM brigades. But despite all my Mary, Rhoda, Maude, Louise, George, Edith and Archie intimacy, I had yet to meet and greet the cast of a show I'd heard surrounding raves about:  M*A*S*H.

I'd had every chance, but the whole historic-war ground setting seemed too remote to relate to, even in spite of all the raves around me, from both the astute grownups and even classroom peers.  My introduction came finally in the Autumn of 1979, when some advancements in strip-syndication entertainment unveiled.

The curtain finally went up on the big pay-now-play-later Viacom re-run syndie deal for two seminal TV hits:  All In The Family and M*A*S*H.  I long loved one, and now I was fully prepared to introduce myself to the other.  It was a rewarding introduction.

In those unpretentious TV times, a syndie re-run cycle ran chronologically. The leasing TV station would begin with S1E1, and when the final held episode arrived, the following airing was once again S1E1, and so forth.  Nowhere near today's creative pattern of "Top 40" episode positioning, in many ways designed to accommodate a smaller available stash of episodes.

With the aforementioned two hits, unlike such golden icons as I Love Lucy, or perhaps The Andy Griffith Show, a chronological run would now mean something different in it's exhibition.  It's kind of like some of the differences between Bob Dylan's first two "Greatest Hits" compilations.  The first, released by Columbia in 1967, certainly represented the original folk hero's transition to the rock-and-roll scene.  But it was the later 1971 double-album (that Clive Davis reportedly had to persuade Dylan into releasing at the time..) that offered perhaps even to this day the most comprehensive essay on the enigmatic artist, and each of his vast adopted dimensions.  The shows that began several years earlier were not the shows they'd become.

Hence, M*A*S*H, and it's first six seasons. Anyone familiar with the classic show probably knows it's odd origins, the tale of how Robert Altman's sleeper-smash big-screen avant-garde and explicit adaptation of Richard Hooker's farce about a trio of advantageous, smart-ass draftee surgeons in wartime Korea would get optioned into an unlikely network TV prime-time sitcom.  Picture if you will such an option with Larry Clark & Harmony Korine's KIDS occurring in 1995.  In 1972, it actually happened with M*A*S*H.

While TV-scriptwriting veteran Larry Gelbart was brave enough to accept the pilot-writing challenge, he didn't really know what to draw upon.  Nothing in that fierce screen hit seemed adaptable to network prime-time family-hour sitcom television.  Beyond a few identifiable props, he had to start from scratch.  The result at the time would yield a potential CBS mid-season flunker.  But some re-scheduling strategies rendered it a hit, and it's own charmed formula of writing and casting made it a living-room sensation.

In it's earliest time, the TV series would mostly represent and speak a very antiwar message.   It launched during the post-inflammatory time of the Vietnam War, and much of it's sharp-edged gaggery was built on blindfolded swings at the U.S. Army pinada.  Unlike the unmistakable Benny Hill-style comedy that characterized such good-old goofy war comedies as Hogan's Heroes, M*A*S*H, while playing to the same America over the same network maybe a year or two later, saw an unfriendly split in it's audience.  Some were just not too warm to it's cold shoulder toward home front military spirit.  It would take a few years, the Vietnam War's end, and a shift in American views and attitudes, for the sitcom's producers to act promptly, making content and cast changes that would reflect and respect, in order to keep this hit on the air.  The result was something warm and wonderful, positioned in a setting that was anything but warm and wonderful.  A sweet little summer camp in what would unquestionably in real life be the most graphic, inhuman setting possible.

Despite the way in which thirteen-year old me and the city of peers and grownups around me blanketed themselves in this evening comfort food, perhaps the perfect side-dish to our long-awaited dinners, even I knew something was perversely juxtaposed, in a way no one cared to acknowledge.  

Perhaps my first line-drive to the head, Charlie Brown on-the-mound-style, arrived when I opened up a thrilling birthday gift that October.  It was something called "M*A*S*H: The Exclusive, Inside Story..", perhaps the very first bio and encyclopedia on the show, which hadn't even completed its run.   Alan Alda penned the foreword, which began, "It's a lot like being in a M*A*S*H unit.."  Even I knew how grossly inappropriate such an analogy was.  Were I the editor, I'd have surely knocked out that line.

But that hardly doused my codependency with this loveable little TV classic, which couldn't really be blamed in the final analysis for it's misguided representation of hard war.  There really aren't too many such types of creations that could be so easily exonerated from such responsibility.  Some, despite their popularity, got nothing but anger from certain critics.  One growler got an article in TV Guide at one time, about the propagandized imaging of the the "hood" in the hit show Happy Days.  He claimed the Fonzie character some cheery bastardization of the figure known historically as the deadly force that oft-fatally threatened the common, Argyled nerd.  Could an adorable little show about high-school or middle-school life now be sitcom-ed, in the face of deadly bullying and mass-shootings...?  Strangely, no one would really ever hold the feet of M*A*S*H to the fire of reality.  That's basically how good it was.  Less than twenty years ago, I met a retiree who spoke of his time in the Korean War as a young serviceman.  He loved M*A*S*H more than anything.  Go figure.

As a preteen, new to the show, while I knew from the outset that the sitcom had some inexplicable beginnings, I was intent on absorbing them all.  When I first got to check out an airing of the original 1970 Altman film in it's afternoon "4:30 Movie" stripped-and-diced-up offering, it was predictably hard to make heads or tails of it all.  I tried to recognize some of the character and story synapses to the series, but it was futile.  Apparently, this thing stood alone in it's pre-TV time as some counterculture blast that spoke to a vicious anti-Vietnam War population of the period.  In some misguided benefit-of-the-doubt effort though, at age twelve, realizing there was likely much to be learned about it, I tried to embrace what was some of the in-movie humor.  But ultimately I just didn't see much empathy to be had with things like wiretapping sexual encounters or a bunch of ugly men crashing women's showers.  If this was in fact the comedy of the century, as some film critics of it's time pronounced it, I sure had a lot to learn about humor.

But the humor, such as it was, was not the face value sort.  M*A*S*H the theatrical release was not It's A Gift, starring W.C. Fields.  The so-called humor was something ironic and generated quite differently in it's time, something the TV series had no interest or intention of doing.  Its so-called anti-Army humor in its earliest seasons would ultimately transition into a humanism that would in many ways embrace the better side of the Armed Forces, a directive that probably no one involved with the original film would have conceived.

In fact, the only figure that might have accepted such mentality would ironically have been the author himself, Dr. Richard Hornberger (alias author Richard Hooker).  The M.D. was not silent about his displeasure with the counterculture anti-Army veneer the adaptations of his work would quickly adopt.  Though there was little he could do about it, he never endorsed it.  The author was a uniquely silent and distant partner to it all.

Meanwhile, all of these unique discrepancies aside, still nothing was more relatable to this kid than a big camp full of ruffled characters forced to contend with daily life, blistering summer heat, biting, numbing deep winter frost, daily worries, fears big and small, the known and the unknown, volleyball games, pranks, the complexity of intimate relationships, the yearning for camraderie, and those nifty olive-drab fatigues that went perfectly with those Groucho Marx-style one-liners and and a  mop-top head of Alan Alda-styled hair such as my own.  It was almost, dare I'd have said in so few words, something akin to being an outcast, Queens junior high school kid in 1980.

And the fact is, I couldn't have been the only one put to such seduction.  How else could one explain the ocean of M*A*S*H image marketing out there at the time..?  The "M*A*S*H 4077" coffee mugs, T-shirts, shoulder bags, knapsacks, hats....I probably acquired one of each at the time.   That summer, sure enough, I took a dumb fall and scraped my knee one afternoon.  Hurt like hell. But, I bandaged up, got upstairs in the AC'd bedroom, and with some old walking cane I'd collected, and in my official M*A*S*H 4077 T-shirt, I galloped around the room, pretending I was some wounded soldier in post-op, waiting to meet with Dr. Hawkeye Pierce.  The act of pretend healed me up quick.

Within about a year, my first great crush and I kind of drifted apart.  The re-runs were finally pulled off the 11pm strip, to make room for the next contestant in the syndie cycle, Taxi.  Certainly a worthy candidate.  I'd entered high school and at last found the respect of some peer friendships and circle inclusion of sorts.  But that didn't remove me from my sense of connection to one of the greatest sitcom character galleries of all time.

I just didn't catch the re-runs any more, and truthfully didn't need to.  By the time the late 1980s rolled around, and a desperate Channel 5 (no longer a Metromedia child by then, but now adopted by Fox) restored good old M*A*S*H once more to salvage what their knockout Joan Rivers Show plan destroyed, I wasn't tuning in.  By that time, Channel 11 had turned re-runs of Cheers into the New York TV bedtime staple.  I knew the M*A*S*H series by heart at that point.  I didn't constantly need to see an opera I adored.  The series today has not left TV entirely.  It lives on various local Classic TV-service schedules.  But I don't need to gaze at it nightly,   A couple of decades ago when an emotional funk took me down hard, I acquired one of the DVD collections, one of my favorite mid-run seasons, and hoped to re-connect positively.  I think I watched about fifteen minutes of it since. But I still own that collection.

It was well into my young and accelerating adulthood too, that I'd also come to understand the fact that M*A*S*H was a television icon, a cornerstone, literally in spite of itself, and not necessarily because of it's premise and setting.  It could have been a show about elementary school crossing guards, and it still would have won.  And the fact remains, it's purpose hadn't nearly as much to do with the ironies of war as it did with creating the best little half-hour greeting card possible to sell as many cars and as much shampoo and cat food as it did.  And it succeeded.  It was a greeting card that certainly lifted my spirits when I needed it.  I'll never forget it for that.

But I also won't forget that the olive-drab Army fatigue ensemble is not a cult TV-based fashion statement, but a genuine artifact not to be misrepresented or exploited.  The historic Constitutional sites of our Colonial forefathers will not be transformed into amusement halls or fast-food restaurants anytime in the immediate future, and there's a reason for that, as well.

Even if the sight of a classic military fatigue shirt or cap draws me back to that ambivalent pre-teen summer that relied on that connective apparel, it's not a costume for a proper, civilian grownup.  Even Hawkeye Pierce would have agreed.  That was one great TV show he had....and it was one miserably great summer.

Noah F.