I finally watched the last episode of Ken Burns' miniseries about World War II. I found it uncompelling in an oddly familiar way, and I think I've figured out why. You know how when you're watching the Olympics, all enthralled as the American in second place takes to the diving platform for the last time, and suddenly NBC cuts away to a 10-minute fluff piece about how she knitted booties for her sister's baby? The War is exactly like that. It's thrilling history garnished with excruciating mundaneness. They'll be showing the Russians liberating the first concentration camp, and then they'll cut away to Private Cooter P. McNugget (Ret.) of Laverne, MN talking about how he once dated a nice Jewish girl. They had ice cream at the place on Main Street that doesn't exist anymore. Her name was Melissa. She got Rocky Road.
I exaggerate, but not nearly as much as you'd hope.
Burns portrayed race with his typical deftness. It's revolting, of course, that black American war heroes returned home from the front to be told "Look at a white man when he's talking to you, boy" by some cousin-stickin' mouth-breather, but it's sadly not all that surprising. One thing that did surprise me: when young Japanese men were finally allowed to fight for the U.S., they were released from internment camps and sent to Army boot camps, many of which were in the South. "Don't worry," one recent releasee was told by his white Southern hosts. "You'll be treated as white." And when he didn't know where on the bus to sit and decided to err on the side of sitting in the back with the black passengers, he was ordered to the front of the bus with the whites. Yet the week before, he was an imprisoned "national security risk" who had no rights. Wow. The contrast, the hypocrisy are just astonishing.