Katie Doyle, Girl About Town

Thursday, Oct. 04, 2007 - 8:03 p.m.

Here's what's going on with me today.

My friend Tina sent me a link to The Mom Song in email. It's clever and amusing. :)

I went to the grocery store and bought some stuff for dinner tonight, as well as a little extra for healthy snacks - ie. some spreadable goat cheese and extra tomatoes. I got a demi loaf (half baguette) of french bread, the aforementioned spreadable goat cheese, mozzarella, a pint of half & half, a quart of butternut squash soup, a jar of dijon, .66 lbs. of chicken tenders, jicama, sliced mushrooms, 1.45 lbs. of tomatoes, and a bag of baby greens for salad. And my total? 36 bucks.

Dude. I had a whole paragraph of ranting here, because I'm still pretty pissed off about some things that happened in the store while I was spending that money, but I'm letting it go in the interest of this not totally degenerating into crap. Moving on...

I am currently reading The Zookeeper's Wife, a history book set during the Nazi occupation of Poland. It's about Jan and Antonina Zabinski, who were the directors of the Warsaw zoo when Germany invaded Poland, and how they helped to hide Jews and smuggle them out of Warsaw during the war. It's taken largely from family recollections and Antonina's journal, and it's very, very good. I am learning things about the Nazis that they don't teach you in history class. Like that Hitler considered the Eastern Europeans to be as much a nonhuman class as Jews, so 2 million Poles were also slaughtered when the Nazis took Poland. And the Nazi party had a lot of scientists in their ranks who were firm supporters of the no-life-but-Aryan-life doctrine, so not only humans, but non-German animals and plants were also eradicated under Nazi occupation. They had plans to completely make over the lands they invaded into Germany, planting forests of German trees and treating all indigenous life as weeds and vermin, to be erased and replaced with Aryan lifeforms, plant, animal, human. They even planned to plant vast forests in the places they took over, in order to create microclimates to match those found in Germany. Put in the simplest terms, they were fucking nut jobs who actually believed they could turn the entire globe into a German paradise. We are very, very lucky we had men and women willing to lay down their lives as they did to stop the German war machine.

Which brings me to the last part of this missive, the Ken Burns PBS miniseries, The War.

I'm not a critic, and I don't write about things with the command of words that critics use to tell you all that's good or bad about something they want you to watch, listen to, or buy. I'm not analytical about the stuff I see. I like it or I hate it. The acting sucks or not. So I'm not going to wax all poetical about how incredibly welldone this series is. What I am going to say, is that if you haven't seen it, you need to. Everyone in America should. Every American history class on the planet should make it required viewing, from now until the end of time. It personalizes and illustrates the realities of WWII in a way I don't think has ever been done before. And makes me weep for the fact that human beings must be the slowest freaking learners on the planet.

Seriously, there are brain-damaged rats who learn lessons faster and more thoroughly than we do.

Burns made the documentary because he discovered there are actually people living in this country today - young Americans born and raised here - who do not know what WWII was about, or even something so incredibly simple as who fought the war and against whom. They thought America fought WITH the Germans and against Russia. Dude, *I* can tell you how fucking World War ONE started and by whom, and how that conflict's resolution led to the conditions which made Germany ripe for the Nazi party and the start of WWII, but adults in their fucking TWENTIES can't even get right who fought against whom in a war that ended in their grandparents' lifetimes, midway through the 20th freaking century. That's appalling.

And makes me weep, as many of those same young nincompoops will be in charge of this country at some point in time, and probably have to make decisions involving violence and bloodshed on a mass scale at least akin to the situation in Iraq right now, and if they can't even tell you what the hell happened in World War II and what it was about, how the HELL are they going to make sound decisions for dealing the the geopolitical climate in which they will themselves be living? God, that scares me.

But I digress. Burns has woven a brilliant tapestry, at once beautiful and terrible. Utilizing personal accounts from both living vets and those who perished in combat (from their letters home) and both stills and mo-pic footage shot during the war by both sides, many times on the battlefront, he brings the war to us in a way nothing I think ever has. It is a living thing, a catastrophe brilliant and horrifying in its gore, devastation and depravity, but with moments of nobility and heroism that shine like bright stars of humanity's capability to rise above the black, base instincts of brutality, greed, and lust for power.

More than just an enumeration of battles fought and lives lost, the series shines a light into every recess, to illuminate many of the mistakes made on both sides of the conflict, be they from hubris, insecurity, cowardice, or just plain stupidity. It is a history lesson of the highest order and a just and awesome portrayal of the men and women who served in combat, as well as the sacrifices their loved ones made at home, and the price we paid as a country to defeat an evil power in what I think of as the last noble war. I defy you to watch it without crying and wanting to find every single vet you can to personally thank him (or her) for his service and sacrifice. They were all heroes, those men. I don't care if "all" they did was march through that hell and make it back out alive again, never once sticking their heads out of a foxhole they didn't need to. The fact that they endured the events they did, all in service to their country and for the good of humanity, sets upon my shoulders a debt that I as a human being can never, ever repay and could never hope to have accomplished myself. I am sorry beyond measure for the need of their sacrifices, and more grateful to them for them than I can ever express.

If you know someone who was in the service during that terrible time in history, please pass along to them my sincere and most heartfelt thanks for their service. Please tell them, that I wish with all my heart they had not been required to go, and that such evil that made it necessary did not exist, but that I am thankful they returned home, and wish for them every joy and peace since they did. Words are poor tools with which to express my sorrow for the sacrifices they, their family, and friends must have made, and those they lost. All I can say is thank you, for everything.

Peace out,
Katie

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