Pete Dexter, felt compelled to review Bill O’Reilly’s latest book “Killing the Rising Sun.” O”Reilly, one night on “The O’Reilly Factor” complained his book had not been given the respect of being reviewed. Dexter, while waiting for a chicken pot pie to cool off, decided to give O’Reilly what he wanted.
Dexter, was galled by O’Reilly’s poor writing combined with the consistent best seller status of his books the last seven years. There was the stench of sour grapes with this review, wafting over the still too hot chicken pot pie.
O’Reilly’s central sin was to talk about the brutality of war and the specific brutality of the Japanese military. This struck Dexter as excess, as he compared it to pornography.
I disagreed. If the reader was unaware of the scale of slaughter in the Pacific during the war, O’Reilly did a service for the reader to drive the point home. Killing soldiers was the inevitable outcome of war, but to mutilate the bodies afterwards was an atrocity very common to the Japanese.
Americans are woefully ignorant about the history of the last year of the war in the Pacific. The invasion of Japan, planned for November 1, 1945, would make the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki an insignificant, tiny blip on the graph of slaughter.
Dexter’s review was a mess. Thankfully, for the reader, the chicken pot pie cooled off and the reviewer could turn his focus elsewhere. Anywhere. Please.