MASH- The Elephant in the Operating Room

When I watch TV, I find that I watch the ME TV Channel a lot (Memorable Entertainment TeleVision).  It contains a lot of the old TV programs that I used to see from childhood to teens and twenties.  Among these is M*A*S*H (Mobile Army Surgical Hospital).  The film came out in 1970 during the Vietnam war, and the TV Series started in 1972.

After a while, we figured out that the producers were using a story set in the Korean War to protest continued American Involvement in the Vietnam War, but that’s not all there was to it. 

I remember enjoying the episodes, when they first came out.  Mischievous Hawkeye Pierce and his bunkmate were always getting one over on their rivals, Frank Burns and Margaret Houlihan. When they weren’t defeating Frank and Margaret, or convincing a different nurse each week to sleep with them, they were complaining about the Korean War–Why were we there?  When could they go home? Why is the food so bad?

These were consistent features of all the episodes, and consistency is comforting.  It is a bit like watching the Scoobie Doo cartoon series.  All but one of them ended with the unmasking of the criminal, who always said, “And I would have gotten away with it too, if it hadn’t been for you meddling kids!”

My wife loves to watch MASH.  She bought the first half of the series on videotape, and the second half of the series on DVD.  When MASH is on TV, she watches it.  When MASH is not on TV, she often watches it anyway.  So I find myself watching a lot more MASH than I really want.  

I found my that my perceptions of MASH changed gradually over the many years of forced watching.  I noticed the cruelty, early on.  Pierce and his bunkmate never gave Frank Burns a break.  Day and night, they harassed him, belittled him, insulted him and played practical jokes on him.  On the show, he was a mediocre surgeon.  Did they try to develop a relationship with Burns so they could help him become a better surgeon?  Not at any time. 

Burns was also having a difficult time in Korea, and had started an affair with Houlihan.   Before Korea, he married for money, and the marriage was unhappy.  He was also portrayed as a person of faith.  This was a deeply unhappy character who continued to make unhelpful decisions about his life.  Did Hawkeye try to help him with any of this?  No.  Instead, he took every opportunity to point out Burns’ hypocrisy and expose every embarrassing aspect of Burns’ life.  Hawkeye insists that Frank follow the values that Frank espouses.  Hawkeye at the same time is committed to sleeping around.  

Is this helping Frank to keep his own morals?  For that matter, is Hawkeye helping the nurses that he constantly beds, and abandons?  –Ahhh, but that was never the point of the program.  The point of it seemed to be that the universe revolves around Hawkeye Pierce.  No one else matters in the MASH universe. The patients are only there to testify that Pierce is the best surgeon anywhere.   Even the women are just objects for Pierce’s use.  

The writers of the show tried to do the same types of cruelty on the Margaret Houlihan character.  The problem was, Margaret’s character became liked by the viewing public–So Hawkeye backed off from her, over the years.  

And all through the show, there was always whining in the background about the senselessness of the war in Korea, that life was difficult there, that they weren’t being treated very well.  Whine, whine, whine, and whine again.

Bullying, Cruelty, Narcissism.  Social engineering, the destruction of one’s enemies, vehemently and with enjoyment, and all accompanied by a laugh track so that the audience can be certain when to laugh--That’s the M*A*S*H I have come to know, all these years later.  But even these features of this terrible series are not the Elephant in the Operating Room.

Let’s think a bit about the US involvement in the War in Korea.  What was accomplished there?  A lot of bungling, to be sure.  If we had listened to the Chinese warning about not approaching the Yalu River, North Korea might have been a buffer zone tens of miles wide at the Chinese border.  But at the end of it all, we helped the Koreans save half of their country from Kim Il Sung.  Was that a good thing?  All we have to do is look at the way the two countries have turned out.  

There is no better poster child for the possibility of a just war than the case of Korea.  South Koreans are better off in every way than their brothers to the North.  Certainly there were many problems with our involvement in the War in Korea, but the outcome was good, and despite the terrible cost in lives, it was worthwhile.  

What of Vietnam?  The outcome was not good for the Vietnamese, but Vietnam seems to have fared much better than North Korea.  Vietnam seems much less pathological to me than North Korea.  It has some exports and some industry, and seems to be making its own way in the world.  By contrast, North Korea is not prospering, and seems to be doing poorly because of its rulers.  

That’s the Elephant in the Operating Room.  The war in Korea that the characters in MASH kept whining about, that they kept sabotaging in every way they could, turned out to be a worthwhile war.  What would South Korea be like today, if we had not gotten involved?  A lot like North Korea, I would say.  Hawkeye and his friends were, on the program, completely self-absorbed jerks.  I hope and pray that there was no one in Korea like them.  

M*A*S*H is still well-spoken-of today, though I can’t imagine why.  I have no time to discuss the two-faced Radar, always portrayed as innocent, yet always enabling the dirty tricks and cruelty.  The incompetent Henry Blake and Sherman Potter, who pretended to be an Army Officer but turned a blind eye to Hawkeye’s shenanigans and praised him on a regular basis.  I could go on and on.   MASH is, without doubt, one of the vilest television programs ever produced.  Against my will, I still laugh at some of the jokes.