08 October 2007
“The War” and Nancy Franklin
I wonder why Nancy Franklin’s pan of the Ken Burns TV series, “The War,” in the September 24, 2007, New Yorker, bothered me so much. It was written with the point of view of a head-in-the-sand thirty-year old who has no sense of history. Baby-boomers like Ms. Franklin still have a derivative personal experience of the horror and inarguable compulsion of that conflict. The victimhood that descended on everyone who lived through it and their progeny was an admirable price to pay for a noble cause; one that did not validate the suffering of draftees in the Vietnam War, or the volunteers in the Iraq War.
Ken Burns is a baby boomer, too. Perhaps he, like me, came to realize that our generation and those that follow have been lucky not to have been confronted with as unconscionably evil a foe as faced our parents in the nineteen-thirties and forties. It is a sort of guilty comfort that we have been privileged to enjoy as a result of their heroism. Seeing that heroism depicted in a quality film that speaks through the words and voices of those who sacrificed so much is an activity that does not grow old, no matter how long it lasts.
I was surprised, therefore, by the tone of Ms. Franklin’s review. The devotion with which Mr. Burns and Lynn Novick worked for six years to produce The War can best be appreciated by those who lived through it and their children. Perhaps it is a trying lesson for people with a more removed experience of WWII to withstand. Mr. Burns’ motivation, the fact that many veterans of The War are dying each day, shrinks each day the size of his appreciative audience. He has succeeded in answering that call. It is up to us to make clear to subsequent generations how important to us is the record of sacrifice that Mr. Burns and Ms. Novick have compiled.
I wonder why Nancy Franklin’s pan of the Ken Burns TV series, “The War,” in the September 24, 2007, New Yorker, bothered me so much. It was written with the point of view of a head-in-the-sand thirty-year old who has no sense of history. Baby-boomers like Ms. Franklin still have a derivative personal experience of the horror and inarguable compulsion of that conflict. The victimhood that descended on everyone who lived through it and their progeny was an admirable price to pay for a noble cause; one that did not validate the suffering of draftees in the Vietnam War, or the volunteers in the Iraq War.
Ken Burns is a baby boomer, too. Perhaps he, like me, came to realize that our generation and those that follow have been lucky not to have been confronted with as unconscionably evil a foe as faced our parents in the nineteen-thirties and forties. It is a sort of guilty comfort that we have been privileged to enjoy as a result of their heroism. Seeing that heroism depicted in a quality film that speaks through the words and voices of those who sacrificed so much is an activity that does not grow old, no matter how long it lasts.
I was surprised, therefore, by the tone of Ms. Franklin’s review. The devotion with which Mr. Burns and Lynn Novick worked for six years to produce The War can best be appreciated by those who lived through it and their children. Perhaps it is a trying lesson for people with a more removed experience of WWII to withstand. Mr. Burns’ motivation, the fact that many veterans of The War are dying each day, shrinks each day the size of his appreciative audience. He has succeeded in answering that call. It is up to us to make clear to subsequent generations how important to us is the record of sacrifice that Mr. Burns and Ms. Novick have compiled.
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