Ken Burns' "War" Is Well Done, But...

From Paul Levine

Have you seen the first two episodes of Ken Burns’ “The War” on PBS? It's the start of a 14-hour documentary, a smart, polished, and informative take on World War II, as experienced by townsfolk and soldiers from four different American cities. It’s hard to criticize a project that is so nobly intended and so well executed.


But...

Yes, there’s a but coming. First, however, this fine account of the more graphic sections of the mega-series from Glenn Garvin in The Miami Herald:

The dead are everywhere in The War: burned corpses, mangled corpses, frozen corpses, bloated corpses, corpses bobbing in the sea and corpses rotting in jungle clearings, corpses dangling from ropes and corpses piled in unruly stacks. American soldiers watched their friends be killed, and killed remorselessly in return. They did it until they were killed themselves (average life expectancy for junior officers during the Battle of the Bulge: 17 days) or went insane. The most harrowing moments in The War are film clips of the mumbling, twitching victims of combat fatigue, a military euphemism for nervous breakdown. ''I can't stand seeing dead people,'' pleaded one.

One of every four men evacuated from battle zones, The War reports, was a victim of combat fatigue. The surprise is not that there were so many but that there were so few. ''I live in a world of death,'' a fighter pilot wrote home to his fiancée. ``Like everything else around me, my dreams are dying, too.''

Okay, now the but...

If you’ve read your history – and there are hundreds of books on World War II – or if you've watched the History Channel, or even thumbed through a series of Time-Life pictorial renditions of the war, you’ve got a good sense of this story already. Most well-read Americans know about Bataan and the Battle of the Bulge, about Tarawa and Iwo Jima, about North Africa and Italy, about B-17's hitting Germany from England and B-29's hitting Japan from Tinian. They know about D-Day, if only through seeing “Saving Private Ryan.”

I wonder if the money and time and skill that went into this project might have been better spent on the Korean War, that nasty little conflict that cost more than 54,000 American lives. It’s long been called “the forgotten war.” Many of you know there’s a new book out, “The Coldest Winter,” by the late David Halberstam.

Just a guess, but I'll bet you a dozen Krispy Kremes that many more Americans can ably describe the events of June 6, 1944 on the beaches of Normandy than they can the Battle of Inchon in September 1950.

What do you think?
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A PROFESSOR'S INSPIRING LAST LECTURE

The most inspiring news story of the week comes from the Wall Street Journal's Jeff Zaslow. His profile of Randy Pausch, a Carnegie-Mellon professor dying of pancreatic cancer, is a true profile in courage. Please check out "A Beloved Professor Delivers the Lecture of a Lifetime" for both the story and a video excerpt.
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GOOD TITLE, GOOD FIRST GRAF

I haven’t read this book, but I love the title and the first paragraph:

"Some Like It Hot-Buttered"
By Jeffrey Cohen

The guy in row S, seat 18 was dead, all right. There was no mistaking it. For one thing, he hadn’t laughed once during the Blind Man scene in Young Frankenstein, which was indication enough that all brain function had ceased. For another, there was the whole staring-straight-ahead-and-not-breathing scenario, and the lack of a pulse, which was good enough to convince me.

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GREAT THINKERS DEBATE THE ISSUES OF THE DAY

Last Saturday, which happened to be Yom Kippur, The Miami Herald reported that Barry Kutun, 66, city attorney for North Miami, was sentenced to probation and house arrest for having sex with a 16-year-old prostitute. He claimed he thought the girl was 18 but nonetheless pleaded guilty and avoided jail time.

The judge's sentence is a legitimate subject of debate. Too lenient? Did a well-known lawyer get a break from the system? Fertile topics for informed discussion.

But the Internet fosters a different kind of "letter to the editor." On the Herald’s web site, we find these anonymous remarks:

“Another pervert Jewish lawyer gets off the hook."
Posted by: Correctional Officer

“They let him go because he's a joo and we have a jewdicial system."
Posted by: Billy

And this clever fellow:

“I am hearing too many jewxcuses and jewstifications for this schmuck's behavior.”
Posted by: Marty

Ah, the beauty of the 'Net. The ability to display your ignorance and hide your identity simultaneously.

(Click the envelope below to send this post to a friend).

Paul