I realized that Saving Private Ryan is much more about conflict in the 1990s than it is about World War II: it encourage us to remember a "good and just" war in order to forget the moral complexities of recent interventions (for example Bosnia, Kosovo, Somalia, Afghanistan, Iraq). In fact, my overblown emotional response was precisely what Spielberg ordered: his nostalgic commemoration created a "comfortable surrogate" for the uncomfortable world I faced every day when I watched the television news or read the newspaper headlines (Kolker, 2000:257). This is because stories about important historical events are directly shaped by issues of the present rather than the past. Very simply, it is not some overarching, finally settled and uncontested notion of "the truth" that dictate how we talk about the past - it is our present concerns and struggles that shape such discussions.