Hurray for the Hasty

THE HASTY PUDDING Theatricals' choice of Sylvester Stallone as its Man of the Year has come amidst much ballyhoo and expression of outrage within the Harvard community. A slaughterer of senior citizens in the epic movie Death Race 2000 and an exterminator of Third World peoples in Rambo, Stallone surely does not merit one of the University's most prestigious honors, so say his Harvard critics.

Rejecting the logic of Stailone's enemies, I hold the opposite position. Stallone is indeed an exemplar par excellence of the dominant values of the Harvard Establishment. What is remarkable is that he was not so honored years earlier.

After all, most of the major architects of the Vietnam War were Harvard men (McGeorge Bundy, Robert McNamara, et. al), while the driving forces behind Reagan's Rambo-style foreign policy carry the Crimson banner with pride, among them Cap Weinberger and Richard Pipes.

There are other obvious similarities between Stallone and the Harvard Establishment. It will be recalled how the Harvard Establishment gladly sent off Blacks, Hispanics, and working class white kids to die in Vietnam, while their pampered children enjoyed the luxury of a "safe" upper class education back at home. Meanwhile, where was Rambo while America was losing the war in Vietnam? Stallone, according to Jack Newfield, "ducked the draft during the Vietnam War (although he looks physically fit to me)." It seems Stallone went to an elite private school in Switzerland, then from 1967 to 1969 studied acting at the University of Miami. On his acting days at Miami, Stallone reflects: "I learned it was possible to function without brain waves for two years." Then as U.S. fortunes sagged in Vietnam, Stallone in the early 1970s worked on producing soft core porn movies.

Stallone recently chatted with New York Daily News columnist Pete Hamill about his lifestyle in Switzerland while 58,000 Americans were being sent to their graves in Southeast Asia.

Then I went to school in Switzerland. I got there because my mother was a great conartist...This was a school for extremely wealthy and professionally spoiled children...I just wanted to get loaded and play pinball machines. Essentially I was the imported American sheep dog for these little lambs, these girls. I mean it...It was my job to chase guys away and yell profanities, like "I'll get your mother for this!" and crap like that. Until I realized that it was more profitable the other way. I mean one of the girls would say, "Listen, for 100 francs, maybe you could go blind for five minutes..." By the end of that year, I had gone blind so often I could pay my own tuition--$6500--and Prince Paul of Ethiopia and I had become such good buddies that we opened a clandestine after-hours secret hamburger restaurant. I came back later like the most gauche American tourist. Ten watches, you know.

Rambo's hypocrisy has brought Stallone his share of enemies. Hill Street Blues star Charles Haid, a Navy veteran during the Vietnam War, observed that: "The whole idea of someone like Stallone representing the Vietnam veteran is absolute rubbish." Denouncing Stallone's film as a cartoon, Haid fumed "I'd love to get Stallone in a public forum where he and I could face off."

One can rest assured that the Theatricals will not allow such a face off; they will be busy clinking glasses and pouring champagne toasts to Sly, whose agent says is more than proud to carry the Harvard banner. It is perhaps unfair to single out Stallone for his support of a macho foreign policy, while himself avoiding the draft. After all, most of the leading Reaganites of draft age, Richard Perle, George Will, Paul Trible, Pat Buchanan, New Gingrich, Paul Weyrich, among others managed to get out of military service during the war. This Rambo coalition, known as the "war wimps," have become the dominant voice of American foreign policy in the 1980s. Having lost the war in Vietnam, they are now winning it on the movie screens, much to the bemusement of the popcorn chewing hoi polloi. Jack Newfield, who originally exposed Stallone and the Reaganistas as "war wimps" in The Village Voice, pondered, "Why [aren't] these bullies by proxy at least inhibited by a guilty conscience?" Certainly when one is wined and dined, lavished with praise by the nation's most prestigious academic institution via the Theatricals, Stallone and his ilk must find it hard to have pangs of conscience. I salute Hasty Pudding for their refreshing honesty.

Jack Trumpbour is a third-year graduate student in History and a longtime Stallone watcher.