History buffs.... Ken Burns: "The War"

[JMT]

7 part mini-series airing each night this week on PBS.

THE WAR | PBS

[talknightlife]

I captured the first one in my Tivo and saw it last night. It's very good so far.

One of the most interesting aspects of this series is that it covers the impact of the war on segments of American society that didn't get a lot of attention at the time, or after the war. At the start of the first episode, the narrator says that WWII was such a huge event that happened to so many people all at once, that it would be impossible to give a comprehensive picture of how it affected people. They chose to focus on four specific American towns to show how it affected them specifically. Sacramento, CA and Mobile, AL were two of them.

I grew up a white kid in the Deep South, and I just spent my Saturday night at a black church event, thinking about how amazingly tight-knit and how amazingly separate the black community is in South Florida. I was literally the only white person at the packed event. The story of the impact of WWII on both the white and the black sides of the tracks in Mobile was told from a perspective that I've never seen before.

My Japanese wife often complains about how WWII documentaries gloss over the internment camps for Japanese Americans. The Sacramento story is told both by white Americans and by Japanese Americans. Very interesting. I'm working on a few nightlife web site projects right now with a guy in Sacramento, and it's interesting to see the descendants of those Japanese and white Americans blending together in Sacramento night clubs:

[IMG]http://sac.img.************.com/pics/albums/sac/082907empire/1038.jpg[/IMG]

PS: I'm the The Artist Formerly Known As TechJunkie. I don't have access to my CoolJunkie email account any more for obvious reasons, so I had to register a new account.

PPS: I notice that there are a lot of messages that have been deleted from the database from around the beginning of September. That's pretty stale. Don't delete me, bro...

[trancepriest]

OK I can see this entire thread getting derailed now. :-)

[talknightlife]

Not "derailed"! The series "The War" isn't about the war itself. It's about how the war affected individual Americans and specific American towns. Even half-naked nightclub girls. I'm seeing so many connections to my own past and present.

My wife carries the scars of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs in her DNA. Her mother was a 14-year-old girl who lived directly between the two cities when we bombed them. She drank fallout-contaminated water and ate grasshoppers to survive after the war. She's been fighting thyroid cancer for decades. When I saw a recent documentary on the Oak Ridge laboratory that enriched the uranium and plutonium for those two bombs, I was amazed to see how everything is connected. There were hundreds of thousands of Americans in Tennessee working for years to kill hundreds of thousands of Japanese in the industrial south of Japan where my mother-in-law lived.



It all tied together even further after I saw the documentary during Shark Week about the sinking of the USS Indianapolis, just after delivering that nuclear material. My great grandfather was a Marine brigadier general in the Pacific at the time, fighting to kill Japanese. Clint Eastwood taught me that when the Indianapolis participated in the Iwo Jima invasion, my great grandfather and our Greatest Generation were killing off all of the men in my wife's family. The men in the family had been conscripted from their home on the island of Kyushu. My wife's family were the civilians that the Japanese were defending from American forces by staging a suicide defense at Iwo Jima.



After the war, my mother-in-law settled in the Florida Keys to avoid the anti-Japanese racist sentiment on the west coast. She had to marry an American because there were few men to marry in Japan after the war. There are no older men in her family, and my wife never knew her grandfather or great grandfather. My great grandfather on the other hand, retired to a mansion in Houston full of hand-carved gifts from Tahiti and Midway and Saipan and Guadalcanal and other little Pacific islands where he came, he saw, and he kicked some ass. All of that led to me, to my wife, and to us meeting.

WWII wasn't just a bunch of old newsreel clips, it was a huge event that changed almost everybody's life in the entire world. This PBS series emphasizes THAT war, not the one that you normally see on the History Channel when you learn about the battles themselves.

[talknightlife]

HAHAHAHAHA! I come back and try to participate, and the soulless corporation running this banner mill responds by censoring my post?!? Okay that's just hilarious. You contribute nothing of your own other than deleting my messages and censoring the ones that you allow?

I'm not trying to hijack people from CoolJunkie, I spent time here today posting CONTENT to your web site, as a member of this community. FYI to Andrew: Napkin Nights doesn't even have a forum. You think that me posting a photo of a bunch of half-naked girls in a night club in a chat thread about WWII is a threat to CoolJunkie and Club Planet? Hilarious!

Don't delete me, bro!

[JMT]

i thought the photo perfectly illustrated the key point of how far our culture's east-west race relations have progressed in the post-WWII era. and let's be honest here, scantily clad women are pretty much a boost to just about any thread, at least that i can think of.

Originally Posted by *************

Don't delete me, bro!

lol

[talknightlife]

Originally Posted by *************

Don't delete me, bro!

You really censored my NAME too?

Isn't that just a little passive-aggressive, guys? You killed "Techjunkie", you deleted entire threads of mine, you censored the web site that I'm working on that doesn't compete with CoolJunkie and now you censor my NAME?

I can see that I'm definitely not welcome here any more, wow. It's hard to justify coming back here and contributing if you're just going to delete half of the stuff that I volunteer my time to post.

You censored my name. I'm truly amazed by that one.

[trancepriest]

Hmmm... seems like i'm clueless to what's going on. Sorry to hear all the latest Tech.

[talknightlife]

Originally Posted by trancepriest

Hmmm... seems like i'm clueless to what's going on. Sorry to hear all the latest Tech.

No worries. I was just checking out Club Planet's new forum overhaul as a distraction earlier. A friend of my dad's is lost at sea right now and he's out in a search plane looking for her. He spotted her drift marker today and got the Coast Guard to resume the search.

My dad and I were lost at sea once when I was 14 in the exact same way, separated from our boat by currents, in the same area of the Atlantic. We spent the night treading water and were rescued the next day. This is Nikki's fourth night in the water if she's still alive.

PBS documentaries and nightlife web sites don't seem too important overall. But back to the subject of WWII and how it touches each of us: some of those guys from the Indianapolis survived in the water for four days.

Hey Club Planet: your URLs in your forum posts are styled so that they're invisible. You probably want to underline them. There's an example in this post above: "lost at sea".

[JMT]

damn, i saw that story on my local news the other night. i hope they find her ok.