Ken Burns: Being An American Means Reckoning With a History Fraught With Violence and Injustice

It's difficult to dispel arrogance if you retain ignorance.

The black-white rift stands at the very center of American history. It is the great challenge to which all our deepest aspirations to freedom must rise. If we forget that — if we forget the great stain of slavery that stands at the heart of our country, our history, our experiment — we forget who we are, and we make the great rift deeper and wider. 

It is the great arrogance of the present to forget the intelligence of the past.

World War II is smothered in sentimentality and nostalgia. What's interesting about Vietnam is that sentimentality is just not there, so you're given kind of a clean access to it in one way. It's also a war that represents a failure for the United States. Many people came back feeling like they never wanted to talk about it again. And so we developed a national amnesia.

War is essentially dehumanizing. It's trying to portray your enemy as less human than you are.

I am passionately interested in how my Country works, and if you want to know about this thing called the United States of America, you have to know about the Civil War.

There's always the certainty that the opposite of what I might believe in might also be true.

There is no communication in this world except between equals.

* * * * * 

From "Not For Ourselves Alone" —

In Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s time:

Women were barred by custom from the pulpit and professions.

Those who spoke in public were thought indecent.

Married women were prohibited from owning or inheriting property: in fact, wives were the property of their husbands, who were entitled by law to her wages and her body.

Women were prohibited from signing contracts.

Women had no right to their children or even their clothing in a divorce.

Women were not allowed to serve on juries and most were considered incompetent to testify.

Women were not allowed to VOTE.   

* * * * * 

History isn't really about the past — settling old scores. It's about defining the present and who we are.

I think we too often make choices based on the safety of cynicism, and what we're lead to is a life not fully lived. Cynicism is fear, and it's worse than fear — it's active disengagement.

History is malleable. A new cache of diaries can shed new light, and archeological evidence can challenge our popular assumptions.

People tend to forget that the word "history" contains the word "story".

You can learn as much about the history from reading about the present as you can vice versa, that is learning about the present through history, which is what I do for a living.

Good history is a question of survival. Without any past, we will deprive ourselves of the defining impression of our being. 

* * * * * 

I began to feel that the drama of the truth that is in the moment and in the past is richer and more interesting than the drama of Hollywood movies. So I began looking at documentary films. 

I have made all my films for my children with the exception of my first film because my oldest daughter wasn't born when I was making the film about the Brooklyn Bridge. 

In a sense I've made the same film over and over again. In all of them I've asked, 'Who are we as Americans?

I wake the dead. I bring Jackie Robinson and the Roosevelts to life. Who do you think I'm trying to wake up?

* * * * * 

I find Donald Trump more of a super-predator. This idea that he can attack and attack and attack whole groups of people, and that we live in a media culture where that’s permitted to be tolerated—it’s the spectacle and not the truth of it. 

An amoral internet permits a lie to travel around the world three times before the truth can get started, and we live in a place where lying is OK—where a lassitude develops where it doesn’t matter what the truth is—and that’s how it’s possible for someone like him to be advanced who is so clearly temperamentally unsuited and has no idea about governing.

This is what happened with Hitler in Germany: he tried a crazy rhetoric ad was surprised when nobody pushed back on it so he just kept saying it, doubling and tripling down, and then look what happened to the German people.

*****

 

Being an American means reckoning with a history fraught with violence and injustice. Ignoring that reality in favor of mythology is not only wrong but also dangerous. The dark chapters of American history have just as much to teach us, if not more, than the glorious ones, and often the two are intertwined.  

Read. The book is still the greatest man-made machine of all — not the car, not the TV, not the smartphone. 

Do not lose your enthusiasm. In its Greek etymology, the word enthusiasm means, "God in us."

The flame is not out, but it is flickering. 

Do something that will last and be beautiful. It doesn't have to be a bridge-or a symphony or book or a business. It could be the look in the eye of a child you raise or a simple garden you tend. Do something that will last and be beautiful.

— Quotes from Ken Burns,

a true national 

treasure