I watched every episode of The War on PBS and can't recommend it highly enough. I did have one gripe, and it had to do with the fear of the Federal Communications Commission evidenced in the narrator's announcement of the title of Episode Five. The title is "FUBAR," which is a long-recognized acronym for the phrase "Fucked Up Beyond All Recognition." It goes hand in hand with another equally cynical acronym, "SNAFU," meaning "Situation Normal, All Fucked Up." On my PBS station, when the acronyms were explained the word was bleeped.
Think about that. Up to that point there had been countless photos of blood and gore and dead bodies onscreen, and the horrific pictures of Nazi and Japanese death camps hadn't even aired yet (that happened in the final episode). And yet, PBS was so concerned that it not subject its member stations to a possible FCC fine that it asked Burns to censor a common word in a phrase that nearly every American already knows. As David Gates put it when talking about this idiocy in his Newsweek review, "Did you need further evidence that today's decadent home front can't see past the end of its own nose? There you go."
Posted by Linkmeister at October 3, 2007 09:02 AM | TrackBack