The first thing to know about the just completed showing of the Ken Burns/Lynn Novick film on the Vietnam War is the financial support it received for production and advanced promotion; as if disparate forces like nonprofit foundations, banks and billionaires had gathered themselves in a shared hope of parting the awful waters of the war toward a new world. The advance promotion--as is always the case with television--was over the top, tempting Burns/Novick to break new ground in self-promotion, and with a hype that suggested the prospect of something like Charlton Heston's Moses descending from Sinai.
After eight two hour segments showing horrifying scenes of violence and death the film's final segments suggested a post-war era with scenes of good will and the struggle of veterans on all sides to come to terms with this hell they had lived through and that now plagued them with misgivings, resentment and guilt.
The problem is that instead of a better promised land The United States went right out and did it again with its invasions in the Middle East fifteen year later.
The Burns/Novick film's final theme is reconciliation, drawing no connection, no dotted lines to the next war in the Middle East. Papered over by hype and film-maker hubris, seventeen hours of the Vietnam War is therefore overtaken by its propaganda function. The USA keeps on doing it: the U. S. invasion and occupation of Iraq had the same empty-mindedness that characterized its invasion of Vietnam. Burns/Novick underline that after hastily succeeding the French collapse, U. S. first responders--diplomats, military officers, military advisors--arrived in Vietnam with no experience or knowledge of the country and its culture or long history.
In Iraq the Bush era cohort quickly demonstrated that they too knew nothing of the Middle East world they were proposing to turn into a democratic ally of the U. S. Motivated by the attack on the World Trade Towers and the Pentagon but focused on the geo-political world of oil--not on Al Qaeda and Bin Laden who launched the WTT attack--but on their wrong-headed obsession about Weapons of Mass Destruction, this Bush era misdirection created a war whose length (seventeen years) now stretches over almost as many years as the Vietnam War's twenty years.
One stark factor that supported this war-making madness among both Democrat and Republican Presidents: Eisenhower to Kennedy to Johnson to Ford to Nixon to Bush I to Clinton twice to Bush II is that all of them lied, creating pretexts out of thin air (the Gulf of Tonkin, Communist Dominoes, WMD's) and they built sand castles to inspire young soldiers to patriotic sacrifice of their lives.
While sometimes the fabled Wolf actually does come, most modern wolves are manufactured from political or Wall Street ambitions using the accelerant of the trillion dollar media industry. Which is why, in the end, the Burns/Novick film about Vietnam becomes a cautionary tale that leaves us in the dark.
The story not told includes the billions made by shipping, arms, and aerospace corporations when the nation goes to war; and in the instance of the Iraq war the emergence of private mercenary forces such as Blackwater that receive hundreds of millions in DoD contracts without oversight by congress or the electorate.
The challenge to citizens today, to people of faith today, is to overcome our susceptibility to the screens in our pockets, on our desks, in our living rooms that, whether brilliant creations of artists or the calculated propaganda of politicians, or the machinations of Wall Street, are intended to make other people rich.
Light in the present darkness. That's the task.
