You have to work very hard, and take yourself very seriously as the keeper of the keys to America, to make a tedious documentary about the Second World War. But that is what Ken Burns and Lynn Novick have done with their fifteen-hour series “The War,” which will begin on September 23rd, on PBS. They’ve taken a subject that is inexhaustible and made it merely exhausting. Scene by scene, interview by interview, the series doesn’t bore, if you are of the school that believes that everyone’s experiences are at least somewhat interesting, and that the experiences of those who went through the Second World War are more interesting than most. What’s off-putting is Burns’s approach to the material, and by that I don’t mean what has come to be known over the years since his 1990 opus on the Civil War as “the Ken Burns effect”—the pan-and-zoom technique with which Burns creates a sense of life and movement in still images and squeezes emotional juice from them. During the months-long promotional run-up to “The War,” Burns emphasized that his documentary would be different from the usual treatment of the Second World War. It would highlight the experiences of people from four towns (Waterbury, Connecticut; Sacramento, California; Mobile, Alabama; and Luverne, Minnesota, a small farming community about thirty miles from Sioux Falls, South Dakota) and would be a “bottom-up” look at the war—concentrating on the people who actually did the fighting (and the waiting at home)—as opposed to a top-down perspective featuring generals and politicians. In addition, there would be no “experts”—no military analysts, no historians.- Spring Break 2017: On the beach at Las Vegas?
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Burns said that one of the motivations for the project was hearing, in the late nineties, that something like a thousand veterans of the Second World War were dying every day. That gave him a sense of urgency, without giving him any good ideas. During the publicity juggernaut for “The War” (and let history record that the ten-million-dollar marketing campaign includes “commemorative” cans of Budweiser and, as I live and breathe, oranges and eggs branded with station and time-of-broadcast information), Burns talked about focussing on “ordinary” people, while adding that he came to realize that, as it says on the Bud can, “in extraordinary times there are no ordinary lives.” This kind of burbling fatuousness does not aid the cause of getting to the truths of war, and Burns should know better.
He does know better. As he did in “The Civil War,” Burns brings to the fore an uncannily gifted storyteller and synthesizer, someone who combines emotion and intelligence in seemingly perfect proportions. In fact, he brings two of them to light: Samuel Hynes, a fighter pilot from Minneapolis, and Quentin Aanenson, an Army pilot from Luverne. These two soft-spoken, thoughtful men anchor the series. Burns, coyly, never identifies them fully. Hynes is a distinguished professor (now emeritus) of literature at Princeton, and the author of a highly regarded memoir of the war. Aanenson made a documentary about his experiences in the Pacific, which was shown on PBS in the nineties; he was a panelist on Charlie Rose’s show on the fiftieth anniversary of D Day, and the airport in Luverne is named for him. Together, they are the Shelby Foote of “The War.”
Rising seas in the next 100 years will likely swamp the first American settlement in Jamestown, Va., as well as the Florida launch pad that sent the first American into orbit, many climate scientists are predicting.- Frank Rich: Free Larry Craig!
In about a century, some of the places that make America what it is may be gradually flooded.
Global warming -- through a combination of melting glaciers, disappearing ice sheets and expanding warmer waters -- is expected to cause oceans to rise by one meter, or about 39 inches. It will happen regardless of any future actions to curb greenhouse gases, several leading scientists say. And it will reshape the nation.
Rising waters will lap at the foundations of old-money Wall Street and the new-money towers of Silicon Valley. They will swamp big-city airports and major interstate highways.
Storm surges worsened by sea-level rise will flood the waterfront getaways of rich politicians -- the Bushes' Kennebunkport and John Edwards' place in the Outer Banks. And gone will be many of the beaches in Florida and Texas favored by budget-conscious students on spring break.
That's the troubling outlook projected by coastal maps reviewed by The Associated Press. The maps, created by scientists at the University of Arizona, are based on data from the U.S. Geological Survey.
Few of the more than two dozen climate experts interviewed disagree with the one-meter projection. Some believe it could happen in 50 years, others say 100, and still others say 150.
Sea-level rise is ''the thing that I'm most concerned about as a scientist,'' said Benjamin Santer, a climate physicist at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California.
''We're going to get a meter, and there's nothing we can do about it,'' said University of Victoria climatologist Andrew Weaver, a lead author of the February report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, in Paris. '"It's going to happen no matter what -- the question is when.''
Sea-level rise ''has consequences about where people live and what they care about,'' said Donald Boesch, a University of Maryland scientist who has studied the issue. ``We're going to be into this big national debate about what we protect and at what cost.''
"I DID nothing wrong," said Larry Craig at the start of his long national nightmare as America's favorite running, or perhaps sitting, gag. That's the truth. Justice lovers of all sexual persuasions must rally to save the Idaho senator before he is forced to prematurely evacuate his seat.And remember, you can now read the rest of Mr. Rich's column for free.
Time's running out. The final reckoning may arrive this week. On Wednesday, a Minnesota court will hear Mr. Craig's argument to throw out the guilty plea he submitted by mail after being caught in a June sex sting in the Minneapolis airport. If he succeeds, there's a chance he might rescind his decision to resign from the Senate on Sept. 30. Either way, he should hold tight.
Not only did the senator do nothing wrong, but in scandal he has proved the national treasure that he never was in his salad days as a pork-seeking party hack. In the past month he has served as an invaluable human Geiger counter for hypocrisy on the left and right alike. He has been an unexpected boon not just to the nation's double-entendre comedy industry but to the imploding Republican Party. Gays, not all of them closeted, may be among the last minority groups with some representation in the increasingly monochromatic G.O.P. If it is to muster even a rainbow-lite coalition for 2008, it could use Larry Craig in the trenches.
On the legal front, Mr. Craig is not without his semi-spirited defenders, an eclectic group including Arlen Specter, the A.C.L.U., The Washington Post's editorial page and scattered Democrats. While there's widespread agreement that Mr. Craig was an idiot not to consult a lawyer before entering a guilty plea (for disorderly conduct, a misdemeanor carrying a $575 fine), idiocy is no more a federal offense than hypocrisy, especially in Washington.
What Mr. Craig did in that men's room isn't an offense either. He didn't have sex in a public place. He didn't expose himself. His toe tapping, hand signals and "wide stance" were at most a form of flirtation. As George Will has rightly argued, if deviancy can be defined down to "signaling an interest in sex," then deviancy is what "goes on in 10,000 bars every Saturday night in our country." It's free speech even if the toes and fingers do the talking.
- Doonesbury: Remembering the good old days.
- Opus: Kiss and tell.
