cactuswatcher (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
cactuswatcher) wrote2007-09-24 11:07 am
cactuswatcher) wrote2007-09-24 11:07 am
That'll make you feel old.
I was going through some papers I've saved over the years and found a reply to a letter I sent to my favorite college professor asking for recommendations for grad school. We were good friends, so she wrote to me about our mutual friend, who was also one of my college instructors, and that woman's son. I stopped to think how old the boy must be now. I once rode in my instructor's car to a club picnic and held her baby son on my lap for the trip (obviously that was before car seat laws!). I realize he must be getting close to twice as old as his mother was when I last saw her. Yow!
Shifting gears. I watched the first episode of World War II on PBS last night. It's strange, but it really seems like Ken Burns is a bit over his head on this subject. Trying hard to make the subject personal as he always does, seems to confuse the issues here rather than make them clearer. Introducing his informants took so long he didn't have a lot of time to go over the situation in the pre-war US, and he largely skipped over what was going on in the rest of the world, except for a few photos of atrocities. Once the story began, his storytelling seemed to be touching more 21st century political bases than historical issues.
He tells us correctly that President Roosevelt had decided to pursue victory in Europe first. But then oddly, Burns immediately starts talking about the Pacific War. He has three different informants telling us about about the Japanese-American internment, which seems more than necessary. I know where each of these informants' stories is heading, but I'm not sure all three are necessary for this kind of documentary. His two informants telling us about Guadalcanal, are both Marines, when the Army had men in the fight longer and the Navy lost more men. There are plenty of stories to tell in the Pacific about the sacrifices of Marines, I'm not sure that Guadalcanal was the place to emphasize them so much. The battle of Midway gets a gloss over when it literally was the turning point of the whole war in the Pacific. I was pleased that the operations on New Guinea were mentioned, although planting a giant American flag on the map where the majority of the troops used were Australian was pretty crass.
I just don't think Burns has a good grasp of the events or the times.
Why he felt it necessary to tell us two separate stories of Japanese atrocities followed by American reprisals against Japanese prisoners, I don't know. Perhaps he wants he just wants us to be sure to remember it. Perhaps he's trying to make a statement about war. Perhaps he's saying something about the US press that willingly covered such things up in World War II. Without some word from Burns, it's hard to know what he's after except more shock-affect, as in his showing more pictures of atrocities in Europe than of the fighting there.
When I was a kid growing up almost all the men had been in the War. But the one thing you were never supposed to ask them about was their combat experiences. They'd tell you about training, even accidents and deaths in training. They'd tell you all about the places they'd been and the natives they'd met. They'd even tell you awful things the natives had done to the fleeing enemy. But you wouldn't get many answers about combat. There were always a few men who talked with historians even right after the war, and the stories that have appeared in print over the years and in this Ken Burns series aren't surprising. But it is still odd to see men actually talking about it now.
Shifting gears. I watched the first episode of World War II on PBS last night. It's strange, but it really seems like Ken Burns is a bit over his head on this subject. Trying hard to make the subject personal as he always does, seems to confuse the issues here rather than make them clearer. Introducing his informants took so long he didn't have a lot of time to go over the situation in the pre-war US, and he largely skipped over what was going on in the rest of the world, except for a few photos of atrocities. Once the story began, his storytelling seemed to be touching more 21st century political bases than historical issues.
He tells us correctly that President Roosevelt had decided to pursue victory in Europe first. But then oddly, Burns immediately starts talking about the Pacific War. He has three different informants telling us about about the Japanese-American internment, which seems more than necessary. I know where each of these informants' stories is heading, but I'm not sure all three are necessary for this kind of documentary. His two informants telling us about Guadalcanal, are both Marines, when the Army had men in the fight longer and the Navy lost more men. There are plenty of stories to tell in the Pacific about the sacrifices of Marines, I'm not sure that Guadalcanal was the place to emphasize them so much. The battle of Midway gets a gloss over when it literally was the turning point of the whole war in the Pacific. I was pleased that the operations on New Guinea were mentioned, although planting a giant American flag on the map where the majority of the troops used were Australian was pretty crass.
I just don't think Burns has a good grasp of the events or the times.
Why he felt it necessary to tell us two separate stories of Japanese atrocities followed by American reprisals against Japanese prisoners, I don't know. Perhaps he wants he just wants us to be sure to remember it. Perhaps he's trying to make a statement about war. Perhaps he's saying something about the US press that willingly covered such things up in World War II. Without some word from Burns, it's hard to know what he's after except more shock-affect, as in his showing more pictures of atrocities in Europe than of the fighting there.
When I was a kid growing up almost all the men had been in the War. But the one thing you were never supposed to ask them about was their combat experiences. They'd tell you about training, even accidents and deaths in training. They'd tell you all about the places they'd been and the natives they'd met. They'd even tell you awful things the natives had done to the fleeing enemy. But you wouldn't get many answers about combat. There were always a few men who talked with historians even right after the war, and the stories that have appeared in print over the years and in this Ken Burns series aren't surprising. But it is still odd to see men actually talking about it now.