Ken Burns is a jerk

Seriously, what is up with this guy? Ken Burns of the Ken Burns effect has been spending four years putting together his 17 hour (SEVENTEEN HOURS!) documentary series for PBS about WWII from "the bottom up" with extensive interviews and research. Apparently the series, titled The War, doesn't include a single interview with a Latino soldier who fought in WWII, even though there were lots of them involved in key battles (like the Philippines) and they won more Congressional Medals of Honor than any other ethnic group in proportion to the total. People are pissed. And people understand why they are pissed:

“If you had to hit a sore point in the Latino community, this is it,” said Chon Noriega, a filmmaker and associate director of the Chicano Studies Research Center at the University of California in Los Angeles. “The Second World War,” he said, “is where the community felt it had earned the right to citizenship that had been denied since 1848,” the end of the Mexican-American War.

“This is a critical turning point in their recognition as citizens and they’re not there” in Burns’ series, Noriega said. “You can understand why people would be upset.” PBS is a “public entity receiving public funding to describe this history and they’re just not there in the image.”

Now I'm not sure about making PBS change the documentary series like some are calling for, and if this is Ken Burns "vision", the last thing we would want to do is pollute the artist's vision! I guess.

What really bothers me is Burn's response to these complaints as "it's not that kind of movie":

The filmmakers weren’t looking for representatives of specific ethnic groups. “That is not what the film is about,” Burns said. “It’s about the experience of combat from the perspectives of a handful of people—most of whom are from [the four towns focused on].”
...
“People, when they see the film, they will see the universality,” Burns said. “The comments that people make are not based on their ethnicity but on their humanity.”

Besides belonging in the Colbert realm ("People say I'm white, but I don't see race"), the quote from Burns shows he fundamentally does not get the point of the protests. These groups aren't looking for Latino representation in the film as a victory on some PC checklist somewhere, but want acknowledgment of Latinos' inclusion within this great American universality/humanity. Acting as if Latinos fighting for America in World War II (or Vietnam, or Iraq today) is some kind of one-off, minor story that fails to capture the true essence of what the war meant belittles those soldiers and the ideas they were/are supposedly dying for.

At seventeen hours (SEVENTEEN FUCKING HOURS!) to not have ONE interview with a Latino soldier and to actively argue against it shows a real, and frankly bizarre, refusal to acknowledge these groups as really American. If you think that's not true, just take a saunter at the message boards on the Free Republic about this issue. Lots of great stuff! Latinos were fighting, and dying, as Americans, together with other Americans. Now when they and their representative groups ask to be remembered as part of the "greatest generation", they are labeled as trying to divide the country, not being loyal, or required to prove, once again, their claims to American history being their history too.

Why not just be cool Ken Burns and find some time in your seventeen hour (seriously, seventeen hours?!) doc for this story? Its telling when the best argument against this is the ridiculous "well, what about representing transgender people or people with bad hair cuts???" (actually said). We aren't talking about that you moron, we are talking about this topic, about Latinos, about how they have been citizens and an active part of the nation's history for hundreds of years but are still treated like they and their families just got here and are stealing Medicaid. Media obviously creates these public perceptions, especially historical, "good for you" multi-hour public broadcast programming that merely maintains national myths of a certain type of American saving the world in the 1940s.

I say let's move on to the next battle: trying to include Latino non-US citizens who died during Operation Iraqi Freedom in Burns's planned 20 hour series for 2016.