In which I get a sneak peak at Ken Burn’s The Vietnam War
Last night I accompanied my friend Scottie Kersta-Wilson–writer and artist-extraordinaire–to hear Ken Burns talk about his new series The Vietnam War, which will air on September 17 on your local PBS station.*
Burns is an appealing speaker. It was fascinating to hear how his team works to tell a story. The depth of the research. The care with language–long debates over whether to describe the American experience in Vietnam as a failure or a defeat, for instance. The fact that research continues alongside writing and filming. It was equally fascinating to hear how he organized this particular story around the concept that there isn’t just one truth about the Vietnam war. (I loved the fact that he described the events surrounding the Chicago Democratic convention in 1968 as an important battle in the war.) He and his crew talked to soldiers and civilians from both sides of the war. Perhaps more importantly, the people they interviewed were not the big names of the war. This is a man-in-the-street look at the war, set within a rigorously researched framework
The heart of the evening was a set of nine clips from the coming series–a little less than a hour of what will be eighteen hours of television. In the course of fifty-some minutes, I laughed** and cried. I was horrified.*** I felt ill and angry and sad and, occasionally, proud. I covered my eyes more than once. I learned stuff.
I’m not sure I’ll make it through all eighteen hours of The Vietnam War. It is a beautiful piece of cinematography and intelligent story telling, but the depiction of death and violence is graphic and gruesome. Despite the fact that I write about war more than I write about anything else,**** I am kind of a wimp about images of dead and broken people. But what I saw on the screen last night makes me determined to try.
I’ll be interested to know what you think.
(A quick reminder to those of you who get this by email: If you want to watch the trailer, you need to go to the browser. Just click the header.)
* Or at least that’s true if you’re in the United States–I know not all of you are. At some point the episodes will also be available online.
**Lyndon Johnson saying “the press lies like a bunch of drunken sailors.”
***Lyndon Johnson saying “the press lies like a bunch of drunken sailors.”
****Not something I could ever have predicted.
In Which I Straddle Two Stories
One of the unexpected benefits of writings more than one thing at a time, set in different times and/or places, is that you stumble across the places where the stories hook up. It always gives me a zing of pleasure to see the relationship between the Crusades and Henry the so-called Navigators’s explorations. Or to realize that Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865) and Karl Marx (1818-1883) were near contemporaries.*
Right now I’m enjoying another type of synchronicity: I’m writing two different stories that touch on the issue of Dutch neutrality in the first world war from differing viewpoints. On the one hand, I’m writing about Queen Wilhemina, who was very proud of her role in maintaining Dutch neutrality throughout the war. At war’s end, she even gave sanctuary to the Kaiser and refused to extradite him to Britain as a war criminal.**
On the other hand, I’m writing about Dutch illustrator and cartoonist Louis Raemaekers, who believed strongly that neutrality was a serious mistake. His virulent anti-German (and perhaps more importantly, pro-Belgium) political cartoons reached an international audience.
As I write, both perspectives are understandable. Even laudable. It’s a conundrum. Or perhaps a lesson.
*Marx feels much later thanks to that additional twenty years–at least to my simple minded way of thinking.
**She had a very different opinion about the Nazis.
From the Archives: Who Made the Map of the Modern Middle East?
The simple answer is: Great Britain. You want the long version?
In The Makers of the Modern Middle East historians T.G. Fraser, Andrew Mango, and Robert McNamara tell the story of how today’s Middle East was created from the remains of the Ottoman Empire during the peace negotiations at the end of the First World War.
The Allies weren’t the only powers that had an interest in the future of the region. Prince Feisal, who led the Arab Revolt against the Ottoman Empire with British aid, hoped to build an Arab kingdom based on Syria and Palestine. Dr. Chaim Weizmann had laid the political groundwork for British support of a Jewish National Home in Palestine. Mustafa Kemal, later known as Ataturk, created the modern, secular Turkish republic in the teeth of Allied opposition.
Fraser and his co-authors weave the details of competing territorial claims, conflicting political agreements, ignored reports, and colorful characters into a narrative as intricate as an Oriental rug, with a warp of Allied imperial ambitions and a weft of the emerging claims of Arab nationalism, Turkish nationalism and Zionism.
* * *
The bottom line? If you promise the same piece of land to France, the Zionists and an Arab king, someone’s going to be unhappy when the war is over
This review previously appeared in Shelf Awareness for Readers.