Ken Burns (of Civil War, Baseball, Jazz) is on with Jon tonight, about his latest PBS thing, "The War." It's the WWII project, interviews with vets, interspersing all three fronts (Europe, Pacific, Home) in what's apparently a first. Also a first was hischanging the thing after it was done, to include some interviews with Latino (and Native American) vets. The last-minute bit apparently shows.
Well, there's lots of stuff around about it, of course, much of it pretty much what you'd expect. Not all, though -- the CSMonitor ran it past a bunch of teenagers, The New Yorker found it tedious, and The Nation had this to say:
In the end, The War is a prisoner of its own iconography. That fact was probably evident months ago when Latino groups protested the complete exclusion of Latino veterans in the preliminary version of the series. Our expectations of the Greatest Generation revolve around old white men telling their stories, with some sops to diversity thrown in: Rosie the Riveter, Tuskegee Airmen, Navajo Code-talkers. Despite the fact that Latinos were very much a part of the war effort, they don't figure in its mythology, and Burns initial elision (corrected in the final version) seems the result of operating within the confines of a mythology that he, himself, doesn't even explicitly recognize.
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