Ken Burns

Edward Curtin He who binds to himself a joy Does the winged life destroy; But he who kisses the joy as it flies Lives in eternity’s sun rise. – William Blake, Eternity Great songwriters, like great poets, are possessed by a passionate melancholic sensibility that gives them joy in the telling.  They seem always to …

Stealing Life with the Big Bad Retail King — One-third of All Buying Transactions 

Good name in man and woman, dear my lord,
Is the immediate jewel of their souls.
Who steals my purse steals trash; ’tis something, nothing;
‘Twas mine, ’tis his, and has been slave to thousands;
But he that filches from me my good name
Robs me of that which not enriches him,
And makes me poor indeed.
— Iago, Shakespeare’s Othello

After running out of time during our discussion on the Vietnam War and the Ken Burns documentary, Michael Swanson and I recorded this short extra. We talk about the South Vietnamese community that settled in Washington DC during and after the war, China and Vietnam’s economic competition, CIA agent Donald Gregg and his connection to DC Madame Henry Vinson, and Bank of America’s funding of Ken Burns.

Michael Swanson, the author of The War State, joins me for an in-depth discussion of the Ken Burns and Lynn Novick Vietnam documentary series. I begin the conversation by discussing my own fascination with the Vietnam War. I talk about the influence my father has had on my understanding of the war, touching on his experiences with the army when he was drafted in 1969. Michael and I then dive into the film itself. We look at some of the serious flaws and aspects that the we felt were left out with the film including the CIA and drug trafficking.

Americans like to view their country as a force for peace in the world when the historical reality is almost the opposite, a reality ignored by the PBS Vietnam War documentary, writes Lawrence Davidson. By Lawrence Davidson If you go…Read more →

Ken Burns’s 18-hour documentary on the Vietnam War, which aired on PBS and BBC, presented extraordinary footage of the war’s grotesque brutality but also soft-pedaled the motivations of U.S. policymakers as well-meaning albeit misguided, or as the prologue put it, a conflict begun in “good faith by decent people out of fateful misunderstandings.”

For decades, the U.S. mainstream media has shied away from a clear-eyed view of the Vietnam War, not wanting to offend the war’s apologists, a residue of which tainted the recent PBS series, as John Pilger told Dennis J Bernstein.…Read more →

   The lone survivor of an all-women anti-aircraft battery near Hanoi. Most were teenagers. (Photo: John Pilger 1975)
One of the most hyped “events” of American television, The Vietnam War, has started on the PBS network. The directors are Ken Burns and Lynn Novick.

In today's NY Times Nick Kristof asked his readers whether they would have hidden a Jew from the Nazis. In the 1970s I lived in Amsterdam for nearly 4 years and passed the Anne Frank Huis-- now a museum-- on the Prinsegracht a few times a week. It was vaguely, a little circuitously, between my apartment on the Overtoom and my job at the meditation center on Prins Hendrikkade. It was built in 1635.

Suggested reading for Cliven Bundy's pet congressmanIn his seminal book, The Progressive Revolution: How The Best In America Came To Be, Mike Lux listed some of the achievements of the progressive movement in this country, achievements that often took years of struggle against conservative forces doggedly serving the interests of great wealth and entren