Slightly P: Ken Burns//The Vietnam War

[Joseph Tracy]

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-vietnam-war-documentary-glosses-over-devastating-civilian-toll
> 

-
Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l