When Ken Burns, discussing his new documentary, "The War," told Mother Jones...

"I think that we deserve, and more important, we need a much more complicated history"

...I braced myself for the Big Cultural Hit to come. In Burnsworld, "complicated" could only mean that the Good Guy-dom of the US would come under the documentarian's pan-and-zoom attack. And so it has.

Why? It seems that World War II was a vicious struggle in which millions of people died. Couldn't possibly have been a "good war," concluded the documentarian, staring at history through a lens so limiting that he missed Nazis, world domination, the Holocaust, and other "good" reasons the United States and Great Britain bled themselves practically to death to fight.

Depicting the horrors of the war--which, incidentally, could only come as news to the woefully uninformed--convinced Burrns "that this is a far different war than we've sort of, in the last deades been led to believe," he said on NPR's "Morning Edition.""You know, as we call it the Good War in the face of the more ambivalent and ambiguous wars that we've been in since the Second World War."

I always thought "The Good War" was Studs Terkel's ironic moniker and title of a 1984 book debunking the goodness of the war--as though goodness were supposed to mean painless or sanitary or something. World War II was a good war because it was waged for a good--a vitally good--cause. But listen to Mr. Burns elaborate on our supposed misapprehension:

"It's time, particularly for us, as the veterans are leaving the scene, to honor what they did when they were teenagers. We asked them to become professional killers. They did their job very well. They saw bad things. They did bad things. They lost good friends. And they came back and put a lot of that information in the deepest, darkest recesses of their souls. And it has been our privilege in recent years that some of those folks have now begun to speak."

Speak out about what--their professional killings? This is base gibberish, and, frankly, nothing less than obscene. We asked these men to defend civilization from barbarism and they did their job very well, indeed. Too bad the amoral vision of their offspring, like Ken Burns, isn't confined to the deepest, darkest recesses of their own souls--and not enshrined in endless hours of documentary.