Slightly P: Ken Burns//The Vietnam War

[rich]

Burns' use of music has been a major annoyance--i find his work informative
yet formuliac.

i'm not shocked by much about Vietnam anymore considering the lessons we
failed to learn less than 30 years after its 'end'. i am only grateful for
men like the helicopter pilot who was instrumental in stopping the killing
at My Lai. i think he passed recently

rich

On Sun, Oct 1, 2017 at 6:35 AM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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
>>
>
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://waste.org/pipermail/pynchon-l/attachments/20171001/26c81f9b/attachment.html>