Fighting "The War"

The Ken Burns World War II documentary, "The War," premieres this Sunday on PBS, and I've been trolling the Web, reading reviews from around the country. Given that reviewers of the arts tend to lean liberal, it's interesting to read their take on Burns' epic 7-part series about the US's involvement in the defining conflict of the 20th century.

Newsday, USA Today, and several other newspapers I read online all give it raves. This review, from Charlie McCollum, writing for the San Jose Mercury News, sums up nicely how I expect "The War" will be received by many of us with parents who lived through that ordeal:

My father was an Army officer during World War II. So was my mother, one of the first to enlist in the Women's Army Corps.

But they never spoke much about the war and, in the self-absorbed way of youth, I never asked before they died.

Which may go a long way toward explaining why Ken Burns' "The War" - which dwarfs anything else you will see on television this fall - had such a profound effect on me. This is not the World War II of textbooks, with bloodless words about great leaders, military strategy and global politics. In 15 riveting hours, Burns makes the war personal, capturing the reality of life on battlefronts of Europe and the Pacific and on the home front in four American communities: Sacramento; Mobile, Ala.; Waterbury, Conn.; and Luverne, Minn.

Both the LA Times and the New York Times weigh in with the kind of hip, pseudosophisticated blather that now emanates daily from the pages of those once venerable newspapers. First, there's this review from Robert Lloyd, writing for the LA Times, in which moral equivalence strikes again:

It is strictly a story of the American war, told from the point of view of a not-quite-random sampling of people -- primarily citizens of Waterbury, Conn., Mobile, Ala., Luverne, Minn., and Sacramento -- who fought in it or waited at home for people who fought in it. The British, the Russians, the French (not to mention the Australians, the Greeks, and on and on) come into it only tangentially. Generals appear only in passing, politicians are out of it almost entirely and strategy is only discussed as necessary. This parochial view, in which the enemy is only seen from afar, or up close in a fight, has the added, surely unintended, undesirable effect of making them seem more insidious, more mystically and inexplicably and congenitally evil than we are used to now. (The Japanese are "the Japs" again.)

Ah, yes, I'm sure any sense of Germany, Italy and Japan coming off in Burns' documentary as "mystically and inexplicably and congenitally evil" for their shared responsibility in the deaths of tens of millions was wholly unintended. I mean, after all, the SS loved their children too.

When it comes to postmodern inanity, Alessandra Stanley of the New York Times takes the prize. The teaser to her review, headlined "What So Proudly We Hailed," reads: "Ken Burns’s series on PBS is a 7-night, 15-hour tribute to the greatest generation that ever bought war bonds." That's right, here we have the sacrifices of the World War II generation reduced to a rather tired poke at American consumerism by some smart-ass editor at the Times.

As for the review itself, Stanley writes:

The tone and look of Mr. Burns’s series, which begins Sunday on PBS, is as elegiac and compelling as any of his previous works, but particularly now, as the conflict in Iraq unravels, this degree of insularity — at such length and detail — is disconcerting. Many a “Frontline” documentary has made a convincing case that the Bush administration’s mistakes were compounded by the blinkered thinking of leaders who rushed to war without sufficient support around the world or understanding of the religious and sectarian strains on the ground. Examining a global war from the perspective of only one belligerent is rarely a good idea.

Unless, of course, you're Clint Eastwood, and the "one belligerent" is Japan. Then you've not only seized upon a good idea, you've also created something "utterly original, even radical in its methods and insights."