In honor of National Ernie Pyle Day
Yeah, that guy. If you don't know him yet, allow me to introduce ya.
Burgess Meredith played him in the 1945 William Wellman classic, The Story of GI Joe. I know that probably won’t help you much. Okay, Hunter S Thompson used to quote him a lot. Proclaiming that Gonzo journalism wouldn’t exist without Ernie. Heck, Studs Terkel wouldn’t have been who he became. We wouldn’t have Radiolab, or This American Life, or Storycorps. Imagine. What would any of us do while at the gym or stuck in traffic? So if that’s all true, who is this guy we called Ernie?
Well, Ernie Pyle was born in Indiana, if you believe what Ernie says about himself. But since his version of his birth is corroborated by the historical record, we will have to agree that that is true. And agreeing anything is true these days is something to celebrate. Which is why I accepted the invitation to share a little of what Ernie means to me on National Ernie Pyle by my friend Mike Brainard (who was an expert on all things Ernie long before it was cool).
I digress. But is that such a bad thing in a world hell built on speed at all costs?
To meander. Deliberately.
Heck, meandering, diverting, and digressing is what Ernie built his entire career on before he was shot by a sniper in Okinawa on April 18th, 1945. Regardless of our taste for style in how we like our yarn spun, let me avoid controversy and tell you why we need more Ernie today.
Because his take on what is truth is immune to any polarity common in today’s never-ending reality war. His truth never attempted to be true. Even though it was. He got under truth and fact to chronicle human experience. He did this by employing what is often referred to as a “common touch;” never missing the details, or names of places bypassed, or the people of an invisible republic, long overlooked.
Ernie converted events of epic scale into bite sized representations we could see and feel in his dispatches, and in so doing, made what his readers couldn’t see seem relatable and more real. He took the existential out of what we all feared and showed real people grappling with it. He would distill the entire Great Depression down to a conversation he had with a dust bowl farmer on the side of Highway 61. And when you read Ernie’s chronicle, you felt as if you were there.
Like Twain, who also began as a columnist, he was loose with the facts of events - especially if the truth required flexibility. But he never tried to be anything other than what he was — A witness. Not to history, but to the people who were there.
To us.
To call what Ernie captured “quotidian” — in his dispatches from the road during the 30’s with “the girl who rides with me,” or sent back via telegraph wire from London during the Blitz, or wrote on his knees in a fox hole on the front lines of Italy, Germany, or France — is to make what Ernie did feel quaint. And Ernie was anything but quaint. Although he was at times sentimental. He was a drunk married to a drunk, so there is a little bit of maudlin to it. But always for effect.
No, Ernie was never in search of America, or heroism, or anything. He was in search of himself. At least, that’s what my friend Mike says. But that was who Ernie was to Mike. There are a million Ernie Pyles just as there are a million sunrises. And I invite you to meet your own today on this day that is his.
So I started this out with a little lead line on why Ernie is needed and like Ernie I meandered away from it. But it seems like a good enough point to wrap this whole thing up. (Which means I’ll probably go on for a while).
It is my opinion, and only my opinion, that we need Ernie because Ernie chronicled others. We live in a time where one side calls the other “snow flakes,” and the side that are snow flakes (even if they are so much of snow flakes they recoil at the idea of being called snowflakes) can’t agree on who can tell what story, what is appropriation, or the perpetuation of stereotype, I fear no one can be authorized to share anything other then their own life story. And that is sad. Not only would that mean the death of fiction with a narrative style dominated by a mono-culture of memoir, but also that sad end would mean the further erosion of identification and empathy. What Ernie did was see others. And in so doing, find himself.
And that, my friends, is a truth worth writing about. Join me in tipping our hat to Ernie today on this, his day. He took a bullet for truth today. To bring back stories of your friends and neighbors who were overseas, who were struggling with the same austerity, afraid of the same unknown, and made us all feel a little less alone. If only we can listen to our relatives and friends and hear their stories, ask them open ended questions, and lean in, we’d be doing our little part to keep what he stood for alive, and maybe, in so doing, make a more perfect union.