Tag Archives: Ken Burns

local news, Sports news

Three cheers for public TV

Some readers of this blog might know that I am a big fan of public television. I worked for a time as a freelance blogger for a public TV station in Amarillo — Panhandle PBS, based at Amarillo College — not long after my print journalism career ended.

Whenever I hear the name Ken Burns attached to a public TV special, I perk up instantly and commit to watching whatever Burns assembles for the public air waves.

I just finished binge-watching a four-part special on The Greatest, aka “Muhammad Ali.”

Wow! What a special! What a man Ali became.

Ali died in 2016 at age 74 of complications from the Parkinson’s disease with which he had been diagnosed since 1984.

Burns and his staff of colleagues, producers, editors and writers assembled a fantastic broadcast journey that took viewers through Ali’s childhood in Louisville, Ky., to the 1960 Olympics in Rome, to his professional boxing career, his wins and losses, his exile for following his religious objection to the Vietnam War, his becoming a Muslim, his troubled marriages to four women (and his relentless womanizing along the way), his status as a cultural icon and how he became the Most Famous Man in the World and finally to his death.

You are reading the words of a longtime fan of Muhammad Ali. I cannot watch without crying his 1996 appearance at the Atlanta Olympics when he lit the torch. It was a seminal moment in Ali’s journey from world-class athlete to world-class human being.

Public TV brought all this to viewers. It was a stunning bit of television. Then again, none of us should be surprised that Ken Burns — arguably the world’s foremost documentary filmmaker — could deliver such epic TV programming to our living rooms.

If you get a chance, check out this latest contribution from Ken Burns. You will learn something about The Greatest.

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

local news

They were sturdy folk

By JOHN KANELIS / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

I have just about finished reading a book it took me far longer than I thought it would take to read.

The book is titled “The Worst Hard Time.” It was written by a stellar New York Times reporter, Timothy Egan, who chronicled in astonishing detail the suffering that came to the Texas Panhandle during the 1930s.

The Dust Bowl plundered the landscape made vulnerable by farming techniques that destroyed the native grasslands that kept the soil in place, preventing wind erosion. The Dust Bowl has been labeled the “worst manmade disaster in U.S. history.”

“The Worst Hard Time” tells story after story of how these sturdy residents of places like Dalhart, Perryton and, yes, Amarillo weathered the astonishing misery of that era. Black Sunday is still thought to be the most nightmarish scenario anyone ever saw, as enormous, towering clouds of dust blew in over the region.

Just how bad was it then? | High Plains Blogger

Children and old people died of “dust pneumonia.” Farmers lost crops. They couldn’t pay their bills. Livestock died by the tens of thousands of head.

Many of them moved away. Many others of them stayed. Their descendants live in Amarillo to this day. I got to know some of those Dust Bowl descendants during my time there. They are a remarkable lot.

For a time after I left the Amarillo Globe-News, I had the privilege of writing a blog for Panhandle PBS, the Amarillo College-affiliated TV station. They paid me to write about public affairs TV programming shown on KACV-TV in the Panhandle.

In March 2016, PBS broadcast a special called “The Dust Bowl,” which was put together by noted historian/documentary filmmaker Ken Burns. I wrote a blog post that talked about its airing.

‘Dust Bowl’ returns just as Panhandle dries out (panhandlepbs.org)

I do hope that PBS will show “The Dust Bowl” again. I want to witness the accounts of those individuals whose stories I read about in “The Worst Hard Time.”

Yes, it was a hard time. The worst of it was unimaginable to those of us who never lived through it.

Timothy Egan’s book only deepens my pride in my former neighbors and fellow travelers.

environmental news, local news

Quite sure ‘Dust Bowl’ won’t return

One of the things I learned about the Dust Bowl was it was manly caused by human fallibility and ignorance.

I also learned that the Dust Bowl was centered right here on the High Plains of Texas and Oklahoma.

As dry as it has been in the Texas and Oklahoma panhandles since this past autumn, I will rely on the knowledge that we have learned how to prevent a recurrence of the hideous tragedy that befell the region in the 1930s.

Ken Burns’ fabulous documentary film, “The Dust Bowl,” which aired on PBS in 2015, reminded us that the event was the worst “manmade ecological disaster” in U.S. history. How did it occur?

Human beings settled on the High Plains and began plowing up natural grassland, turning it into cultivated farm land. Many farmers relied on rainfall to irrigate their crops; they were “dry land farmers.”

They plowed up hundreds of thousands of acres of grassland, which Mother Nature put there to act as protection against wind erosion. The grass held the soil together, preventing it from blowing away in the stiff wind that howls frequently across the High Plains.

Well, then something drastic happened. It stopped raining. The region became gripped by a killer drought. Then the wind blew as it always does. What happened next has become the stuff of legend throughout the High Plains.

The dirt blew in sinister, black clouds across the vast landscape. People breathed in the dirt. They contracted “dust pneumonia.” Many of them died; the most vulnerable were the very old and the very young; obviously, the very sickly also fell victim. Many others who didn’t die vacated their farms and ranches.

Other survivors, though, stayed and powered through the misery.

The nation learned a lot from that terrible time. One of the lessons dealt with tilling the land. Farmers started by letting the grass grow back where Mother Nature intended for it to grow. They improved their tilling techniques to minimize wind erosion.

The rain would return eventually. The High Plains would rebuild. The dust settled.

We’re now gripped by another drought. The U.S. and Texas departments of agriculture consider the region to be in “severe drought” mode.

Here’s a glimmer of hope: No one really believes we are going to experience a chapter-and-verse repeat of what occurred on the High Plains more than eight decades ago. The region’s ignorance about Mother Nature’s way has long gone.

However, we’ve got those damn fires with which we must contend.

https://highplainsblogger.com/2014/04/looking-more-like-dust-bowl/

environmental news, local news

This is what the Dust Bowl looked like?

Dust Bowl, anyone?

What you see here is a picture I snapped this evening looking west from where we are living. The wind is howling. The weather apps on my cell phone and my wife’s cell phone tell us it’ll keep howling through the night and into the next day.

This picture frightens me a bit.

I am not going to equate what we’re seeing here in 2018 to what Texas Panhandle witnessed in the 1930s, when hideously ignorant farming practices coupled with a severe drought created the nation’s worst-ever man-made environmental disaster.

Ken Burns’s documentary, “The Dust Bowl,” told that story in a gripping series that aired on Panhandle PBS a couple years ago. Elderly residents who lived through the Dust Bowl as children recalled watching their siblings and young friends die of “dust pneumonia.” They talked about how they either fled the High Plains or remained to rebuild their lives destroyed by Mother Nature’s merciless wrath.

Are we heading for another catastrophe? No. I don’t intend to suggest such a thing.

The picture I have posted with this blog item, though, intends to illustrate that we are getting a touch — perhaps only a smidgen — of what this region’s ancestors endured during a much darker time.

We all are ready for some rain.

national news

Nothing positive or ‘uplifting’ about PBS series on Vietnam

I can’t stop talking about “The Vietnam War.”

Everywhere I go as I circulate through Amarillo, Texas, I encounter friends with Vietnam experience or ties to those who have such experience. Our conversation turns inevitably to that landmark, epic PBS series on the Vietnam War produced and directed by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick.

Moreover, I am urging my fellow Vietnam veterans to watch the series if they haven’t seen it already. Buy it on DVD. Wait for it to be rebroadcast. Do what it takes. It’s worth your time.

One good friend of mine is married to a Vietnam War veteran. He served with the101st Airborne Division and suffered some serious wounds in the war. My friend has told me her husband suffers from serious post-traumatic stress disorder stemming from his experience.

She has recorded the series for him and is urging him to see it. I gathered from a conversation we had recently that she hadn’t seen it yet, either.

“Is it uplifting?” my friend asked. My answer was direct: “Uh, no. There’s nothing positive about it. It’s pretty damn grim.”

She, too, was direct. “Well, it is what it is,” she said.

Yes. It’s also worth anyone’s time who wants to understand the nature of this conflict. Yes, we killed more of them than they did of us. It was a defeat that still pains the nation and many of those who answered their country ‘s call to duty.

As for PBS and its collaboration with Burns and Novick: The nation watched some first-rate documentary television. “The Vietnam War” was an epic production for the ages.

entertainment news, International news, media news, military news

More bombs did not produce ‘victory’ in Vietnam

“The Vietnam War” is coming to a close this week. I refer, of course, to the landmark public television series, not the actual war.

What are the takeaways from this epic production directed by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick and broadcast on PBS? I have so many of them, but I think I’ll focus briefly here on just one of them.

It is that the Vietnam War required us to redefine victory.

We fought the communists in Vietnam for more than a decade. We killed many more of the enemy than we lost so very tragically. We emerged victorious from many more battlefield encounters than the Viet Cong or the North Vietnamese. As we have learned in the Burns-Novick epic, U.S. commanding Gen. William Westmoreland was obsessed with “body count”; he insisted that the media report that the enemy suffered far worse than our side did.

Merrill McPeak, a fighter pilot during the Vietnam War who later became Air Force chief of staff, noted correctly in the documentary that the United States dropped more ordnance on the enemy than we did in all the combat theaters of World War II. Think of that for a moment. American air power dropped more explosive tonnage on the Vietnam communists than we did against the Nazis, the Italians and the Japanese.

What we didn’t do and the reason we “lost” the war was because we lost our political will. The Vietnamese were fighting on their turf, defending their homeland, battling an enemy they considered to be “invaders.” They had more to lose — and to gain — than we ever did. Thus, it was their fight to win.

Are there lessons to carry forward as we continue to fight an even more elusive enemy, those terrorist organizations that have declared “death to America!”? Yes, certainly.

One profound lesson should be for U.S. politicians — or one in particular — to cease implying that defeating an enemy is “easy.”

We cannot just keep dropping bombs and sending young Americans into cities, killing enemy fighters and then expect the enemy simply to give up. We tried that in Vietnam. It didn’t work out well for us.

Ken Burns and Lynn Novick have provided a masterful piece of documentary television. Just as Vietnam was the first war to be fought “in our living rooms,” my hope is that the educational benefit that’s being delivered to us via PBS will assuage some of the pain we felt as the fighting raged.

***

Politico has provided a fascinating look at a conversation involving President Lyndon Johnson and U.S. Sen. Richard Russell. The Burns-Novick documentary doesn’t report on it.

Take a look at the story here.

entertainment news, International news, media news, military news

PBS ‘Vietnam War’ episode misses a key element

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I remain utterly transfixed by the Ken Burns-Lynn Novick documentary series “The Vietnam War.”

It contains some of the most compelling television I’ve ever witnessed and I am so proud of PBS for its longstanding commitment to this type of educational broadcasting.

Having tossed out that bouquet, I want to offer this barb at what I witnessed tonight.

The series tonight focused on the Tet Offensive, which the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese launched against dozens of South Vietnamese cities on Jan. 31, 1968. “The Vietnam War” rightly points out that Tet likely was the political turning point, the singular event that turned American public opinion solidly against that bloody conflict.

Tet also produced what arguably was the most singularly graphic moment in that war. It was the photo of Gen. Nguyen Ngoc Loan’s summary execution of a Viet Cong suspect.

Loan was head of South Vietnam’s police department when he found the suspect and shot him dead on a Saigon street. The picture would earn a Pulitzer Prize for Associated Press photographer Eddie Adams. It also would deliver a lifetime of misery for Gen. Loan, who was vilified because reporting of the incident at the time failed to the tell the whole story.

I wish the Burns-Novick documentary would have told us tonight about the media’s role in demonizing Loan.

You see, Loan shot the man dead because the suspect had been part of a VC hit squad that killed a colleague of the general — and his wife and six children. Loan knew about what had happened to his friend and his family. His men arrested the suspect. Loan ordered one of his officers to shoot the suspect; the officer balked.

So, Loan took out his pistol and shot the man in the head.

Nguyen Ngoc Loan had snapped. He proved to be a human being subject to human emotion,

“The Vietnam War” didn’t tell the whole story tonight, nor did it explain why — because of the lack of full reporting in the moment — that picture came to symbolize the absolute horror of war.

However, by golly, I am going to watch the rest of this utterly spell-binding television event.

I am hooked.

national news

Memo to fellow Vietnam vets: go back to see it again

I caught up with the PBS series on the Vietnam War. I am riveted all over again by the tragedy that unfolded in that faraway land.

The Ken Burns-Lynn Novick directed documentary is going to be known as a landmark television event. The way I figure it, anything with Ken Burns’ name attached to it has that potential. This one will make the grade.

***

As I watched the first two segments, I was struck by something I’ve told Vietnam veterans over the course of the past 28 years: You need to go back; you need to see the country now; you need to see what that place you remember as a war-scarred nation has become since the shooting stopped.

I served there many years ago as an Army aircraft mechanic. But in 1989, I was granted an extraordinary opportunity. I returned to Vietnam two decades after I reported for duty at Marble Mountain, a secure Army aviation unit just south of Da Nang. I’ve shared with you already on this blog the emotion I experience upon returning to that spot.

When I came back home at the end of that three-week journey — along with other editorial writers and editors from around the country — I made an unofficial pact to encourage other Vietnam War veterans to do that very thing. They need to see that place.

I must make a point that Vietnam in 1989 wasn’t yet the country it has become in the years since then. The United States had no diplomatic relations with its former enemy when my colleagues and I went there. Those relations took root in the 1990s and the country has made huge economic development strides since then.

The reaction I’ve gotten from vets, though, has been muted. Few of them have embraced the notion. Most of them say, “No way, man. I’ve had enough of the place.”

I tend to back off when I get the “hell no!” response from vets. They have their reasons and I’m sure it has everything to do with the misery they experienced during their wartime tour of duty.

To those who waffle a bit, I tell them a couple of things.

First, the country still smells the same. I can’t describe the odor one whiffs — whether in cities or in rural settings. It’s not exactly pleasant. It’s just, um, unique.

Second, I like to tell my fellow vets that the Vietnamese are gracious, welcoming and quite anxious to greet Americans. I can recall setting foot for the first time in Saigon in 1989. I jumped off the van that had took us from the airport to our hotel. I was greeted by a Vietnamese gentleman who figured I was “of age” to have been there during the war.

“Did you serve here in the military?” he asked as he clasped my hand. Yes. I did. “Welcome back to my country,” he said.

I will concede this point, though, about why the Vietnamese are so welcoming: They won the war!

Returning to that place, though, is good for Americans’ soul. Trust me on that one. I went there believing I wasn’t packing an ounce of emotional baggage. I was wrong.

Others are likely to experience the same catharsis that gripped me.

https://highplainsblogger.com/2017/05/dear-vietnam-vets-return-to-that-beautiful-land/

 

entertainment news, military news, national news

On the hunt for PBS signal

DURANGO, Colo. — I’m so mad I could spit.

We hauled our fifth wheel recreational vehicle into the Rocky Mountains for a long weekend, getting away from the hustle, bustle and some of the tussles of the world.

But surely — clearly, without a doubt — we could land in a spot that picked up the Public Broadcasting Service.

Oh, no. Didn’t happen.

We’re in Durango, cooling our jets until the morning arrives. I am missing the premiere episode of a landmark television event, PBS’s epic series “The Vietnam War,” put together by the great documentary filmmaker Ken Burns and Lynn Novick. It’s going to run for 10 days.

I am sort of reminded of a comment the late pro football coach Bum Phillips once said of Orange, Texas, where he was born. “It’s not the end of the world,” Bum said in a Playboy magazine interview, “but if you get up on your tippy toes, you can see it from there.”

That’s kind of how I am feeling this evening as PBS is airing “The Vietnam War.”

I’ve published several posts on this blog commenting on the importance of the series to a generation of Americans, many of whom served in that war. I am one of those Americans.

I won’t let it depress me. We’re shoving off tomorrow for another location — in Albuquerque — where I am certain we’ll get PBS in our fifth wheel. I know this because we stayed there the other night en route to Durango. By golly, I watched some PBS programming while we were parked there.

I am going to pray that the weather doesn’t get in the way. You are welcome to wish me luck. Oh, and be sure to watch it yourself.

entertainment news, local news

These heroes did not ‘die in vain’

Americans might be asking themselves once again a question that crops up as the nation examines its history of armed conflict.

The lingering question might present itself as PBS airs its landmark documentary series “The Vietnam War,” by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick, which premieres on Sept. 17.

The question focuses on whether the 58,000 Americans whose names are etched on that black stone wall in Washington, D.C., died in vain. Was their sacrifice wasted?

I will not tolerate such a question. I won’t stand for it!

The Vietnam War did not end well for the United States of America. We lost our will because the enemy we were fighting in Vietnam kept up the fight despite the grievous losses they suffered on the battlefield throughout the southern portion of Vietnam.

The war shredded the nation’s emotions. It tore at our collective heart. We didn’t know how to lose. Indeed, the Vietnam War arguably redefined “winning” and “losing” in the minds of many Americans.

To my point about dying in vain …

The Vietnam Veterans Memorial wall contains the names of men — and a handful of women — who left behind a story. Their loved ones grieved and perhaps are still grieving their unspeakable loss. Did those Americans die in vain? Did they make the supreme sacrifice, pay the ultimate price for no good reason?

These heroes all died in service to their country. We never should measure the loss of brave Americans on faraway battlefields against the rightness or wrongness of the policy that sent them into harm’s way. These warriors did their duty as they were ordered to do. Their patriotism was unquestioned. Nor was their love of country.

I’ve been able to see the war memorial three times. The most recent time was just this past June. I defy anyone to walk along that wall, examine those names etched in the black stone and believe they are memorialized because they died in vain.

I am not going to engage in a debate over whether our enemies in all the wars this country has fought deserve to be honored in this manner. This blog post is about our men and women. It’s about our young service personnel who followed lawful orders.

The PBS special well might ignite this discussion once again. Fine. Let’s bring it to a full boil. I’ll stand forever by the notion that no one young American ever — not ever! — dies in vain when they are serving the nation that orders them into battle.

***

The first five episodes will air nightly on Panhandle PBS from Sunday, Sept. 17, through Thursday, Sept. 21, and the final five episodes will air nightly from Sunday, Sept. 24, through Thursday, Sept. 28. Each episode will premiere at 7 p.m. with a repeat broadcast immediately following the premiere.