Part of what changed -- and it was a change that was already under way before Vietnam -- was Hollywood's transformation from a mass appeal industry to an elite institution. Many of the major stars today have an Ivy League background. And a large number of them are second or third generation stars -- people who have been born into the movie business and have lived in it their whole lives. So the industry is no longer connected with the public in the way that it used to be. Certainly very few of Tinseltown's luminaries have had any experience in, or contact with, the military. All of this is reflected in the new mission that Hollywood has adopted: not to entertain, but to challenge and discomfort the public.

And of course it is not simply antipathy to the military that permeates Hollywood today. There is a broader anti-Americanism -- an alienation from everything American -- that runs very, very deep there. Listen to Sean Penn, speaking to a press conference at the Cannes Film Festival in 1991, when asked a question about his film Indian Runner:

I don't think it scratches the surface of the rage that is felt, if not acted upon, by most of the people in the country where I live. I was brought up in a country that relished fear-based religion, corrupt government, and an entire white population living on stolen property that they murdered for and that is passed on from generation to generation.

And here is Oliver Stone in 1987, upon receiving the Torch of Liberty Award from the American Civil Liberties Union:

Our own country has become a military industrial monolith, dedicated to the Cold War -- in many ways, as rigid and corrupt at the top as our rivals, the Soviets. We have become the enemy with a security state now second to none. Today we have come to live in total hatred, fear, and the desire to destroy. Bravo. Fear and conformity have triumphed. This Darth-Vadian Empire of the United States must pay for its many sins in the future. I think America has to bleed. I think the corpses have to pile up. I think American boys have to die again. Let the mothers weep and mourn.

..... Is it any wonder that people who deliver statements like that also feel the need to trash the U.S. in film after film after film?

I'll make one last point -- this one about the economics of the movie business today -- which is also critical in understanding what has changed in the relationship between Hollywood and America. In 1970, more than 70 percent of all revenues for the major studios in Hollywood came from the U.S. Today this number is less than 30 percent. Hollywood has conquered the world. It sells tons of movies and DVDs in France, Germany, Italy, Japan, and increasingly in China and India. And while it has been doing that, the audience has collapsed here in the U.S. As recently as 1965, 45 million Americans attended the movies every week. Our population has nearly doubled since then, and yet today the number of moviegoers per week is barely 20 million. In other words, the American film industry has become conspicuously less American. So is it any wonder that when war movies are produced at all, there is much less reflexive sympathy and support for the American point of view?

A book published in 1999, The Black Book of Communism, computed the number of corpses that communism had accumulated since the Russian Revolution in 1917. The total adds up, in the 20th century alone, to more than 100 million. The U.S. fought a life-and-death struggle against world communism between the end of WWII and the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991. We won that war, thank God. And Hollywood's continuing insistence on portraying the Vietnam War -- which, along with the Korean War, was an integral part of that life-and-death struggle -- as having taught us that all war is pointless is a way of ignoring the fact, not only that Hollywood did not engage in that struggle against world communism, but that most people in the entertainment elite were on the wrong side of it. I say this with respect and with caution. I am not suggesting that most people in Hollywood were active communists. But I am suggesting that the anti-anti-communism that became so typical of Hollywood during the Cold War has led to its ongoing denial that the Cold War meant anything.

Can anyone think of a movie that has celebrated America's victory in the Cold War? Probably most of us will think of Miracle. Apparently Hollywood can face the fact that we beat the Soviet Union in a hockey game, but not the fact that we overcame the Soviet Union politically -- through attention to moral principles and through the maintenance of military superiority -- because the entertainment elite is terribly invested in the idea that no war ever meant anything.

Some of you are going to leave this fine college and go out and make tremendous contributions, I hope, serving in our military, which is the most honorable thing that any American can do. But some of you also, I hope, will go out and engage in a different kind of combat, a battle to redeem the popular culture -- which, in terms of its false treatment of the military and of America itself, and its denial of the awful occasional necessity of war, is a popular culture in deep need of redemption.

People like the gentleman I had on my radio show today love to say that "Violence never solved anything." But what solved Hitler? Was it a team of social workers? Was it putting daisies into the gun barrels of Nazi Panzer divisions? Was it a commission that tried to understand what made Hitler so angry? No. What solved Hitler was violence. And what will solve the problem of Islamo-fascist terrorism, I'm sorry to say, is not understanding, negotiation, conferences, social workers, daisies, or anything other than the heroic violence of brave men and women with guns, fighting selflessly for their country -- this greatest nation on God's green earth.