JEFF JARVIS HAS AN OPED on war, globalization, and PBS smarminess:

If you watched the Ric Burns documentary “The Center of the World” this week, you saw an effort to rewrite the story of 9/11, so it is no longer about murderous fanatics and selfless heroes, not even about life and death.

It is about globalization.

As we watch the jets tear into those buildings, as we watch them collapse, as we watch almost 3,000 neighbors die yet again, the show’s narrator says without a trace of emotion:

“In a little less than two hours – with an almost poetically horrifying symmetry – the symbols and instruments of the city’s uniquely air-minded culture, and of globalization itself – skyscrapers, jets and the mass media – would be turned back against themselves with a devastatingly lethal impact and effect.”

Don’t you see: globalization – that’s what made this happen. Globalization – the political bogeyman of the age, the American disease.

But the truth is that “globalization” is really just code for “why they don’t like us.” It’s just another way to say that this was our fault. Nothing could be more offensive.

In the two years since 9/11, we have heard small anti-American voices here and there try to turn this crime on us. They say we should ask why they hate us, as if there could be any justification for this act, as if the blame should fall to the victims, not the criminals. That is abhorrent. It is no different from saying that the Jews should ask why Hitler hated them. But, of course, it does not matter.

Yet this is the anti-globalization agenda: to blame us for our success and others’ failures.

Yes, it is. And, as with the BBC, here it’s done with taxpayer money.

UPDATE: A couple of readers think that Jeff is too hard on the special. I didn’t see it, but I tend to trust his judgment in matters of TV criticism. But in questions of interpretation, your results may differ, of course. Reader Scott Harris, meanwhile, emails with a point of fact, not opinion:

PBS is also funded by voluntary individual contributions, private foundations and corporate sponsors. Not dissimilar, in fact, to academics or many successful bloggers. Public money may be essential to PBS, but so it is to the infrastructure of most universities and the backbone of the Internet.

Hmm. Well, fair enough on the private contributions, but the government support that PBS gets is not quite like support for the backbone of the Internet, is it? I’d be happy to see PBS supported entirely by voluntary individual contributions, private foundations, and corporate sponsors. You know, like the Heritage Foundation, an organization that PBS largely resembles in terms of balance and nonpartisanship.