Burning Ken Burns

The documentary filmmaker Ken Burns was in Dallas last night to give a talk at an awards dinner. I was lucky enough to hear his speech, which included showing clips from his upcoming 14.5-hour PBS documentary "The War," which is about World War II. It tells the story of WWII from the perspective of four American towns: Waterbury, Conn., Luverne, Minn., Mobile, Ala., and Sacramento, Calif. Burns went to those towns and talked to people who had participated in the war -- soldiers, families, workers on the homefront, anyone who had anything to do with the war and was willing to talk about it (which turned out to be harder than you might think, Burns said; there are many, many men who fought in that war who will go to their graves without ever really talked about what they lived through). The film looks fantastic, and I can't wait to see it.

Burns came by the newspaper earlier in the day to meet with a few of us from the editorial board, because we wanted to know about the dust-up with Latinos over "The War." Some Latino activists were put out because in their view, "The War" ignores the contribution Latino soldiers made to the war effort. Never mind the fact that no Latinos lived in those cities during the war, or if they did they didn't come forward to be interviewed. There's no way to tell how big the US Latino population was during the war years; the US Census didn't start measuring for Latinos until 1970. But today, they're America's largest ethnic group. Contemporary activists got organized, got the Hispanic caucus in Congress behind them, and prevailed upon PBS to force Burns to add Latino material to his already-finished film. They're still not happy: Burns had to hire a Latino filmmaker to help him put together an extra hour of Latino-focused material, but the activists demand that Burns re-edit his finished film to insert the Latino stuff into the body of the work instead of being tacked on at the end.

Yesterday in meeting with us, Burns insisted that this was a win-win situation. He said that he works for public broadcasting, and the public has a right to have its say, and he was pleased to have listened. I can't tell if he really means it, or if this is the Official Story, but I have my suspicions.

Personally, I think it's an outrage what was done to Ken Burns here, and it sets a dangerous precedent. Let me be clear: this is not about denigrating the sacrifice and service of the hundreds of thousands of Latino soldiers in WW2. To me, this is about art and politics.

If PBS lets a special interest group do this to Ken Burns, of all people, they'll let them do it to anybody. (Here in Dallas, the local public TV station KERA cravenly allowed Muslim leaders to scotch the airing of a documentary on the Middle East peace process on the virtual eve of its broadcast -- even though the filmmaker had worked with the station for years, and was respected for his films). I completely agree that the public has a right to have input on art that tax dollars fund -- even to the point of refusing to fund it. I covered the NEA controversy in the 1990s, and the utter arrogance of the arts bureaucracy, and the contempt they had for legitimate questions and concerns posed by the people who paid their salaries, were startling to see up close. If a majority of the American people don't want their tax dollars to pay for sadomasochistic and pornographic art, they have the right in our democracy to refuse to pay for it.

But the right of the public to have a say over the art that it pays for can't be unlimited. Once an art project has been green-lighted, and even finished, it's unconscionable to force the artist to make changes to suit a special interest group's political agenda. I thought, for example, it was a scandal that the NEA endowed work by this sicko (who, in one performance, soaked paper with his HIV-infected blood and sent it sailing on a clothesline out over the panicked audience). But having done so, the artist should be free of the obligation to suffer meddling from arts bureaucrats who want to change his work as a result of political pressure. On that principle, if PBS thought the Burns project was kosher when they approved it from the start, they should have left it alone, period. Will any ethnic group that doesn't feel that the Burns documentary gives a proper shout-out to its WW2 vets step up to demand redress? On what grounds will PBS deny them?

Like I said, a dangerous precedent here. If a group of politically organized conservative Christians were to round up a posse in Congress and demand that PBS alter this upcoming pro-atheism documentary to be more fair or accurate, in their view, to religious believers, what would PBS say? What they should say is, "Go jump in the lake, we're not about to alter this film to suit you or anybody else" or even better, "Go jump in the lake, we're not about to alter this film to suit you. But if you have a proposal for a documentary telling a different angle of belief and disbelief, we'd like to hear it." Somehow, I think PBS would find its spine if Bill Donahue and Jerry Falwell came calling.

By capitulating like this to activists and politicians, and siding with them against the artist, PBS has left itself with no ground to stand on next time it gets bullied by the politically correct and politically connected. And believe me, it will.