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In television, both mirror and catharsis

EDITORIAL | James Carroll

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February 06, 2012|By James Carroll

IF DYSFUNCTIONAL American politics has become an obstacle to meaningful social introspection, how does this nation reckon with its grave problems? Only indirectly. Some struggles are too deep for words, and can be grappled with more by implication and sublimation than by confrontation. The entertainment we choose provides a better window into our real anxieties than our public dialogue does, even - or maybe especially - when the stakes are high.

In September of 1990, for example, the nation was at the terrifying threshold of major war. The previous month had seen the launching of Operation Desert Shield, the initiating stage of the rollback of Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait. It was the first massive deployment of US troops since Vietnam, involving the mobilization of reservists, the assembly of a vast armada, and preparations for catastrophic ignition of oil fields and grotesque biological warfare.

Ultimately, the assembled coalition forces would number most of a million, and Desert Storm would be unleashed in January. But by late September, an unaddressed war anxiety was already peaking. It was just then, across five consecutive evenings, that PBS broadcast the Ken Burns documentary series “The Civil War.’’ Forty million people obsessively watched.

Never had war seemed so purposeful or so romantic as in Burns’ rendition. With plaintive fiddle music, delicate panning of sepia photos, understated reading of eloquent letters and diary excerpts, and the unforgettably doleful voice of Shelby Foote, the US Civil War was transformed from carnage into sublimity. Americans faced with the coming Gulf War were not only braced but uplifted. In the PBS series, the artifice of nostalgia transformed not only a past horror, but the brutishness of a present threat.

Whether the series helped set the United States on a disastrous war trajectory from which it has yet to veer is another question entirely.