[Dixielandjazz] Poor Ken Burns

[David Dustin]

As Stan Freberg had Betsy Ross (stitcher of the first American flag) sing
it, ³Everybody wants to be an art director, everybody wants to call the
shots, everybody wants to be a flag dissector, turning all my stars to polka
dots....²  No matter what Ken Burns does, he certainly will not please
everyone.  But I happen to think that what he does, while perhaps not
reflective of cutting-edge views of history, he does quite well for 98% of
the population.  I viewed a pre-screening of the first episode ‹ billed as a
work in progress -- of ³The War² in December at Dartmouth College and was
bowled over, as were the other 2,499 people in the SRO auditorium. I don¹t
think Ken was trying to be politically correct in servicing all ethnicities
in this country in this oral history/documentary of the war.  He¹s
opportunistic, pretty much goes where he finds the best material, and has
tried to balance first-hand and letter-based accounts of G.I.¹s from four
communities in the northeast, the midwest, the west, and the south. He has
found an astonishing eloquent cast of veterans whose experience of WW2 is
recounted in often excruciating detail; there was a lot of sniffing and
nose-blowing at the end of episode one.  Some of his material is
unbelievable, like the photo of a USMC patrol on Guadalcanal where his then
18-year-old subject is shown off to the side, taking a leak.  I think it was
³a given² that Burns would include the perspective of blacks and Nisei (2nd
generation Japanese-Americans), such as Senator Daniel Inouye of Hawaii who
enlisted at age 17, the day after he witnessed the attack on Pearl Harbor,
and Nisei from the west coast who volunteered for service out of the
mind-boggling internment camps in California and Arizona.  And I believe he
includes soldiers who were Native Americans.  After the screening, Burns
fielded a question asking why he didn¹t include accounts from soldiers of
other allied countries. He said the subject was vast ‹ by the last episodes
of the series the accounts of around 50 soldiers and airmen would be tracked
‹ and he was trying to tell an American story, not a global one.

As a sidebar, Walpole, NH, is the home of Burns¹s Florentine Productions. I
have been there twice in my life because Walpole has a Fountain Square
containing a noted restaurant/chocolatier called Burdicks.  Each time we
visited Walpole we have had lunch at Burdicks, and each time Ken Burns has
been seated at the very next table, chatting up some (different) sweet young
thing.  So close I could ask to borrow his salt and pepper.  He looks like
he¹s about 21 himself with that 1970s hairstyle that reminds me of Florence
Henderson in the Brady Bunch, or any of the members of Abba.

David Dustin