Ken Burns: Where Have All The Flowers Gone?

Last night, Plot and Duck slogged their way through World War II in Northern Europe in 1944, plus the marines landing in Peleliu in the Pacific. The screen was filled with death and stench and much of it was caused by stupidity. Theirs, ours.

Ken Burns showed our bloody invasion of an island to take out a Japanese airfield that was no longer a danger to anyone. In Germany, there were numerous and catastrophic failures to clear out a forest filled with dug-in Germans that could have just as easily been marched around and avoided.

Generals gave orders and grunts died needlessly. This has always been the name of the game. Since its birth, America has won its wars not because of brilliance but because of sheer size and strength.

Not complaining -- when choosing teams, always pick the big man first.

But this Ken Burns series has not resonated with Plotnik, except in a negative way. What it has done is to make him sad that he never spoke to Harold, his first stepdad, about service in the Pacific. Ducknik's dad Joe wouldn't talk about the war much, either, except to comment occasionally about how frightening a Kamikaze attack was on the open sea.

It's hard to create a TV show where everybody knows how the story ends, who wins, who loses. We already know how much hardship there was around the world, how much bigotry towards our own non-white citizens existed in our own armed services, and we know how awful the Nazis were to the Jews and the Russians and the Japanese to the Chinese and to our own captured POWs. Seeing it on the screen doesn't teach us anything new, it just makes the horror more horrible.

Which is to say: people in power abuse those less powerful. Sometimes it's them and sometimes it's us.

Maybe Plottie doesn't need more horrible. What he needs is more inspirational. Maybe he truly is getting old. But he doesn't find anything inspirational about one set of people attacking and another set of people conquering, even if one of those people is us.

What is inspirational is how the soldiers of each nation were able to endure, and how the citizens of those nations could put aside their pettiness to work together for the duration. Hitler had to be stopped. And the bomb had to be dropped on Japan, for no reason but to save at least a million American soldiers and God knows how many tens of millions of Japanese civilians.

But that the Emperor himself eventually had to step in and surrender his country, because even after atomic bombs had been dropped on and obliterated two Japanese cities, the military men were determined to fight on until every last one of their own citizens were dead -- this is not inspirational. This is delusional. This is Jihad on yourself.

What really discourages Plotnik is, on a global level, outside of stopping Hitler, what did this hideous World Conflict actually accomplish? More than 60 years have passed since WWII ended. How is the world better off now than then?

Different people control different parts of the world, that's all. One of them is us. And how's that working out for us?

Where have all the flowers gone, goddamit? If Ken Burns is trying to tell us war is futile, he needs to do another show.