Slightly P: Ken Burns//The Vietnam War

[Mark Kohut]

It should not allow emotional equanimity--and doesn't. You put your whole
self in. And feel.

"Dramatized actuality" as a great documentarian defined such. Burns does
this: gives slices of 'both sides' as history YET,
 the right 'interpretative' words, the right straightforward presentation
of deception, of actively chosen lies, with the repetition--a theme is what
is steadily repeated in variations in the work, said someone, maybe Susan
Sontag--of the horror truths of death and suffering and incompetence, it
becomes one the the best anti-war movies/tragedies made.

On Sat, Sep 30, 2017 at 9:11 PM, Joseph Tracy <brook7 at sover.net> wrote:

> I am not able to watch, cable is needed where we live to get tv and don’t
> like tv that much. I am glad it is having such a strong impact on you and
> specifically inducing sympathy toward the Vietnamese. My only other contact
> with a local person, who is not a close acquaintance, watching the series.
> He seemed to see it as a thrilling story of american courage and cool
> scenes of war. I hope the series will wear away this bizarre enthusiasm.
>    The Nick Turse article was not a scathing put down or anything like
> that. He seemed to think the series pretty decent and thorough. He spent a
> decade writing a book about Vietnam and brought to light via FOIA many
> atrocities that had been histoorically suppressed. I hope the series has
> more the effect it is having on you than it did on this person I mentioned(
> a political centrist electrician in his early 50s). I cried enough tears at
> the time and fought with the war mania at home, in school and elsewhere. I
> could never watch it with any emotional equanimity.
> > On Sep 30, 2017, at 9:33 AM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > I am not even going to bother to read it to say IT DOES NOT!....I have
> NOT been able to get the repeated huge numbers out of my head--because I,
> hating to even read about war, had NO IDEA they were so high---with scene
> after scene of massive numbers
> > of dead Vietnamese...When we see that bombing and extrapolate--how else
> can it be done?--and see the deaths and extrapolate......THE HORROR, THE
> HORROR....
> >
> > and they come up in EVERY discussion I have had--and I am in a
> discussion group about it in my soft liberal bourgeois town.
> >
> > "Sometimes simply seeing what is on front of one's eyes is the hardest
> thing"---G. Orwell, surely paraphrased.
> >
> > On Sat, Sep 30, 2017 at 9:21 AM, Joseph Tracy <brook7 at sover.net> wrote:
> > This is a brief article by Nick Turse who wrote an important recent book
> on Vietnam.
> > https://www.commondreams.org/views/2017/09/29/ken-burns-viet
> nam-war-documentary-glosses-over-devastating-civilian-toll
> >
>
> -
> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?listpynchon-l
>
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