First off, there will be a Blog Stalker post later today. I promise. I’ve just been exhausted as I went to full time this week at my job and I’m still making the circadian transition. So when I get up the stairs, I don’t feel like taking my camera and going back down to snap a picture of my transit. It will happen. rly. Oh yeah, and TV being new has been a big blow to my schedule, as well. Between The War on PBS and all the show premieres, I’m swamped.
Speaking of The War, I’m of two minds about it as a whole. (For those who don’t know–it’s Ken Burns’ latest massive documentary about regular Americans during and in World War II.) It’s wrenching, emotionally, between the veterans who speak, and the footage that Burns acquired. To be honest, it takes a certain amount of will to remind yourself that those are actual dead bodies or wounded people or battles, filmed sixty years ago by some brave crazy men in the US military. They’re not special effects, and most of it isn’t staged. It’s a drastic change from where we are now, with embedded journalism and instant information.
It’s hard to remind yourself of that. It’s hard to remind yourself of a lot of things, like that someone could be killed and the family wouldn’t find out for over a month. And that there was so much footage taken that the public didn’t see for ages. If they had had instantaneous communication, as we do now…would they have wanted to know? And are the people of that time really ‘the greatest generation’ or just people who walked in towards combat blind because no one had made them aware of its horrors before, and were too disciplined by societal mores that prescribed to stay the course?
I’m thinking that the truth is somewhere in between.
And someone should have made this documentary fifteen years ago.
4 October 2007 at 5:50 pm
Lots of images and info from the current war are being suppressed right now.
4 October 2007 at 6:15 pm
Indeed. But does our awareness of that fact make a difference to being unaware?
6 October 2007 at 9:45 am
I haven’t seen this yet, but I’m curious — why 15 years ago?
15 October 2007 at 8:20 am
The images of war in Iraq are not being properly reported. I was there for a year and never saw a media person cover the good things the US military is doing and the relationships they are developing with the Iraqi people. There is alot more to the story than carnage brought by an IED…which is the “if it bleeds it leads” mentallity of the media. Things like opening a hospital or a water treatment plant in a village are not reported. The opening of thriving marketplaces where there was previously nothing is not reported. The unarguable fact is that life is better for the average Iraqi now than it was under Saddam Hussein.
17 October 2007 at 12:03 pm
I watched The War too… it’s an amazing documentary. I really liked the woman who said something like- when they first saw the footage from the pacific she and her town were so outraged that the ‘japs’ had killed ‘their boys’ that they all wanted to kill the japs.- I don’t know something about the irony of it. As though the mothers/sisters/wives of the Japanese soldiers wouldn’t be feeling exactly the same thing. I also liked the way one of the vets described finally liberating the death camps in Germany, coming to realize that all they had done really was for a purpose.
The documentary just gave me so much to think about – really brought out the best and the worst of humanity.