Found photographs

While cleaning out a storage room I found some old photographs belonging to my wife's father Tom Sutherland. These photos had been put in a box after the 2001 flood on Onion Creek, and have suffered some damage due to neglect since then. I have found out who some of these people are, but the identity of the others is a mystery.



This is Kay's great-grandfather Maclin Robertson outside the family home at a ranch near Salado, Texas. The house still exists, essentially unchanged. Kay and I visited the place once when her father was still alive; it is where he grew up.



This woman is unknown; although it is very likely she is one of Kay's great-aunts.



This woman is unknown to family members I have asked.



The only clue I have about this picture and the next is that they were in an envelope sent to Kay's grandmother Mary Elizabeth Robertson from a photo studio in Houston in 1954, where she had probably sent negatives to have copies made. The photos were obviously taken long before 1954. I am guessing they were Robertson family members.



This boy's photo was in the same envelope as the previous.



This is Kay's great-aunt Minnie Bell Sutherland.

Occupying Austin

I went by the "occupy Austin" event today at City Hall. Several hundred people were there early in the afternoon. As of about 2 o'clock it was quite peaceful and uneventful. Austin police are generally not hostile to events like this, but there were a lot of police officers in attendance, including, to my surprise, Chief Acevedo himself, who walked around talking occasionally to the top button of his shirt, which presumably contained a microphone.

There was a surveillance team on the top of the building to the west of City Hall, three guys with binoculars, plus a still camera and a video camera set up on tripods. I took some photos of 'em with a 200 mm lens, and when I got home I realized that they were military. Two of the three were in what I'd guess are Army uniforms. The third guy in a t shirt could have been a cop, or a soldier who took off his fatigue shirt.

I am interested in why the military is watching this demonstration. Anyone have any ideas?

Photos below (click on any of the images for more detail):














And of course I have to show you Chief Acevedo talking to his shirt:



Plus an impressive array of motorcycle cops parked in the shade across the street




And that was to keep this...

...from getting out of hand


It was peaceful enough when I left.

When the lesser of two evils argument fails

(Note of explanation: A month and a half ago I wrote the following more as an internal soliloquy than a normal blog entry--given that my irregular posts have left this blog with essentially no readers--but I realize now, some time after the fact, that if a reader does come along, there is no clue in the post what I was talking about. Mea culpa. The occasion was Obama caving to the Republicans when they held the economy hostage on raising the debt ceiling. A more extended internal soliloquy would include ruminations on whether to vote in the Republican primary in hopes that Romney as president would do less damage to the country than Perry, or whether to seriously look at living in another country. And I would direct the very hypothetical reader to my other blog, equally irregular but far less political, at Brass nor Stone.)

In the case of this deal with the devil that Obama has made, I am not sure that for Democrats to support it, and to support Obama in the next election, is in reality the lesser of two evils, so my title is probably misleading.

If the Republicans are not bluffing, then surely for Democrats to join with them in destroying the economy gradually is better than letting Republicans alone destroy it suddenly. Yeah, maybe. You would think. But not in this instance. Two or three years down the road, the country is going to be in the same sorry state regardless of who is president, thanks in large part to Obama himself.

And the worst possible case would be for the next Herbert Hoover to be a Democrat, or rather, to call himself a Democrat.

So I've arrived at the slightly consoling thought that the next Herbert Hoover is likely to be a card-carrying Republican, and that with a Republican Congress the ex-Party of Lincoln will completely own, as they say, the subsequent catastrophe.

I knew a lot of angry liberals who refused to vote for Hubert Humphrey in 1968. I think I still believed in the lesser of two evils argument in those days, and I duly held my nose and voted for Humphrey.

In hindsight I think I made the right decision. But I feel pretty good about the idea of writing in some third party candidate's name in 2012. In defense of my 1968 vote for Humphrey, he never agreed in ADVANCE to sign on to the bombing of Cambodia, or to the Watergate burglaries. Obama on the other hand has capitulated in advance to everything the Republicans want.

Birth of a Nation

I had never seen Birth of a Nation. I don't know why I watched it, I guess it came up when I was browsing in Netflix on-demand titles, so I started watching on a whim. I was blown away. I watched it all the way through, all three hours.

I'm not a fan of historic film, or silent film, or propaganda, artful or otherwise. For example I wasn't much interested in Triumph of the Will, though I did watch it all the way to the end. If I were a film history buff (obviously I'm not) Triumph of the Will might have held my interest more. I just saw it as ugly and dated, and more to the point, as Nazi crap.

Birth of a Nation was racist crap...but I've never seen anything like it and I have been trying to figure out why it fascinated me. Part of it may be that it gave me a sense of the permanence of some of the right wing sentiment in this country, a vision of America that's still around, mutatis mutandis of course--nobody justifies the Ku Klux Klan now.

I don't think I would call it a movie at all in the present-day sense of the word. Maybe you can think of silent film as a kind of extended mime-melodrama--in this case very extended, as I said, three hours long--accompanied by music, originally played in the house.

I can't tell you why a moving-picture mime performance three hours long with captions and music worked, but it did. In 1915 a ticket cost the equivalent of over $40 in 2010, and the film was a runaway hit, the biggest grossing hit in movie history until the late 1930s.

I guess I haven't been patient enough to sit through many restorations of silent films, but my impression, and I hasten to say, not a very informed impression, is that they were accompanied by rinky-tink and slightly comic player-piano sounds, but until now I never thought much about the music in the originals.

With Birth of a Nation I think the music was actually the key to its power, even more so than the amazing photography--or so it seems to me--much like in Alexander Nevsky, though that was not a silent movie. (An aside: I originally saw an unrestored version of Alexander Nevsky many years ago, and thought the Prokofiev score for the Battle on the Ice was absolutely perfect in its majestically satanic quality, but later I discovered in hearing a restored version that a lot of that was the distortion of the degraded sound track. The restored version seemed like hearing a Tom Waits song performed by Loreena McKennitt. Oh well.)

I wonder if Lee Atwater and Donald Segretti and Karl Rove and Frank Luntz didn't watch Birth of a Nation, secretly, and find in it something that could still be used. I don't mean that they saw it and discovered music as a tool of misinformation--Republican propaganda has gone in other directions--it was the whole deal, the idyll of America that was being sold to the viewer, a vision of an ideal America that Republicans have to like, excluding the overt racism of course. But the music had to be really important in why Birth of a Nation succeeded.

The score was selected by Joseph Breil with a lot of help from, or (I have read) argument with, Griffiths, and was played by house orchestras, at least in the case of performances in major cities. (I read somewhere that Breil's score was not played at the Los Angeles premiere, but only later at the New York opening.) At any rate the Breil score seems be the soundtrack of the film's presently released version. And that soundtrack is fascinating.

What do we hear? Orchestral and kinda tarted up versions of Dixie, Bonnie Blue Flag, Camptown Races, My Country 'Tis of Thee, O Tannenbaum (which at that time must have been familiar to Breil as also being the socialist anthem the Red Flag) the Ride of the Valkeries, Gary Owen, and at the end, the Star Spangled Banner as the new nation of Aryan white brotherhood, north and south, is born. And of course there was a lot of original stuff by Breil. I'd guess he wasn't a very good composer, but Dixie has an emotive spin on it, on its own.

So I think what kept me with the movie was the music, and the simplicity of mime. Plus the cinematography, but that's obviously not news. A simple, mythic message, pulling out all the stops in the delivery. Which, unfortunately, seems to be what the right-wing in America is good at. Even more unfortunately, maybe better today than in 1915.

An irrelevant-to-my-point footnote: I have not looked into real scholarship on Birth of a Nation, but the online commentary always notes that the major black roles were played by white people wearing blackface. That's not really true. I noticed a few, but only a few, white people in stereotypical blackface playing minor black roles. A great many of the black crowd members and extras actually were black. Black actors and extras were clearly available in Los Angeles and were hired for the movie.

The major black characters in the movie, who were villains, were supposed to be "mulattos." I think that's important. Race mixing was a big deal in Birth of a Nation, representing contamination and corruption, not just of whites but of blacks as well. The villains did not appear in blackface; they were obvious white people whose skin had been made to appear dirty. Nothing more. Just dirty. The symbolism is obvious.

Trivia: I suppose the rocky terrain could pass for Appalachian foothills, and ponderosa pines for loblolly pine, but I had to laugh at a big agave that persistently appeared in the background scenery during one sequence toward the end.

OK, I may have misspoken

...when I said I was through with this blog because I was tired of political negativity. I still am tired of it, but when Robert Gibbs, the President's mouthpiece, attacks _liberals_, for Christ's sake, because we have been insufficiently appreciative of Mr. Obama, I have to differ. So let me get a couple of things off my chest.

Obama has broken promises on everything from ending the war in Iraq to gay rights. He has sucked up to the Wall Street bonus junkies. He has backed away from a meaningful stimulus program, or from doing anything about foreclosures or unemployment. He has actually revved up a war in Afghanistan that George Bush had definitively lost by 2002, which is at this point absurd as well as un-winnable. And did I say we are still in Iraq, a war originally based on falsehoods--and now Obama is lying about our "leaving" when in fact we still have 50,000 "non-combat" troops there and that he proposes to keep them there indefinitely?

His government claims the de facto right to assassinate American citizens abroad. He believes, like Bush, that he has the right to imprison people without charges indefinitely, possibly for life. Guantanamo is still open. He has claimed the right to deny habeas corpus. He has given de-facto immunity to the criminals who dreamed up and approved the torture policies of the previous administration. His economic team is essentially the very Wall Street insiders who crashed the economy. He has sold out the public on the environment, among other things giving the oil companies carte blanche that they used to create the most enormous oil pollution disaster in world history.

He has pandered to the Republicans on their immigration hysteria. He is unwilling to fight for anything that he claimed to believe in when we voted for him. He has shown himself totally spineless (or totally duplicitous) on doing anything about global warming.

He sold the public out on the public option, so the health care bill will now benefit far fewer people than it should, and cost far too much. He has shown every sign of buckling under to the Republicans on gutting Social Security. He is a TERRIBLE president.

Yes, you can say he is better than Bush. But so little better, in fact, that he is still deeply in the realm of terrible. If he doesn't step up to the plate I am pretty sure he will be a one-term president. I personally have never voted for a Republican and never will, but at this point I don't see much point in voting for Obama again either.

Update, as of Dec.21, 2010:

Obama only a few days caved to the Republicans on the tax bill benefitting the upper 2.5% of income earners and screwing the economy fairly long-term in the process, and today has torpedoed net neutrality with Bush-era Orwellian language, calling his betrayal of net neutrality, a "victory" for net neutrality.

His administration continues to make the hysterical manhunt for Julian Assange into a major project, with a grand jury convened in northern Virginia to find a pretext for charging Assange with a crime in the United States, even as the criminals from the Bush era mentioned above continue to go free. Meanwhile our government places private Bradley Manning, the soldier accused, among other worthy and honorable things, of leaking the videos that expose the aerial murder of journalists from a helicopter in Iraq, under a form of arrest that amounts to torture--the supermax solitary confinement regimen his administration subjects him to is considered a war crime if we treat prisoners of war that way--and the helicopter gunners of course have not been punished, nor have those who gave them their orders.

I am beginning to feel about this Democratic president the way I felt about Lyndon Johnson, although Johnson at least had a redeeming virtue that I have not so far seen even a glimmer of in Obama, which was a commitment to civil rights. Obama is about as bad as Johnson on murderous foreign military adventures, and worse than Nixon or Eisenhower (FAR worse than Eisenhower) on everything else.

It says something remarkable about where this country has gone that the only presently visible alternative to Obama and his Democratic Party is the Republican Party of Sarah Palin.

Impermanence, revisited

When I started this blog I chose to subscribe to a free commenting utility called Haloscan, which at the time seemed more user-friendly than Blogger's native commenting system. For one thing it would notify me by email if I got new comments on an old blog post. Blogger did not do that, and as far as I know still doesn't.

Looking back on several years of blogging at Stone Bridge it has some of the usefulness of a diary: I can find out what I was doing, say, in July of 2006. Otherwise I would not have a clue. Additionally, there was an ongoing conversation with regular, and occasional irregular, visitors, in the comments. A certain sense of community arose, which possibly would still be going on, if I had not gotten burned out on the political negativity which had overtaken most of my posts.

Haloscan has now been sold to a company that will allow the comments to stay, but we have to pay a very modest fee for them. I am probably going to let the comments go, not because of the money, which is insignificant even for a pensioner of my very limited means, but because the blog itself is inactive, and I only rarely get new comments. The Blogger comments will still be possible for such stragglers.

I have downloaded and archived the old comments for my own personal use, (many of the comments were interesting and some memorable.) Unfortunately I can see no way to restore them to the original posts as blogger comments, but on the other hand I see no real need to.

So in a few weeks the comments will disappear.

It occurs to me that some people may still have RSS feeds for Stone Bridge, and will notice this entry, and hopefully be reassured that I did not erase their comments out of some late-blooming aversion to the comments, or to them.

Impermanence

I do not expect to be making any new entries to this blog, although as in all things, I could well be mistaken. I have had little taste for writing lately (I spend most of my spare time taking nature photographs), and in my opinion fwiw the best writing on this blog was at the beginning, when I had several years worth of accumulated ideas (and in some cases, previously written stuff to upload.) So, in the unlikely event you are a new person coming to this blog, I suggest you go posthaste from this entry to the first, rather than read any of my recent posts, which have deteriorated toward the political and the opinionated in keeping with the times. To such a hypothetical reader I especially recommend my obsolete travel notes, found here and there in the early months of this blog.

I started a test blog once, called Brass nor Stone, which I am now thinking of using for any stray impulses to write, if they arise. The reason is that its template allows larger photos. I could try to re-format this blog to use a new template, but that way lies madness, or disaster, or both, so I think it is better to refer readers, if any, to more interesting material toward the front end of this blog, and to new material, probably mostly photographic, at Brass nor Stone.

Yesterday's rabbit

My yard is regularly visited by a couple of rabbits, and I sometimes have a moment to snap a picture of one before my little dog Bella goes crazy when she catches the scent or--occasionally--actually spots it, and begins a frantic and yapping pursuit, always with the same result, of course, which is the rabbit disappearing through a small hole in the back fence which, for better or worse, is too small for Bella to get through. This ritual effectively constrains my rabbit-photo-op window of opportunity to one click, because when Bella hears it she knows that I am taking a picture of something, and charges off to investigate.

Occasionally two clicks.

Everyone loves a parade

As you get older certain things lead to a sense of time standing still, or what year is this? It can be disquieting. Especially when you leap whole decades and at least for a second it feels like 1968 except for the old people whom I unaccountably resemble marching beside me in the peace demonstration. (In 1968 we were all young, as all of you old enough to remember will know.)

Yesterday's springtime (well, technically, late winter) peace march in Austin was almost a duplicate of last year's, and the year before, and the year before that, with many of the same faces, immeasurably more geriatric, perhaps. The parade was billed as the Million Musicians' March For Peace, and although it came up a little short numbers-wise, it was a loud and robust event musically, with a brass section at the front (which someone in the crowd, not me, joked had been provided by AARP) plus drums, tambourines, tin whistles, ukuleles, cowbells and supposedly a pots-and-pans rhythm section bringing up the rear in memory of Molly Ivins, though I was closer to the front and can't vouch for that. Just as last year, the mainstay tune of the brass was When the Saints Go Marching In, which gave several musicians opportunity to display some outstanding tuba and trombone virtuosity.

In the middle of the throng we had a guy in a kilt playing martial airs on the highland war pipes. I am not sure what to make of that.

Our parade went through the middle of the entertainment district, which this week is the same as South by Southwest. One of the first posts on this blog, in 2005, is an account of what seems, upon re-reading, to be this year's parade.

I also wrote a post on last year's event. If I were lazy I would simply link to the two earlier posts and be done with it.

Small differences are what I am left to write about, which leave me with a certain optimism. I didn't have the feeling that any onlookers along the route considered our actions unpatriotic, even when we passed by the Salvation Army soup kitchen. (Down and out alcoholics tend to be more sentimentally patriotic than the rest of us, I dunno why.) If Bush's war has lost its appeal to drunk people, maybe our country is on the road to recovery.

Just as in previous years, the street crowd, already festive at one in the afternoon, seemed a little unsure what the hell was going on, but whatever we were doing, they approved of it. Some guy came running out of a pub with his electric guitar, and feigned consternation at discovering it unplugged and thus useless for joining in.

We walked a circuitous route from the capitol building to city hall, where various post-march performances were booked on the front steps. Even if there hadn't been a parade, a free venue during SxSW will always draw a crowd, so several hundred stayed for the music, shading themselves from the unseasonable heat under the awning of solar panels.

A few photos of the event follow, plus one of a runaway bride.

Click on any picture for a larger view on flickr.

-----

Singer songwriter in front of the capitol building, before the parade



The march begins




The trumpet section



Code pink



Stereotypical tuba player



The bagpiper



Afterwards, on the steps of city hall


Now, the runaway bride was before the parade, on the capitol grounds. As the marchers gathered, I spied this young woman taking to her heels and departing. (You can see anything at our state capitol building.) If our gathering march had frightened away the wedding, the groom had apparently bolted in another direction. We will never know.

What would Jesus say?

Ronald Reagan's Cadillac welfare queen seems be part of the ur-unconscious of the right-wing mind. (Would it be unfair to call it the conservative racial memory? Perhaps.) She lives there in the psychic shadows, constantly ready to be rediscovered and to emerge on demand, in the hour of conservative need.

And so it came to pass, only recently, as I understand it, that Sharon Jasper, a resident in public housing in New Orleans, complained about missing window screens, a leaking sink, and high deposit charges and utility bills in her subsidized housing. This got the attention of the New Orleans Times-Picayune, such that they sent one of their photographers to look at her apartment. Given that a leaky sink will not put any news photographer in the running for a photojournalism Pulitzer, the photographer opted for a picture of her very large TV set instead.

Now, this TV set has excited a good deal of outrage in the conservative blogs, like Ross Douthat's, for example. And I myself saw the picture. The flat screen TV appeared quite large, though the wide-angle lens used exaggerated this somewhat.

But no matter. It was definitely a big television set.

The Lee Atwater-esque encoded message here (which right wingers with instinctive wisdom never feel the need to spell out and make potentially falsifiable) is that the overburdened taxpayer has paid for this TV set, or, if not and if the money was Ms Jasper's very own, then it should have been used for several months rent for non-subsidized housing. Absent such assumptions, indeed, why else would there be the outrage?

Well, let's assume for the moment that the Atwater-Rove message is true, just for the heck of it.

The important question to ask, then, in terms of the holiday tradition being celebrated even as I write (by all except secular enemies of Christmas and maybe a few Jews and Muslims and Buddhists), is "so what?"

I suspect Ross Douthat either belongs to, or in any case and for whatever reason psychically identifies with, an income bracket that has received an inordinate Republican tax break at the expense of the rest of us, not to mention at the expense of our children and grandchildren, and as such is either himself a greater burden to his fellow men than Ms Jasper, or admires men who are. Not to put too fine a point on it, Warren Buffet, second richest man in America, is in a much lower tax bracket than his secretary, who pays twice the percentage of her income to support George Bush's war than Warren Buffet does. Mr. Buffet was honorable enough to express outrage about this, but I doubt if any conservative bloggers have. I could be wrong, of course. I haven't read Ross Douthat's archives to find out about him.

But I digress. Getting back to the TV welfare queen, and to introduce a little perspective here, this being Christmas Eve, I went to the Good Book to say what Jesus might say about the matter. Assuming that, say, adultery might be considered even worse in conservative circles than ownership of a large TV set, Jesus' words to a mob agitated by a serious transgression against a conservative moral code might be instructive and apposite. "Let he who is without sin cast the first stone."

In fact Jesus seems like the kind of guy who would get more offended about wide-screen TVs in the houses of the rich than in the houses of the poor. Specifically, "...it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God." Matthew 19:24

That's a pretty hard message for a conservative to hear, but they seem to have been diligently at work all these many centuries not hearing it.

And there's this: "Give to everyone who begs from you, and do not refuse anyone who wants to borrow from you" again from Matthew. This would seem to prohibit those among the right wing who are actually Christians from being real soreheads about Ms. Jasper's subsidized housing.

In the spirit of the Season, I have to say that my overall impression is that Jesus was far more forgiving of the sinners than of those who obsess and rend their garments about the sin.

Newspaper of record

You'd think that Maureen Dowd had at last jumped the shark with her psychotic Hillary dominatrix column in today's New York Times, but I finally realized, reading it, that the shark can no longer be jumped by an American pundit. Modo's steamy mix of unknowing self parody, psychosexual obsession, bodice-ripperesque O-take-me-Rudy fantasy as politics has finally achieved the level of the unremarkable in political journalism. I guess I hadn't been paying attention. Tom Friedman's sophomoric "Obama needs a big swinging Dick as VP" column on the same page clinches it.

One weeps for the Republic.

Is this a great country or what?

Yesterday our born-again Manichaean president made his fourth trip to San Antonio to strut and preen before an audience of wounded and maimed soldiers at Brooke Army Medical Center. According to the San Antonio Express-News, he made a light vs dark speech where he said that "If you kill people to achieve a political objective or to advance an ideology ... you are nothing but evil." He was referring, of course, to "suiciders," not deciders.

"Bush spent almost two hours at the center chatting with wounded soldiers, including Pfc. Nicholas Clark, 26, of Seattle, around whom he wrapped his suit coat. Bush asked Clark, who lost his left leg below the knee in an ambush June 2 in Afghanistan, if he wanted to go home."

"No. I want to go back (overseas)," Clark said.

"Isn't this a great country?" Bush responded.

The hoverbot

The Washington Post has come out with a story about tiny flying robots which may be spying on, well, whoever. They had a photo of a robotic "fly" which was actually about the size of a wasp, resting on the tip of someone's finger. The robot wasn't shown in the air, and it was not clear that it was functional.

They also had a video which showed a flying robot "dragonfly" which did have two pairs of wings like a dragonfly, but the resemblance ended there: the robot was about the size of a great tailed grackle, and flew like a barnyard chicken that had gotten over a fence.

According to WaPo's informed sources, DARPA is also spending the taxpayers' money installing computer chips in moth pupae, hoping a bionic spy moth will emerge. They are also working with beetles, hoping to take control of living insects with inserted silicon chips.

Mention was also made of the threat of unrestricted flying robots to commercial air traffic.

The story concluded with speculation that tiny spy robots may already be airworthy and operational, mentioning various reports of odd looking dragonflies at peace demonstations.

I also have my inside sources, more credible perhaps than those of the Washington Post.

Here is the real deal, the CIA's secret spy bot. Called the hoverbot, it is about half an inch long, and contains a very, very tiny camera with an even tinier ultra telephoto zoom lens.

Ken Burns's War

Having watched the 16 hours of Ken Burns's war extravaganza, I have to say I thought it sucked. There was a lot wrong with it as art, which I will get to, but there was a deep moral hole at the center of it. The artistic failure and the moral black hole are related.

Nostalgic, sentimental, slow paced like an endless thanksgiving family get-together, and deeply invested in American exceptionalism, with a self-congratulatory and mawkish backward view of any mention of the evils of the time, segregation, for example, from an implicit we-are-much-better-now-thankyou viewer-supplied perspective, plus running through it all there was a kind of subliminal and in my view deeply dishonest crypto-triumphalism as contaminating background radiation. It was a succession of Norman Rockwell Saturday Evening Post magazine-cover pictures of war on the home front alternating with the attempted-realism of non-stop newsreel explosions, weary soldiers marching, more explosions, corpses, and more corpses, and mutilated corpses, and more of them too, all with the probably unintentional effect of deadening any real realization of the human meaning of it, with a voiceover of course, explaining it all.

Mention was made of the furor that arose when the first photos were published, in Life, I think, of dead American soldiers in Pacific beach sand. Those photos had impact because no one had yet seen them. To see 16 hours straight of death and mayhem and more death and more death yet deadens the moral instincts, assuming the viewers have any left after CSI Miami and the average American action-movie genre film.

This series was in effect a vaccine against a genuine apprehension of what that war or any other war really is.

The voice-over was almost unbearable--no cliche, bromide, nor hackneyed comfort-zone voice giving sonorous meaning to it all left undeployed, and most unbearable of all was Tom Hanks reading homilies from a Minnesota small-town newspaper. I hasten to say that the homilies themselves were not unbearable in their original context. They only became so in the context of this obscene celebration of The War.

Yes, celebration. Who does Ken Burns think he is kidding?

And the celebration was profoundly dishonest, in every which way from Sunday. (Tom Hanks could really say that well, I'll bet.) First of all, the idea of taking four towns as representative of America is folly. Hispanics got angry, with good reason, because there was not a Martínez or a Gonzales from any of these places, but four towns are by definition not representative. The project of painting these towns, in black and white mostly, as "America" is flawed and dishonest from the start.

What this was, was the construction of an idyllic myth of "America" brought together by this great (and I suspect in Ken Burns's view, wonderful) crisis, The War. Rosie the Riveter rolled up her sleeves. Civilians put their shoulders to the wheel. We put our differences aside. Fresh faced boys lined up to volunteer. All underwent great sacrifice, enduring hardship, death, and destruction to further our great project, victory, which brought us all together.

What crap! What unbelievable nonsense.

Burns inadvertently makes exactly those same observations about the Japanese and the Germans. The War was a great crisis that brought everyone together, everything subordinated to the cause of victory--but, given a view from the outside, he has no trouble seeing the downside of Japanese or German nationalistic fervor.

Our guys are heroes. The Japs are fanatics. This film should really be offensive to anyone not blinded by Ken-Burns-Americanism.

Burns also comes down pretty much on the side of those who claim the use of the atomic bomb was necessary, and quotes absurd hypothetical numbers of lives-that-would-have-been-lost. Half a million American soldiers. Hypothetical numbers are great to send into rhetorical battle.

He mentions, but only in passing, and without exploring it, the fact that the Japanese were actively trying to arrange a conditional surrender when the bombs were dropped. He does not mention that the one condition they required, and which we rejected, was the retention of the Emperor as head of state. When they surrendered unconditionally, we gave them the very thing they had been holding out for in their back-channel peace proposals.

Burns, who has no concept of irony, does not talk about this.

Burns does not say a word about the fact that the chairman of the joint chiefs, Admiral Leahy, opposed dropping the bomb. He does not mention that Eisenhower opposed it. He does not mention that Admiral Nimitz opposed it. He does not mention that Admiral Halsey opposed it. He does not mention that Admiral King opposed it. He does not mention that MacArthur opposed it. Most of them opposed it on old-fashioned moral grounds. Some, who knew how close Japan was to military collapse, opposed it on pragmatic grounds.

He does not mention that Einstein opposed it. Of course not. Einstein was not from Mobile, Alabama, or Laverne, Minnesota.

The millions of people who watched the final episode of this travesty went away knowing nothing of the historical issues surrounding the use of the bomb, and now think that it was a regrettable necessity.

That's very sad.

Why did I watch it, then? The personal accounts were fascinating, and were the main reason I stuck with it all the way through. I liked all the talking heads, even the couple of them who made the war into a springboard for some well-rehearsed crackerbarrel philosophy. They spoke, as the voiceover would have said, from the heart. Their words from the heart however were drowned out by the voiceover and the the explosions and the sturm und drang, courtesy of Ken Burns. These people were deeply deceived by Mr. Burns, in my opinion, because their relatively quiet and moving testimony was perverted to his toxic ends.

I liked most of the music, but again, it was misused to further Burns's terrible project.

I never saw Burns's Civil War, and I know now that I never will.