Goodbye Ma

Who's been watching Ken Burns' The War? And among those of you who have been, who else chuckles at the intro sentence, "Corporate sponsorship for The War is provided by..." They should say the same thing before Bush press conferences.

The War is, predictably, a little bit disappointing. It's a huge undertaking, and has to err on the side of entertainment over historical precision, but still...there's got to be more to that era than just the fighting, the internment of Japanese-Americans, and the always-incomprehensible segregation of black Americans. All three of those stories are ones always worth re-telling, and even after hearing them repeatedly, they all still shock as much as they always did, but you wouldn't really think that anything else happened in those days. Couldn't Ken Burns, in six years of research, have turned up rarely documented parts of '41-'45 and presented them along with those things we need reminding of?

As the Post pointed out, very few of the first person accounts approach the personality of Shelby Foote, the historian that helped make Burns' The Civil War so amazing, but that's a little unfair. Shelby Foote was one of a kind. Quentin Aanenson, the fighter pilot comes close, though I find his resemblance to an elderly Dwight Schrute takes a little of the edge off of his stories, though maybe that's a good thing. Anyway, though many of the stories are really intriguing and some impossibly sad and moving, there still seems to be a lot of...romance in the stories from some of the civilians. It just seems as though they're often saying too much of what they feel like they should be saying, and often surprisingly un-eloquently, and with somewhat forced dramatic weight.

But in spite of the weight I just gave the negatives, The War is still absolutely worth watching. The stories of the actual warfare are brutal, especially from the stories of the South Pacific. Not just "people died around me", but the accumulation of experiences of torture, pain and death that would be horrifying once in a lifetime, but to have to see it multiple times in the span of weeks...it's amazing that these people were able to carry on with their lives after the war. And the stories of segregation are still so shocking. It's hard not to fantasize about a historical do-over: here were Americans willing to sacrifice for their country and yet were turned away and kept without even basic American freedoms. How different could things have been if the war had revealed just how clearly wrong it was? But that didn't happen, and knowing that as you hear the stories is tragic.

Endnote #1: One other thing that comes through in The War is that, apparently, whenever anyone in the early '40's met a gal or a fella that they liked, they had to go home and tell a friend or relative, "I just met the man/woman I'm going to marry." Were people really this in tune with exactly who they were going to marry back then? Or did they just say it all the time, leading to plenty of disappointment, but ultimately giving them a great story they could tell for decades afterwards?

Endnote #2: It's always hard to for me to hear about aviation in WWII without thinking of the one good song on Pink Floyd's The Final Cut. Listening to it years after I heard it last, it's pretty ridiculous, but the first two verses make anything that comes after it worthwhile, and the line, "Goodbye Ma, after the service, when you're walking slowly to the car" gives me chills always, but downright moves me to tears in the wake of the tragic stories from The War.

Pink Floyd, "The Gunner's Dream"