imagine thinking the destruction of Vietnam was started "in good faith" whatever the fuck that means— Adam H. Johnson (@adamjohnsonNYC) September 16, 2017
― ice cream social justice (Dr Morbius), Sunday, 17 September 2017 14:24 (six years ago) link
"in good faith by decent people""fateful misunderstandings""muddle through""tragic decisions"https://t.co/3nARKTBHDl pic.twitter.com/VNypbb8saj— Adam H. Johnson (@adamjohnsonNYC) September 16, 2017
― ice cream social justice (Dr Morbius), Sunday, 17 September 2017 14:25 (six years ago) link
Citing a piece written by George Will with ghost quotes. Cutting twitter critiques, there.
I plan to watch this.
― Ⓓⓡ. (Johnny Fever), Sunday, 17 September 2017 14:34 (six years ago) link
I just watched his The War about the 2nd world war or at least people from 4 towns at the time. Is he following a similar path, though area of conflict is significantly smaller so maybe he doesn't need to narrow things down as heavily.Anyway probably will watch this if i get a chance.
― Stevolende, Sunday, 17 September 2017 14:37 (six years ago) link
Based on the interviews I've heard with him and Lynn, they're interviewing people who've never been interviewed before, on all sides of the conflict (including Viet Cong soldiers, who've never spoken to western media about any of this). They apparently asked for assistance and recommendations from the likes of John Kerry and John McCain, but neither of them are subjects of interview and their own stories do not get covered.
― Ⓓⓡ. (Johnny Fever), Sunday, 17 September 2017 14:40 (six years ago) link
Those quotes are in other reviews, they seem to be from the show's narration.
The (laudatory) NY Times review invoked "PBS centrism."
― ice cream social justice (Dr Morbius), Sunday, 17 September 2017 14:52 (six years ago) link
I'll watch at least the first part, but getting a rave review from George Will is a very bad sign.
― Karl Malone, Sunday, 17 September 2017 15:10 (six years ago) link
I don't think it is a good time (not as if there ever was a good one) for apologist Nam nonsense with a Jon Boy Walton narration. I am being a bit flippant and reductive there maybe, but wouldn't any better than that from Burns.
― calzino, Sunday, 17 September 2017 15:15 (six years ago) link
*expect any better
― calzino, Sunday, 17 September 2017 15:16 (six years ago) link
Peter Coyote narrates.
― Ⓓⓡ. (Johnny Fever), Sunday, 17 September 2017 15:17 (six years ago) link
...who had a substantial lefty-activist history in that era.
― ice cream social justice (Dr Morbius), Sunday, 17 September 2017 15:18 (six years ago) link
That Coyote also narrated The Roosevelts, which was quite often in the usual Burns style of lots of winsome blathering about the inherent decency of AMERICA!
― calzino, Sunday, 17 September 2017 15:52 (six years ago) link
I've been listening to the Trent Reznor/Atticus Finch score for this since earlier this morning, and it's quite nice, but some of it feels painfully modern to be used as underscore for events that happened 50 years ago. I guess we'll see how it's incorporated.
― Ⓓⓡ. (Johnny Fever), Sunday, 17 September 2017 15:56 (six years ago) link
Also, the actual pop music soundtrack they assembled for this thing is pretty white and unremarkable, but fuck if "Gimme Shelter" doesn't do it for me every single time.
― Ⓓⓡ. (Johnny Fever), Sunday, 17 September 2017 15:57 (six years ago) link
i highly recommend pbs' vietnam: a television history, from 1983. a testimonial:
The film Television's Vietnam: The Real Story (1985), aired on the PBS network as a rebuttal to the documentary. It was narrated by Charlton Heston and produced by Accuracy in Media.
now that's pbs centrism
― difficult listening hour, Sunday, 17 September 2017 18:10 (six years ago) link
i have to say that i love Burn's films, flawed as they are. he's a better "popular historian"than what you usually get, i think, and the subject matter this time may organically push back against his worst tendencies. anyway--i'm looking forward to this.
― ryan, Sunday, 17 September 2017 18:13 (six years ago) link
yeah, Burns is far from perfect, but he sneaks a lot of information into his sentimentalized documentaries that his audience of millions would never seek out or enjoy in other formats.
― A is for (Aimless), Sunday, 17 September 2017 18:19 (six years ago) link
they're interviewing people who've never been interviewed before, on all sides of the conflict (including Viet Cong soldiers, who've never spoken to western media about any of this).
the 1983 doc (partic e5) has vc interviews-- soldiers and peasants as well as e.g. general giap
bet ken pans over the nguyen ngoc loan photo w unprecedented drama tho
― difficult listening hour, Sunday, 17 September 2017 18:25 (six years ago) link
A Trent Wotsit soundtrack sounds like an appalling idea, would have been better digging out some Billy Bang imo.
― calzino, Sunday, 17 September 2017 18:37 (six years ago) link
The music is on Spotify.
(The title - The Vietnam War: Original Score - makes me want to make dumb "Vietnam 1, USA 0" jokes)
― grawlix (unperson), Sunday, 17 September 2017 19:24 (six years ago) link
david thomson: "It seems to me the best film I have ever seen, but in saying that I am not thinking of its aesthetic elements, its storyline or cinematic elegance."
https://www.lrb.co.uk/v39/n18/david-thomson/merely-an-empire
― (The Other) J.D. (J.D.), Sunday, 17 September 2017 22:19 (six years ago) link
wow, well, okay!
― difficult listening hour, Sunday, 17 September 2017 23:25 (six years ago) link
Thought it started at 9:00, so I missed the first 20 minutes--I'll catch that later tonight. Obvious (and necessary) thing to do, but I like how Kennedy, Nixon, and Johnson are worked in around the edges starting in the early '50s.
― clemenza, Monday, 18 September 2017 01:33 (six years ago) link
This is off to a promising start. Learned more about the 100 years leading up to US involvement than I've ever known.
― Ⓓⓡ. (Johnny Fever), Monday, 18 September 2017 01:46 (six years ago) link
― calzino, Sunday, September 17, 2017 10:52 AM (ten hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink
OMG I could not get through one episode of the Roosevelts. An unending blast of hot wind.
― the last famous person you were surprised to discover was actually (man alive), Monday, 18 September 2017 02:15 (six years ago) link
do people think civil war is bad? i found it extremely good (though watched it as a canadian who didn't learn much american history in school)
― flopson, Monday, 18 September 2017 08:35 (six years ago) link
I was wondering if they'd talk about things like Dien Bien Phu and French colonialism in general. JUst d/lded this so can watch it shortly. notice just popped up that it completed as I typed this.
― Stevolende, Monday, 18 September 2017 09:21 (six years ago) link
The Civil War documentary is outstanding imo. I binge-watched it earlier this year when it popped up on Netflix.
― Well bissogled trotters (Michael B), Monday, 18 September 2017 10:03 (six years ago) link
The Prohibition doc is my favorite.
― Mr. Snrub, Monday, 18 September 2017 10:22 (six years ago) link
I liked the Prohibition doc too; I learned about the WTCU, the Progressive connection to temperance, and the income the federal government made off alcohol before an income tax.
― the Rain Man of nationalism. (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Monday, 18 September 2017 10:58 (six years ago) link
this was very good so far but my one question is why the jumps forward to 67/68; there didn't seem to be very good parallels between the two times until one of the last ones, and it seemed...arbitrary? or like...sticking it in to tell the viewer "yeah yeah we know all this old historical stuff is old and confusing, here's some war tragedy you're more familiar with, keep with it". I dunno.
The Reznor soundtrack is great, fitting. Very low key.
― akm, Monday, 18 September 2017 12:34 (six years ago) link
my one question is why the jumps forward to 67/68; there didn't seem to be very good parallels between the two times until one of the last ones, and it seemed...arbitrary?
I agree, but there was one...maybe midway through?...that really drove home the point for me that no one besides the native Vietnamese ever should have been there. No French or Americans, for sure. I guess most people who fought and saw friends and fellow soldiers die don't want to dwell on how absurd and pointless the entire war was, but that's clearer to me now than ever before.
― Ⓓⓡ. (Johnny Fever), Monday, 18 September 2017 12:45 (six years ago) link
I suppose to show circular patterns of history? French longshoreman spitting on and throwing rocks at returning troops in 1953 = anti-war protestors and cops fighting on streets of Chicago. I'm not sure it works either.
― the Rain Man of nationalism. (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Monday, 18 September 2017 12:47 (six years ago) link
I'm amazed that my Catholic high school offered a class for seniors with the anodyne title "U.S. Foreign Policy," a class about the Vietnam War and Watergate. We learned about Ho, the Vietminh, Dien Ben Phu, the self-immolating Buddhist Monks, Madame Nhu, and the rest of it.
― the Rain Man of nationalism. (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Monday, 18 September 2017 12:51 (six years ago) link
I was incensed by the Ho Chi Minh letters never being presented to Wilson and Truman.
― Ⓓⓡ. (Johnny Fever), Monday, 18 September 2017 12:53 (six years ago) link
that was incredible. I had no idea about that; is that well known? I admit to knowing very little about any of the build up to the war until now.
― akm, Monday, 18 September 2017 13:00 (six years ago) link
I knew about Ho approaching Truman in some fashion but not a letter.
― the Rain Man of nationalism. (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Monday, 18 September 2017 13:02 (six years ago) link
I also didn't know about Peter Dewey, that was an interesting (and tragic) story.
― akm, Monday, 18 September 2017 13:03 (six years ago) link
I found the back-and-forth time structure odd too--that may have been to give viewers who only know the living-room-war part of the story some context, and may be limited to the first episode, I don't know.
Because I have to be somewhere tonight, I've got to choose between watching everything out of order or staying up till 1:30 each night--I don't know why, but they repeat the previous day's episode at midnight.
― clemenza, Monday, 18 September 2017 13:51 (six years ago) link
You can also stream it on PBS' website -- it's how I watched it a couple hours ago.
― the Rain Man of nationalism. (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Monday, 18 September 2017 13:56 (six years ago) link
― flopson
it's the doc that made burns's reputation and still his most famous, so it gets a lot of backlash. his presentational style, particularly in that doc, proved pretty ripe for parody, or at least easy _to_ parody, and his strong association with pbs and the sort of middle-of-the-road liberalism pbs is thought to represent also inspires a lot of criticism.
i think he's a truly excellent popular historian, myself.
― bob lefse (rushomancy), Monday, 18 September 2017 14:11 (six years ago) link
I remember The Civil War being good but haven't seen it in years. I'm mostly haunted by the fact the theme from the series was standard fare for my high school orchestra years and still have extreme listening fatigue as a result.
― mh, Monday, 18 September 2017 14:31 (six years ago) link
― calzino, Sunday, September 17, 2017 2:37 PM (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink
this, this, a million times this. Bang's Vietnam records are tremendously moving.
Trent Reznor, otoh, is the jingle writer ad agencies call on when they want a new flavor of chewing gum to come across as "extreme."
― Montgomery Burns' Jazz (Tarfumes The Escape Goat), Monday, 18 September 2017 14:32 (six years ago) link
have you listened to any of his and ross's actual soundtracks? I'd argue "plaintive" or "contemplative" over extreme
afaik he hasn't really done any ad work, mostly soundtracks for fincher films
― mh, Monday, 18 September 2017 14:40 (six years ago) link
've been listening to the Trent Reznor/Atticus Finch score for this
sorry to hear Atticus has given up the law
― ice cream social justice (Dr Morbius), Monday, 18 September 2017 14:43 (six years ago) link
I started the first episode and there was immediately a thank you to one of the Koch brothers.
― President Keyes, Monday, 18 September 2017 14:44 (six years ago) link
isn't that standard on PBS? Hell, they named one of the theaters at Lincoln Center after em. Love those donations.
― ice cream social justice (Dr Morbius), Monday, 18 September 2017 14:47 (six years ago) link
the Kochs contribute to a couple Boston-area public radio and tv stations, always kind of a jarring effect when I hear their names attached as donors for content culled from those stations, but I think the malevolence is when they use their influence from that to get funding pulled from other projects, not necessarily the things that get made
― mh, Monday, 18 September 2017 14:47 (six years ago) link
I guess the PBS ombudsman addressed a prior incident:http://www.pbs.org/ombudsman/2013/05/david_koch_and_pbs_the_odd_couple.html
― mh, Monday, 18 September 2017 14:50 (six years ago) link
i like the civil war a lot, was classic insomnia viewing in college and not just because it tended to be a cure. the letters are hard to resist obv. but the show needs basically a whole other show laying the ground for it. i used to get v frustrated because i didn't understand at all the ~30 (~300) years leading up to the war and so would feel at sea watching it-- yet would know its audience wasn't expected to know that stuff either; rather just be moved or disquieted by the uncanny fantasy of americans fighting in american towns. think the limit of its focus--tho obv more than justified by the material's density--is why it's able to stay so uncontroversial and "healingly" patriotic without actually saying much wrong or dumb. (that and all the shelby foote.) maybe i'm remembering it unjustly but all this is why my first impulse would be to not personally watch ken burns' the vietnam war. however apparently it is the best movie david thomson has ever seen?
what made me lol was thanking some donor for their "support for the vietnam war"
― difficult listening hour, Monday, 18 September 2017 15:41 (six years ago) link
this is the opening script to Burns’ Vietnam doc. What, one wonders, does “good faith” mean? “Decent”? What war of aggression is not “in good faith”?? Note the responsibility-laundering “both political parties” because that which is bipartisan cannot, by definition, be evil. pic.twitter.com/CX3E7j6PgC— Adam H. Johnson (@adamjohnsonNYC) May 6, 2018
― the ignatius rock of ignorance (Dr Morbius), Sunday, 6 May 2018 18:29 (five years ago) link
just watch the fucking doc already, jeezus
― morning wood truancy (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Sunday, 6 May 2018 18:35 (five years ago) link
The doc is quite clear about probing the self-deceit of good intentions
no self-deceit at the top; the bloody pursuit of empire.
― the ignatius rock of ignorance (Dr Morbius), Sunday, 6 May 2018 18:44 (five years ago) link
It's impossible to read about the history of empire without noting the shibboleths held by the colonialists, for example, "We're civilizing these people, that's why we're here." I'll wait for Adam Johnson to get past pg. 2.
― morning wood truancy (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Sunday, 6 May 2018 18:48 (five years ago) link
The pretext for the war, the so-called Gulf of Tonkin incident, was a blatant fabrication by the Johnson administration. The decision to send troops to fight in Vietnam was implemented in bad faith. The Congress and the public were lied to. So that, if there was good faith involved on the part of the nation as a whole, it was a faith inspired by the lies promulgated by the highest echelon of government.
― A is for (Aimless), Sunday, 6 May 2018 18:52 (five years ago) link
no one disagrees with that fact
― morning wood truancy (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Sunday, 6 May 2018 18:53 (five years ago) link
idk in what innermost spirit it was begun, but it was prolonged not to "muddle through" but because the actual war goal-- the projection of a credible impression of american will-- dictated it be prolonged at whatever cost even after command fully understood in 1966 that the country would not be taken. how's that for russiagate
silly to argue with a blurb i guess.
― difficult listening hour, Sunday, 6 May 2018 18:54 (five years ago) link
i mean okay that's a kind of muddling through. whoops?
― difficult listening hour, Sunday, 6 May 2018 18:56 (five years ago) link
nothing in that blurb seems particularly different from the way the US has understood the war for decades, dating back to "best and the brightest." you can argue w/ it or see it as self-serving but it's a little silly to act like ken burns is coming up w/ some gross revisionist take of his own.
― (The Other) J.D. (J.D.), Sunday, 6 May 2018 19:02 (five years ago) link
Yeah, that line is at the beginning of the thing iirc, and REALLY puts a bad foot forward, but if you actually watch the doc it doesn’t really seem like it’s actually backing that statement up at any point
― we æt so many shimripl (Whiney G. Weingarten), Sunday, 6 May 2018 19:10 (five years ago) link
I mean, iirc it was a little soft on Kennedy — and I certainly am not knowledgeable enough to refute it — but it certainly laid into Johnson and Nixon
― we æt so many shimripl (Whiney G. Weingarten), Sunday, 6 May 2018 19:14 (five years ago) link
There's an implicit assumption in some corners of the Left that those in power don't really believe in the "good faith" version of their actions--which strikes me as a fatal (if perhaps comforting) misunderstanding of how ideology works.
― ryan, Sunday, 6 May 2018 19:17 (five years ago) link
Honestly (off topic, here) I think the only thing missing from the doc is an extra chapter about 1975 to the present day: the way we process the war through the film of the seventies and eighties, how vfw halls transformed, all these guys getting back into the workforce, more on the effects of ptsd, the government not following through on taking care of these guys, etc
― we æt so many shimripl (Whiney G. Weingarten), Sunday, 6 May 2018 19:20 (five years ago) link
you had Poppy Bush in early '91 proclaiming the Vietnam War "Syndrome" (!) had been conquered
― morning wood truancy (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Sunday, 6 May 2018 19:27 (five years ago) link
we have learned well the terrible lesson of vietnam: stay out of vietnam
― difficult listening hour, Sunday, 6 May 2018 20:03 (five years ago) link
DO NOT FORGET YOUR DYING KING
― morning wood truancy (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Sunday, 6 May 2018 22:01 (five years ago) link
watched all of this as my nightly viewing over the last month or so. it does capture a lot of idk, emotional history, the way things FELT for these different people. trauma, terror, loss, confusion, these come across really powerfully. but the historical consciousness is really pathetically thin and gets worse as it goes on. never gives any sense of why the war made sense at an economic level - should have had interviews with a onetime junior aid at dupont or joe schmoe who paid for his split-level working in an airplane factory in southern california or whatever. (be nice to understand the domestic dispute as more than a longhairs vs silent majority culture war.). more to the point i was hoping to understand more of what the vietnamese saw in communism and/or the north vietnamese government, why some people would have been willing to die for this. was it like idk spain or italy before the fascists, where half the country is huge plantations to whose peasants land reform is like the earthly paradise? or was it just that the french and US were backing a repressive and extractive neocolonial regime so the independence movement ended up aligning with the USSR and the PRC? there's really no mention of economic activity or exports after a few references during the french colonial period, but idk I thought this was a big aspect of vietnam and the "domino theory" - "losing all of southeast asia" meant losing like, rubber plantations in malaysia right? or am i scrambling things up?in the doc the north vietnamese and/or viet cong motive seems to boil down to just opposing the corrupt and brutal thieu regime, which ok fine, that's a pretty good reason, but then in the final chapter thieu is suddenly treated as a martyr --- poor guy, unable to "save his country" because the cowardly war-weary US public and congressional democrats bailed on promises they didn't know about which richard nixon would toooootally have kept. totally confusing as written. the rushed ending reminded me of "we didn't start the fire," suddenly we're just zipping through the early 70s. makes it really clear that this is about the war as it was experienced by american soldiers and responded to on the american homefront. nice of them to note that the vietnamese intervention in cambodia cost almost as many vietnamese lives as the US lost in their "vietnam war" but the fact that it's kind of a sad footnote makes clear that the early commitment to really putting the war in a larger context has evaporated. once the americans come home, we follow them.it also fumbles in the end when dealing with my lai and other atrocities - they can go as far as saying that the coverup was due to more widespread causes in the military's culture but they can't quite say, the americans were waging a brutal colonial war, the entire thing was a war crime, so of course the culture of committing war crimes is going to become endemic. some of the talking heads come close (someone points out that if the same people had been killed by aerial bombardment no one would have singled it out as an atrocity) but the narrator demurs.first few episodes still probably very useful for your "daddy, what's vietnam?" type audience. i don't think i really grasped the french colonial context until college. in other little ways it does a lot better than most pop documents of vietnam, like keeping vietnamese suffering/casualties in the narrative (if less frequently rendered with the same clarity and emotional punch as things that affect americans). it frustrated me but i don't regret watching it and feel like i "get" a number of things that i didn't before.
― noel gallaghah's high flying burbbhrbhbbhbburbbb (Doctor Casino), Sunday, 6 May 2018 23:56 (five years ago) link
so of course the culture of committing war crimes is going to become endemic. some of the talking heads come close (someone points out that if the same people had been killed by aerial bombardment no one would have singled it out as an atrocity)
what McNamara says Curtis LeMay told him about the firebombing of Tokyo iirc
― morning wood truancy (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Sunday, 6 May 2018 23:58 (five years ago) link
DC, did they ever really align with the PRC? I missed the last couple episodes but the main thread of Vietnam’s conflict with its neighbors and its alliances (well, North Vietnam’s at the time) was about self-determinationVietnam’s been in conflict with China virtually forever, and my impression is that the conflict with the US is a recent footnote to centuries of conflicts, the most notable with China. Only took until 1979 for that to happen again.
― mh, Monday, 7 May 2018 00:48 (five years ago) link
i think it's telling that i watched this whole series and remain confused on this point! they definitely did refer to chinese forces supporting the NVA in the last years. i think.
this review by maurice isserman at Dissent brings up something that annoyed me but which i'd forgotten to complain about: the series is really on the side of the hoary old "returning veterans spit upon by protesters" trope, and pretty bad at dealing with the anti-war movement except when its participants are grieving family members or disillusioned soldiers. it'd be nice to see more of people who were just moved by the moral argument and forced to realize, from a position of comfort, that their government was doing something horrible. or even people who just didn't want to get drafted and go fight in a pointless stupid war. there's hints of that but it's not explored at length. or the black radical position which identified the war as an expression of the same violence, white supremacy and exploitation as domestic oppression - totally absent.
― noel gallaghah's high flying burbbhrbhbbhbburbbb (Doctor Casino), Monday, 7 May 2018 04:37 (five years ago) link
i get that you would see it as “hoary” but i don’t think that that perspective is any less valid just because it is oft-repeated. sorry to be a stan but that bugs me
― Squeaky Fromage (VegemiteGrrl), Monday, 7 May 2018 04:47 (five years ago) link
likei realize there are viewpoints not shown in this series & blindspots but the perspectives it *does* include are not just lazy sawhorses, they are backed up by actual people who actually experienced those things. one of the problems i have with our era of the 00’s is our eagerness to say we’ve seen something before, that we need fresh new hot takes on everythinghow about this: a better, deeper take on something you think you already know.
― Squeaky Fromage (VegemiteGrrl), Monday, 7 May 2018 05:10 (five years ago) link
something that annoyed me but which i'd forgotten to complain about
New Board Description.
― Making Plans For Sturgill (C. Grisso/McCain), Monday, 7 May 2018 05:11 (five years ago) link
lol
― Squeaky Fromage (VegemiteGrrl), Monday, 7 May 2018 05:11 (five years ago) link
"decent people," kiss my ass Ken B also yr Baseball & Jazz docs essentially sucked
― the ignatius rock of ignorance (Dr Morbius), Monday, 7 May 2018 05:14 (five years ago) link
are you ever going to watch this or are you just going to haunt this thread like Jacob fkn Marley
― Squeaky Fromage (VegemiteGrrl), Monday, 7 May 2018 05:19 (five years ago) link
veg, I disagree. I think the isserman article convincingly makes the case that the kind of incidents burns favors for inclusion were rare and nonrepresentative, and that the notion that they *are* representative has been a noxious right-wing canard for decades, used to stereotype and retroactively marginalize the peace movement so that anyone who organized against the war is forced to defend themselves against the charge that they spit on veterans rather than standing proudly as people who got off their asses to end an evil war. the doc could have honored these individual vets' memories (showing us the broad and varied quilt of experience) without leaving the trope later constructed from those accounts unexamined. the documentarian makes choices, and can't just say, look, these stories were true for these people who told them and stop there. given the wide audience and scope of the series, the makers could have taken the chance to cut through and complicate these loaded narratives, not just repeat them.certainly it could have give equal time to the middle-of-the-road antiwar activists or coherent radical critique like i suggested above - not admissible here because burns doesn't want to call it a colonial, white-supremacist war). what gets the airtime are the days of rage, the protestors with VC flags, and all the sneering juxtapositions like, yknow, ~while these guys were dying overseas, look at these decadent hippies singing parodic protest songs and cavorting in the sunshine at woodstock!!! ~ as if country joe attacking the senseless deaths of his peers is more shockingly indifferent than, idk, footage of square moms and dads laughing it up at the movies or a baseball game or whatever.i think isserman is right to be concerned that the only peace activists burns wants to put a halo on are veterans against the war and those who lost family members. if those are the only people with moral authority to question a war then it's gonna be pretty hard to stop any future wars, which is just how the right wingers who've promulgated certain vietnam narratives (see also: we could have won but the politicians didn't let us) would like it. when present-day protests are edited and soundtracked to showcase only the wild young more-radical-than-thou advocates of violence and destruction, we recognize this as a falsification with a political agenda, even though there are going to be some on-the-scene observers who will, forty-five years from now, assert that they remember vividly how such activities dominated the protest. that's not even getting into whether those wild young radicals may have been (or been manipulated by) federal agents whose job was to discredit and divide the movement by pushing for over-the-top radical steps. also not part of the story here.
― noel gallaghah's high flying burbbhrbhbbhbburbbb (Doctor Casino), Monday, 7 May 2018 13:21 (five years ago) link
I'm four episodes in and my impression is that Bill Zimmerman is the only american figure in the series who isn't either: a straight evil person or a naive imbecile who's about to go 'aw raspberries that's war?'. Not only he is the one american so far (I'll repeat I'm four episodes in) with the clearest view of the war but he seems to be the one who has the most control of his own narrative. I control+F'ed to see what Isserman was thinking about him and the role he has in the grander storytelling and he is the absent of the analysis so I don't know. Seems to me that protestors are on the right side of history in that documentary, but are also not the main subject at all.
― Van Horn Street, Monday, 7 May 2018 15:35 (five years ago) link
Forgot the journalists, some of the journalists fit the description I used for Zimmerman.
― Van Horn Street, Monday, 7 May 2018 15:39 (five years ago) link
that is fair - isserman may overstate the case and it would be a stronger piece if he took the time to explain how the treatment of those other figures fit into the documentary as a whole, in his reading. imo the second half of the series is worse on this front than the first, and i'm curious to see what you think later on!
― noel gallaghah's high flying burbbhrbhbbhbburbbb (Doctor Casino), Monday, 7 May 2018 16:11 (five years ago) link
I don't think I ever watched it a second time, but I thought the original baseball series was pretty great. (Didn't like the 10th-inning addendum as much.) There are a zillion ways you could try to cover the entire history of baseball, but I thought organizing it, to a certain extent, around Ruth and Robinson was smart. There was indeed too much New York through the '40s and '50s (so someone like Musial gets tacked onto a different episode), but it's also true the Yankees and Dodgers more or less dominated those decades. I thought the interviewees, music, and footage were usually excellent.
― clemenza, Monday, 7 May 2018 17:54 (five years ago) link
are you ever going to watch this or
Life's too short. Watch the Karnow series from the '80s.
― the ignatius rock of ignorance (Dr Morbius), Monday, 7 May 2018 18:36 (five years ago) link
it's cool how you don't have time to watch it yourself but do have the time to lecture us tediously about how bad it is
― (The Other) J.D. (J.D.), Monday, 7 May 2018 18:54 (five years ago) link
all i had to do was read Burns' fucking intro about the "good faith" of McNamara & Co
so piss off
― the ignatius rock of ignorance (Dr Morbius), Monday, 7 May 2018 18:57 (five years ago) link
If I remember correctly the good faith thing is really about american involvement during the First Indochina War and had nothing to do with the military? Someone correct me.
― Van Horn Street, Monday, 7 May 2018 19:15 (five years ago) link
That tracks iirc
― Johnny Fever, Monday, 7 May 2018 23:24 (five years ago) link
Morbs is even more ridic than usual in this thread.
― Johnny Fever, Monday, 7 May 2018 23:25 (five years ago) link
― the ignatius rock of ignorance (Dr Morbius)
what a relief that you judge artists by intentions, it makes reading you easier!
― morning wood truancy (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Monday, 7 May 2018 23:49 (five years ago) link
Burns an artist, that's my lol for the day
― the ignatius rock of ignorance (Dr Morbius), Tuesday, 8 May 2018 00:35 (five years ago) link
I generally judge critics by their intentions, which in 99% of cases is wasting everybody's time
― the ignatius rock of ignorance (Dr Morbius), Tuesday, 8 May 2018 00:37 (five years ago) link
presumably that's always your intention too
― (The Other) J.D. (J.D.), Tuesday, 8 May 2018 00:53 (five years ago) link
NAPALMED!
― the ignatius rock of ignorance (Dr Morbius), Tuesday, 8 May 2018 01:11 (five years ago) link
― noel gallaghah's high flying burbbhrbhbbhbburbbb (Doctor Casino), Monday, May 7, 2018 12:11 PM (three months ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink
I'm watching this slowly because it's a thing I do with my friends and sometimes not all of us are available. I'm 9 episodes in and the whole thing is winding down so I think I can discuss the whole protestors thing with more insight, I'll come back once more when I'm done.
For now, I think it's hard for Burns to discuss the whole experience of the american soldier in Vietnam without mentioning the difficulty of coming back home and being criticized for doing something most of them didn't really even sign up for, which makes for good documentary. Plus, a lack of middle class to middle class solidarity is antithetical to the whole Burns philosophy he has been threading on for 30 years. Since it played into the hands of Nixon, well he discusses it. The same way he discusses the atrocities the soldiers worked on a daily basis. At no point the soldier is painted as a saintly figure either.
You say "when present-day protests are edited and soundtracked to showcase only the wild young more-radical-than-thou advocates of violence and destruction, we recognize this as a falsification with a political agenda, even though there are going to be some on-the-scene observers who will, forty-five years from now, assert that they remember vividly how such activities dominated the protest." and I just didn't see that? A few violent factions that are disavowed by the talking heads and smarter protestors, and people dying on campus greens. I saw cops beating on peaceful protestors. I saw a lot of young people lucidly being on the right side of history from day one and more and more people joining them. Perhaps more importantly, I did see the great falsification by the american right, clearer than ever before and how it related to today politics. For someone who wasn't a super aware of the peace movement, the war itself and it's impact on today's politics it was eye opening (I'm not american).
When it comes to the permanent revision of the US to see this as a nothing more than a mistake and not an extension of a colonialist mentality, the interviewed Vietnamese are quick to remind us how they saw it and how they saw is seems to have been ignored since then. After watching most of the documentary, I don't think there is any doubt where Burns stand when it comes to the nature of this war.
― Van Horn Street, Tuesday, 21 August 2018 19:01 (five years ago) link
I didn't realize conservatives were staunchly for the War even by the '72 campaign. They really are perpetually on the wrong side of history huh.
― A True White Kid that can Jump (Granny Dainger), Tuesday, 21 August 2018 19:51 (five years ago) link
nor did I realize a majority APPROVED of the police response during '68 Dem convention wtffffff
― A True White Kid that can Jump (Granny Dainger), Tuesday, 21 August 2018 19:52 (five years ago) link
the only thing they were ever remotely right about was the USSR under Josef Stalin
― Οὖτις, Tuesday, 21 August 2018 19:55 (five years ago) link
and about hippies smelling bad
― The Silky Veils of Alfred (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Tuesday, 21 August 2018 19:56 (five years ago) link
Casino, I have been rethinking about it since I last posted (merely a hour ago) and let me backtrack and explain that my grander point is that Ken Burns is at his best when you don't know a subject very well and then the documentary acts as a primer on the subject. There's probably shades of nuances that weren't there, that shouldn't be there and couldn't grasp what was missing, and you did and it frustrated you. So all in all I am not saying that your criticism isn't fair, which is how I come across earlier, just that I don't have what it takes to see it yet.
― Van Horn Street, Tuesday, 21 August 2018 20:04 (five years ago) link
Fair! TBH I'm not fresh enough on the series anymore to really defend my own points. I just remember feeling, after the last couple episodes especially, like the selection of the 'narrators' really left out a number of reasons/arguments against the war, and left the main platform to soldiers and families-of-soldiers, as if the emergent main stream of the New Left hadn't offered coherent challenges to the war, to imperialism, and to the military-industrial complex, or that there was any kind of radical critique beyond "crazies who wanted to violently overthrow society." Of course the doc itself helps make some of the arguments by showing atrocities, and demonstrating that militarily the war was folly, but I do think it matters who gets to speak, and my memory - maybe shaky - was that Burns favors the soldiers as the locus of morality.
TBF, by the time I read critics that helped me articulate this inchoate dissatisfaction, I'd already really soured on Burns's narrative just because of the totally bizarre handling of the end of the war with its sudden pivot to "poor Thieu, all the promises to him that were broken by Ford and the Democrats in Congress, he was treated very unfairly" and "now let's wrap up the non-US-involved fate of the region in ten minutes." It felt like it really really drifted from the kind of thing it was promising to be in the first episode.
― Doctor Casϵϵno (Doctor Casino), Wednesday, 22 August 2018 16:39 (five years ago) link