The War takes pride in America

Episode 4 of Ken Burns' The War presented us with the Anglo-British-American invasion of France in June 1944, apparently the grandest and most decisive military event in all of human history. All that had come before, our war interpreter tells us, were "mere preliminaries". Stalingrad, Kursk, Midway: small stuff, practically inconsequential. It had to be the Americans who achieved the Turning Point of All History. And in a battle, of course. Not in writing a Constitution or curing polio or some wimp sissy stuff like that. The invasion of France in 1944 was "the greatest invasion in history," we learn. Well, I guess if you don't count the massive attack that Germany and its allies threw at the Soviet Union almost exactly three years earlier. But who cares what happens in a backwater of history like Russia and eastern Europe?

A way occurred to me to describe the dissonance I have watching The War. Jackson Browne did a haunting song about the bloody civil conflicts in Africa over blood diamonds, called "Sergio Leone". It's about a filmmaker who records the brutal events. The concluding lines are:

From the Via Tusacalana to the view from Miller Drive
He shot the eyes of bad men and kept their deaths alive
With the darkness and the anguish of a Goya or Van Cleef
He rescued truth from beauty and meaning from belief

Just once in my life, I wish I could write a line as evocative as, "He rescued truth from beauty and meaning from belief."

But since I probably never will, I'll borrow Jackson Browne's lines to describe the impression Burns' documentary is making on me:

From the bombing of Pearl Harbor to the view from Utah Beach
He took long reams of war film and sandwiched it in kitsch
With the brightness and nostalgia of Norman Rockwell painting cheese
He buried truth in violins and horror in light relief

Tags: jackson browne, ken burns, second world war, the war documentary, world war two

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