Let's face it.
Ken Burns, he of the mournful cello interludes and soft focus interviews is a uniquely boring individual. Only Ken Burns could take the fascinating sport of American baseball and turn it into a turgid, lifeless mass.
And only Ken Burns could take the single most important event of the Twentieth Century and find absolutely nothing to say about it in twelve hours of carefully crafted footage.
I have to admit. Like so much else in his oeuvre, I couldn't get past three or four hours of his latest claptrap. And I'm fascinated by World War II. Used to have two thousand books on the subject. But I think it's time that we face our memories and recollections of the Good War and have a stern conversation with ourselves.
World War II was a meatgrinder. Pure and simple. We turned a blind eye to the coming storm in Europe and Asia. We abused those countries that became our enemies and acted shocked when they came at us, frothing for vengeance.
We should be justly proud of the young men and women who served in that War. Just like any of our wars. But we should be honest about our reasons for entering the conflict. And the horrible things that happened to the ill-prepared armed forces we sent into battle.
And that's where Burns fall down. There's lots of montages about how this person or that person felt about this or that.
How does he manage to blunt the testimony of E.B. Sledge, writer of "With the Old Breed," quite simply the best memoir of combat ever. Sledge was a Marine at Pelelieu and Okinawa. His descriptions of the war against Japan are horrifying. And awe-inspiring. But apparently his naked depiction of a genocidal war of extermination didn't fit into Burns' carefully crafted narrative. Nor does the personal aftermath of Sledge's war.
Where is the anger at a country that sent barely trained National Guard units to their doom in New Guinea? Where is the sober commentary on the fact that even in 1944 and 1945, we sent young men to die in Sherman tanks, a design already obsolete by 1940? What about the homefront, where angry citizens demanded that the Navy not allow convalescing burn victims to walk the street, lest they horrify our sensibilities?
Where is anything, anything at all, that suggests that World War Two was not a great adventure, but a horrendous, avoidable conflicted started by bitter old men and paid for in the blood of the innocent?
You won't find it in Ken Burns' world. Because Ken Burns, intellectual lightweight, is an exact reflection of our juvenile and adolescent mindset. A country who would prefer to be comforted rather than forced to think. A country that prefers fantasy to reality. And a country that produces not historians, but brandnames.
Do yourself a favor. Read a book by Donald Burgett, paratrooper at Normandy, Bastogne and Arnhem. Read "War Without Mercy" by John Dower. And force yourself to think.
And Jesus, would somebody point that guy to a Supercuts?
