Back in the sixties, during my singing/dancing career in New York, a dancer friend, Bill B., was asked to choreograph the act of a Pat Suzuki wannabe in Vegas. Ms. Suzuki was a young Japanese who rose to modest fame in the Rodgers & Hammerstein Broadway production of Flower Drum Song singing I Enjoy Being A Girl. (Incidentally, Flower Drum Song was directed by Gene Kelly and starred perennial Asian actors like Keye Luke — Kung Fu’s blind master Po, and the late Jack Soo of Barney Miller fame.)

San Francisco born Suzuki had a clear, vibrant voice and she sang with great verve. Asian girls then became the flavor of the day and many less talented Suzuki imitators were booked in lounges and clubs throughout the world of lounges and clubs.

In Vegas, Bill created this Japanese girl’s act and selected her “exit music,” which is what the band plays when the act is over and the performer bows, rushes off stage, comes back for more bows, rushes off again and waits to hear if there’s enough applause to merit an encore. Exit music is just the music, no lyrics. And if the performer is a well known, established star, the music is usually his signature song, like I Left My Heart In San Francisco is to Tony Bennett.

Here’s where Bill did a cruel thing. The exit music he chose was Don Reid and Sammy Kaye’s wartime, self-described “march-with-spirit” song, Remember Pearl Harbor, a wildly popular slogan at the time. Bill himself was remembering. When a young boy his cousin died at Guadalcanal and his uncle returned after having endured the Bataan Death March.

The song’s lyrics weren’t particularly venomous towards the Japanese, urging instead a collective remembrance of what happened that morning in Hawaii.

Let’s REMEMBER PEARL HARBOR -
As we go to meet the foe -
Let’s REMEMBER PEARL HARBOR 
As we did the Alamo.

We will always remember - 
how they died for liberty,
Let’s REMEMBER PEARL HARBOR 
and go on to victory. 

When Bill told us his music choice, we all had a big laugh, as did the Vegas workers and musicians who also “remembered” and got the “joke” that the clueless young singer didn’t.

Bill acknowledged that what he did was wrong, if only because this innocent girl had nothing to do with Pearl Harbor. But he was remembering the pain, and expressed it through the “comedy” of choosing that song. It wasn’t lost on him that deceiving her was not unlike the deception of the attack itself, and it was small consolation when he later discovered she was Chinese.

I remembered this story and thought of Bill as I watched the news and read the papers yesterday, the sixty-sixth anniversary of, in FDR’s stirring description, “a day that will live in infamy.”

Apparently “infamy” has a short life-span because few remembered the day this year. What little was written about it was perfunctory, back page stuff. The anniversary’s only significant appreciation came from conservative radio; typically, the mainstream media barely remembered.

Were Bill alive today, how would I explain to him this omission? Iraq? Viet-nam? The decades-long revulsion of the military on the part of the secular, liberal elites that control the media and academia? All of the above?

Were he here, Bill would think that Bataan, Guadalcanal, Iwo Jima, Midway, the Coral Sea or Pearl itself had never happened; it’s as if the sacrifices of his cousin and uncle meant nothing to this generation that thinks history begins with their own birth.

He would have noted the disdain our intellectual elites hold for anything military. These are the same people who spat at returning Vietnam soldiers in the name of peace. These are people who’ve been sleeping safely under their warm coverlets without ever manning a post in defense of their country. These are people who now ignore those who have fought and died because their version of life is conflict resolution and not the harsh realities of warfare that is needed in a world filled with the likes of Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, Sadam, Amedinejad and Islamic terrorists, who can only be fought with rifles and bayonets, not subpoenas.

It would not escape Bill’s notice that Veteran’s Day also was greeted by an indifferent media, which rarely celebrates the heroism of our fighting men and women because to acknowledge their heroism would open the door to acknowledging that their heroism was necessary and that war is sometimes necessary. That idea is anathema to the media elites and their denial cheats the war dead and the families like Bill’s who remember it all. It cheats the living, who endured and survived the battles.

The USS Arizona is still a tomb. Like my old friend, Bill, we must always remember that. Certainly not to express it as he did, but to always remind ourselves each year of the tragedy and glory of a war that began on December 7, 1941.