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October 3, 2007

what’s spanish for “mouth breather who’s drunk on his sense of entitlement?”

Decrying Latinos' lack of special treatment in the PBS series "The War," shrill imbeciles like this guy succeeded in getting 30 minutes of jarringly irrelevant footage tacked on to the end of the series.

Now, I'm well aware that "special treatment" is a racially charged term oft abused by people who look like me. But it fits here. From an artistic standpoint, the series was told from the point of view of four small American towns. This narrative device does not lend itself to easily accommodating the demands of special interest groups. The Latinos-only epilogue is jaw-droppingly irrelevant to that arc. Imagine watching Star Wars, and the boys get their medals at the end, and as everyone in the theatre rises to exit, you suddenly see a Latino rebel pilot telling his own mildly interesting story about a separate skirmish. "Many Latinos fought alongside all the other, unspecified ethnicities during the Rebellion," a narrator intones almost apologetically.

Worse, though, is their calling out Ken Burns for recognizing black, Jewish, and Japanese stories during the war. Perhaps the protesters should shut their cry-holes for a moment and actually listen to those stories. If they did, they'd learn that blacks were segregated and therefore have a story of their own; that Jews were slaughtered and therefore have a story of their own; that Japanese were thrown into internment camps and therefore have a story of their own. Latinos? Intregrated, not murdered, not incarcerated. They have no collective story of their own that warrants a collective history of their own. Their story is the American story. Their story is, in fact, indistinguishable from mine, except that mine doesn't warrant its own, unjustifiably racially-themed epilogue.

posted by john at 7:03 AM  â€¢  permalink