Ken Burns’ Worst Idea
by Steve Sailer
The publicity machine is now gearing up for documentarian Ken Burns’s twelve-hour extravaganza, The National Parks: America’s Best Idea, which will run for six straight nights on PBS starting September 27.
This being a Ken Burns series, the predominant theme of The National Parks will be “diversity.” So, if you go camping in a national park this month, check out the diversity of your fellow visitors. You’ll likely notice tourists from all over the world, including busloads of punctual Germans and amenable Japanese.
But, foreign tourists aren’t the right kind of diversity for Burns.
Although Burns has spent his career explaining stuff, he’s never quite figured himself out. That’s why, judging from his documentary’s preview materials, The National Parks is shaping up, after six years of work, as Ken Burns’ Worst Idea.
Burns became famous in 1990 with his magnificent eleven-hour documentary The Civil War.
Could he top it? Anticipation in the press for his 18-hour Baseball series in 1994 was intense.Well, it turned out Burns couldn’t top The Civil War. As Baseball slogged on, reaching some kind of apotheosis of pompous tedium when interviewee Stephen Jay Gould sang “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” all the way through a capella, my wife started asking unkind questions about why the media would never get so excited over a documentary of this numbing length on the history of, say, soap operas or some other feminine timewaster.
Still, adrift inside the vast hulk of Baseball was an excellent two-hour documentary on the one topic that truly engaged Burns: the Negro Leagues and the Jackie Robinson story.
http://www.takimag.com/blogs/article/the_unbearable_whiteness_of_ken_burns/