Ken Burns on the State of the Union
Posted: Thu May 30, 2024 5:03 pm
Historian and documentary film maker Ken Burns gave the commencement address at Brandeis University this year. If you haven't read it, it's well worth a read. I have long admired him as a story teller. His documentaries on the Civil War and Baseball were stories about America told through the lenses of both.
Just a few selections to give you the flavor:
Early on, he describes how he has worked hard to tell his stories from a politically neutral point of view. Personally, I have had no idea what his political views actually are.
And then he gives a warning, not from a politician or a professional news analyst, but from history:
I think that Burns is right about the fragility of the American Experiment. The genius of the founders was not just the rejection of the notion that Government derives its power from God, as opposed to the people, but that the will of the majority must be balanced against the rights of the minority. But that is a far cry from what the GOP is doing -- changing laws and rules to allow a minority of Americans to govern in perpetuity.
If you haven't paid attention to what is going on in states controlled by Republican legislatures, I strongly suggest taking a look. In Texas, Republicans are trying to change the rules in way that will prevent a Democrat from winning any statewide office forever. In Ohio, where the citizens passed an amendment to the Constitution giving themselves a right to abortion, the Republican legislature is not only trying to undo the will of the citizens, it is trying to dilute the ability of the citizens themselves to pass laws or amend their constitution.
The leader of the Republican Party has told us again and again and again what he will do if he's elected. And his intentions are to replace American style democracy with minority authoritarian rule. HIs planned replacement of the civil service system with party Apparatchiks will give us a system that looks more like the government of the old Soviet Union -- something that the GOP used to find abhorrent.
The first time Trump was elected, I don't think even conservatives took him seriously. It's different now. The Heritage Foundation and other organizations have been spending a ton of time and money to plan Trump's transformation of the government the day he is elected. It isn't as if this is should be new to us -- we've had plenty of examples of how democracies slide into authoritarianism. And the current GOP ticks all of the boxes.
During Trump's term, his authoritarianism was reigned in by people that I may politically disagree with, but who understood that our system of democracy is built on red lines that should never be crossed. This time, there will be no such people. His advisers will be people like Steve Bannon -- a revolutionary comparable to Lenin that advocates destroying our system of government so it can be built to his liking.
Yes, it can happen here. But only if we let it. If we do, we should anticipate what happens in other countries ruled by authoritarian one-party rule. Eventually, the majority simply will not tolerate rule by the minority. The result will be the kind of political instability and extremism we can see in the history of other democracies in our hemisphere.
The GOP made a decision to put party before everything -- including the foundations of our nation. I don't think I'm prone to alarmism. But a threat to end the American experiment is, IMHO, something to be alarmed about.
Just a few selections to give you the flavor:
Early on, he describes how he has worked hard to tell his stories from a politically neutral point of view. Personally, I have had no idea what his political views actually are.
He eloquently describes what he calls our dialect preoccupation with sorting everything into bins of right and wrong and how history shows how mistaken this preoccupation is:Listen, I am in the business of history. It is not always a happy subject on college campuses these days, particularly when forces seem determined to eliminate or water down difficult parts of our past, particularly when the subject may seem to sum an anachronistic and irrelevant pursuit, and particularly with the ferocious urgency this moment seems to exert on us. It is my job, however, to remind people of the power our past also exerts, to help us better understand what's going on now with compelling story, memory, and anecdote. It is my job to try to discern patterns and themes from history to enable us to interpret our dizzying and sometimes dismaying present. For nearly 50 years now, I have diligently practiced and rigorously tried to maintain a conscious neutrality in my work, avoiding advocacy if I could, trying to speak to all of my fellow citizens. Over those many decades I've come to understand a significant fact, that we are not condemned to repeat, as the saying goes, what we don't remember. That is a beautiful, even poetic phrase, but not true. Nor are there cycles of history as the academic community periodically promotes. The Old Testament, Ecclesiastes to be specific, got it right, I think. What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again. There is nothing new under the sun. What those lines suggest is that human nature never changes or almost never changes. We continually superimpose that complex and contradictory human nature over the seemingly random chaos of events, all of our inherent strengths and weaknesses, our greed and generosity, our puritanism and our prurience, our virtue, and our venality parade before our eyes, generation after generation after generation. This often gives us the impression that history repeats itself. It does not. "No event has ever happened twice, it just rhymes," Mark Twain is supposed to have said. I have spent all of my professional life on the lookout for those rhymes, drawn inexorably to that power of history. I am interested in listening to the many varied voices of a true, honest, complicated past that is unafraid of controversy and tragedy, but equally drawn to those stories and moments that suggest an abiding faith in the human spirit, and particularly the unique role this remarkable and sometimes also dysfunctional republic seems to play in the positive progress of mankind.
He then gets to the primarily lesson he has learned from his years as a historian:But the isolation of those two oceans has also helped to incubate habits and patterns less beneficial to us: our devotion to money and guns and conspiracies, our certainty about everything, our stubborn insistence on our own exceptionalism blinding us to that which needs repair, especially with regard to race and ethnicity. Our preoccupation with always making the other wrong at an individual as well as a global level. I am reminded of what the journalist I.F. Stone once said to a young acolyte who was profoundly disappointed in his mentor's admiration for Thomas Jefferson. "It's because history is tragedy," Stone admonished him, "Not melodrama." It's the perfect response. In melodrama all villains are perfectly
villainous and all heroes are perfectly virtuous, but life is not like that. You know that in your guts and nor is our history like that. The novelist, Richard Powers recently wrote that, "The best arguments in the world," — and ladies and gentlemen, that's all we do is argue — "the best arguments in the world," he said, "Won't change a single person's point of view. The only thing that can do that is a good story." I've been struggling for most of my life to do that, to try to tell good, complex, sometimes contradictory stories, appreciating nuance and subtlety and undertow, sharing the confusion and consternation of unreconciled opposites.
But it's clear as individuals and as a nation we are dialectically preoccupied. Everything is either right or wrong, red state or blue state, young or old, gay or straight, rich or poor, Palestinian or Israeli, my way or the highway. Everywhere we are trapped by these old, tired, binary reactions, assumptions, and certainties. For filmmakers and faculty, students and citizens, that preoccupation is imprisoning. Still, we know and we hear and we express only arguments, and by so doing, we forget the inconvenient complexities of history and of human nature. That, for example, three great religions, their believers, all children of Abraham, each professing at the heart of their teaching, a respect for all human life, each with a central connection to and legitimate claim to the same holy ground, violate their own dictates of conduct and make this perpetually contested land a shameful graveyard. God does not distinguish between the dead. "Could you?"
[Emphasis added.]Another voice, Mercy Otis Warren, a philosopher and historian during our revolution put it this way, "The study of the human character at once opens a beautiful and a deformed picture of the soul. We there find a noble principle implanted in the nature of people, but when the checks of conscience are thrown aside, humanity is obscured." I have had the privilege for nearly half a century of making films about the US, but I have also made films about us. That is to say the two letter, lowercase, plural pronoun. All of the intimacy of "us" and also "we" and "our" and all of the majesty, complexity, contradiction, and even controversy of the US. And if I have learned anything over those years, it's that there's only us. There is no them. And whenever someone suggests to you, whomever it may be in your life that there's a them, run away. Othering is the simplistic binary way to make and identify enemies, but it is also the surest way to your own self imprisonment, which brings me to a moment I've dreaded and forces me to suspend my longstanding attempt at neutrality.
And then he gives a warning, not from a politician or a professional news analyst, but from history:
The Republican party, when faced with the demographic problem of their base aging and dying, had a decision to make after Obama's election. They could, as an internal study recommended, align their platform and goals more in accordance with what most Americans wanted. Or they continue with an effort, started during the George W. Bush presidency, to subject the majority to a permanent rule by a minority. Regretfully, they chose the latter. The result has been the transformation of the party itself into an authoritarian populist movement to elect a strongman who will do what is needed to keep Republicans in power.There is no real choice this November. There is only the perpetuation, however flawed and feeble you might perceive it, of our fragile 249-year-old experiment or the entropy that will engulf and destroy us if we take the other route. When, as Mercy Otis Warren would say, "The checks of conscience are thrown aside and a deformed picture of the soul is revealed." The presumptive Republican nominee is the opioid of all opioids, an easy cure for what some believe is the solution to our myriad pains and problems. When in fact with him, you end up re-enslaved with an even bigger problem, a worse affliction and addiction, "a bigger delusion", James Baldwin would say, the author and finisher of our national existence, our national suicide as Mr. Lincoln prophesies. Do not be seduced by easy equalization. There is nothing equal about this equation. We are at an existential crossroads in our political and civic lives. This is a choice that could not be clearer.
I think that Burns is right about the fragility of the American Experiment. The genius of the founders was not just the rejection of the notion that Government derives its power from God, as opposed to the people, but that the will of the majority must be balanced against the rights of the minority. But that is a far cry from what the GOP is doing -- changing laws and rules to allow a minority of Americans to govern in perpetuity.
If you haven't paid attention to what is going on in states controlled by Republican legislatures, I strongly suggest taking a look. In Texas, Republicans are trying to change the rules in way that will prevent a Democrat from winning any statewide office forever. In Ohio, where the citizens passed an amendment to the Constitution giving themselves a right to abortion, the Republican legislature is not only trying to undo the will of the citizens, it is trying to dilute the ability of the citizens themselves to pass laws or amend their constitution.
The leader of the Republican Party has told us again and again and again what he will do if he's elected. And his intentions are to replace American style democracy with minority authoritarian rule. HIs planned replacement of the civil service system with party Apparatchiks will give us a system that looks more like the government of the old Soviet Union -- something that the GOP used to find abhorrent.
The first time Trump was elected, I don't think even conservatives took him seriously. It's different now. The Heritage Foundation and other organizations have been spending a ton of time and money to plan Trump's transformation of the government the day he is elected. It isn't as if this is should be new to us -- we've had plenty of examples of how democracies slide into authoritarianism. And the current GOP ticks all of the boxes.
During Trump's term, his authoritarianism was reigned in by people that I may politically disagree with, but who understood that our system of democracy is built on red lines that should never be crossed. This time, there will be no such people. His advisers will be people like Steve Bannon -- a revolutionary comparable to Lenin that advocates destroying our system of government so it can be built to his liking.
Yes, it can happen here. But only if we let it. If we do, we should anticipate what happens in other countries ruled by authoritarian one-party rule. Eventually, the majority simply will not tolerate rule by the minority. The result will be the kind of political instability and extremism we can see in the history of other democracies in our hemisphere.
The GOP made a decision to put party before everything -- including the foundations of our nation. I don't think I'm prone to alarmism. But a threat to end the American experiment is, IMHO, something to be alarmed about.