Twelve O'Clock News

I was lucky enough pick our group topic randomly.  We drew New Historicism and applied it to the story “twelve O’Clock News” by Elizabeth Bishop. The stage was set during the Vietnam war, which was perfect for New Historicism. Elizabeth Bishop was a poet who was involved emotionally in writing about what it was like living in a poor unorganized area. As a third world country, Vietnam didn’t have the natural advances such as  industrialization that most of the world enjoyed. So many people of its home land misinterpreted the magnitude of what kind of destruction was going on in their own back yard. The story that Bishop writes discovers this side, or view ,of the Vietnam war that most Americans civilians never heard of. The New Historic would argue that All history written about this war is merely subjective. Within the text we find very graphic warfare of fire and death towards the Saigonese the people. American literature didn’t write about how one of its fighter pilots single handily destroyed a boy on his bike by a dirt road in Vietnam. A co-pilot, who was very tickled to describe this, flew with this pilot in a little FAC plane, writes “Below, a lone Vietnamese on a bicycle stopped, looked up, dismounted, took up a rifle and fired; the pilot let him have it with the whole bomb load of napalm- enough for a platoon.” The way he is tickled makes me sick. Such disgusting views aren’t very heroic. Many Americans who were seen as defenders for our country came home as war victors… fully expecting to be hoisted up on the public's shoulders for their service. I wonder how many of our “hero’s” slipped under the radar with ruthless acts such as this during this war (or any war for that matter). The title “Twelve O’Clock News” is implying that the reality of the war was mediated on TV. However, Bishop shows the side that the twelve O’clock news didn’t. We incorporated the New Historicism principle into our presentation through the view that no one story of history is the complete story but merely a piece.