"Ninety-nine percent of people [back then] didn’t have their portrait painted. It does not mean they did not exist."

"They are central to the drama of the American Revolution. It might be a teenager: John Greenwood from Boston, or Joseph Plumb Martin from Connecticut. Or 10-year-old Betsy Ambler [from Yorktown] or the Native Americans or Spanish or French or Hessian soldiers. At the end, we say the Continental Army is just filled with teenagers and ne’er-do-wells, second and third sons who aren’t due an inheritance, felons, and recent immigrants. That’s who wins the war, and that’s why democracy is not an object of the revolution, it’s a consequence—because you realize at the end, they did the fighting and dying. We’re going to have to give them something. John Greenwood is a footnote? Betsy Ambler is a footnote? Follow the trail. And when you get Maya Hawke reading Betsy Ambler, it comes alive."

Says Ken Burns, in a Vanity Fair interview. He's talking about his new PBS documentary, "The American Revolution," and Vanity Fair makes its headline spicier than the quote: "Ken Burns Knows Who Won the American Revolution: 'Ne’er-Do-Wells, Felons, and Immigrants.'"

Is VF making the show more about present-day politics than it deserves or is the show pushing a political agenda? I have a feeling Burns does very restrained interviews — in line with the PBS presentation of itself. So maybe the VF headline is helpfully apt. Rereading that Burns quote, I find it plainly political.

I cringe at the sentiment "when you get Maya Hawke reading Betsy Ambler, it comes alive." Hand me a history book and spare me the lively readings of nepo-babies.

I believe I've only ever watched one of Burns's shows, the first one: "Brooklyn Bridge," from back in 1981. I've actively avoided them. And I love documentary film.

By the way, of all the American wars, did the Revolutionary War have the highest percentage of teenagers doing the fighting?

"What is the insecurity, the anxiety, the deficit in our culture today that makes us worship figures like Leonardo?..."

"Leonardo sometimes seems like humanity’s miraculous pet unicorn, a pure and perfect, one-off instantiation of grace, intelligence, superhuman talent and bewildering wisdom. We feed and cosset his memory as if he is the spiritual father of all humanism, art and science, which he wasn’t. If Leonardo invented our world, how bad can that world be?... Near the end of the film, there is brief mention of 19th century rhapsodists... who helped launch Leonardo into the stratosphere of genius, 'lavishing Leonardo’s masterpieces with lyrical praise.' That’s what the film has also been doing for almost four hours. You can never say enough good about Leonardo, which is why it is an entirely uncontroversial cultural exercise to praise him. The work will continue until we actually understand the man, or no longer need his tacit benediction for the civilization we have inherited."

Philip Kennicott in "Ken Burns takes 4 hours to canonize Leonardo da Vinci. He needed only two.The celebrated documentarian turns his lens on the great Renaissance polymath, with mixed results" (WaPo).

Ken Burns things are always extra long. Why complain about this particular lengthiness? It's Burns's style to drag it way out. But Kennicott has a special problem here. It seems to have something to do with the idea that "our world" isn't so great, that "the civilization we have inherited" does not deserve reverence. I don't know if that's what Kennicott thinks or if he's just looking down on the people who feel "anxiety" and "insecurity" and want to be indulged with a vision of human glory. 

"If we choose former president Donald Trump, then we will see what happens when 'the checks of conscience are thrown aside and a deformed picture of the soul is revealed.'"

Writes Jennifer Rubin, quoting Ken Burns, in "The media and sullen nonvoters should listen to Ken Burns/The historian knows something about civil war — and moral responsibility in politics" (WaPo).

Burns, the filmmaker, was giving a commencement speech at Brandeis when he veered off topic to denounce Trump. Rubin, the columnist, thinks that was just wonderful.

Burns’s exhortation that “the kinship of the soul begins with your own at times withering self-examination” should sound an alarm for voters.... If voters on the right and left renounce “withering self-examination,” they at least might imagine how they would fancy a fascist regime under Trump.... Democracy defenders should hope the essence of Burns’s message reaches beyond Brandeis.... Biden’s message, like Burns’s, is simple: This is the existential choice of our time. There is nothing equal about this equation....

What should "democracy defenders" think of the Democrats' effort to fight Trump through the use of the criminal process? To say "there's nothing equal" is to suggest that this isn't a democratic process in which 2 candidates compete for the vote. It's an "existential choice" — some sort of apocalyptic battle. So, what does that mean — that you can use all weapons and fight any way that you can? Well, look around. We're already seeing "what happens when 'the checks of conscience are thrown aside and a deformed picture of the soul is revealed.'" In this "picture," who is uglier? 

"Ken Burns sees a connection between his father’s distress and his own productivity."

"He meets deadlines and keeps to budgets. There are only a few examples of failed ideas, and in these cases Burns was not at fault. A biography of Martin Luther King, Jr., was defeated, Burns said, by the King family: 'They wrote me a letter saying, "We think you are the person to do the biography," and I said, "You are right." And I went to visit them in Atlanta, and I realized they weren’t going to let go.' He added, 'This was a husband and a father they could not control in life, and so desperately tried to control in death.'"

From "Ken Burns’s American Canon/Even in a fractious era, the filmmaker still believes that his documentaries can bring every viewer in," by Ian Parker in The New Yorker.

Burns grew up with "a dying mother and a mentally ill father," as he put it. His mother died of cancer in 1965 when he was 11, and his father was in a mental institution for 4 months in 1958. After the mother died, Ken and his brother Ric "were running the show—we were more parents than my father." And:

When Ric was in tenth grade, and Ken in eleventh, their father took a research trip to Morocco and the French Alps for several months. He left a checkbook; Ken paid the bills. This upbringing created unusual freedoms, Ric said, but was still a “Bergmanesque, dark thing, which Ken is determined to save himself from, and determined, in some sense, to save the world from, too.”

"What part of Donald Trump reminds you of Jesus Christ?"

A question — aimed at Evangelicals (but anyone can answer) — from Ken Burns, the film documentarian (the one with the still images that slowly move forward).

IN THE COMMENTS: tcrosse said, "He was despised."

AND: My answer: He's a tekton.

Ken Burns uses his commencement address to tell Stanford students they must oppose and fight against Donald Trump.

Here's some very heavy-handed rhetoric — ironically against another man's heavy-handed rhetoric — that shouldn't be imposed on the captive audience of a graduating class and the guests who want to celebrate them, but I can see that he thinks it's such an emergency that the normal rules do not apply — which, again ironically, is why Donald Trump must think he's got to talk the way he does.

So before you do anything with your well-earned degree, you must do everything you can to defeat the retrograde forces that have invaded our democratic process, divided our house, to fight against, no matter your political persuasion, the dictatorial tendencies of the candidate with zero experience in the much maligned but subtle art of governance; who is against lots of things, but doesn’t seem to be for anything, offering only bombastic and contradictory promises, and terrifying Orwellian statements; a person who easily lies, creating an environment where the truth doesn’t seem to matter; who has never demonstrated any interest in anyone or anything but himself and his own enrichment; who insults veterans, threatens a free press, mocks the handicapped, denigrates women, immigrants and all Muslims; a man who took more than a day to remember to disavow a supporter who advocates white supremacy and the Ku Klux Klan; an infantile, bullying man who, depending on his mood, is willing to discard old and established alliances, treaties and long-standing relationships. I feel genuine sorrow for the understandably scared and—they feel—powerless people who have flocked to his campaign in the mistaken belief that--as often happens on TV--a wand can be waved and every complicated problem can be solved with the simplest of solutions. They can’t. It is a political Ponzi scheme. And asking this man to assume the highest office in the land would be like asking a newly minted car driver to fly a 747.

As a student of history, I recognize this type. He emerges everywhere and in all eras. We see nurtured in his campaign an incipient Proto-fascism, a nativist anti-immigrant Know Nothing-ism, a disrespect for the judiciary, the prospect of women losing authority over their own bodies, African Americans again asked to go to the back of the line, voter suppression gleefully promoted, jingoistic saber rattling, a total lack of historical awareness, a political paranoia that, predictably, points fingers, always making the other wrong. These are all virulent strains that have at times infected us in the past. But they now loom in front of us again--all happening at once. We know from our history books that these are the diseases of ancient and now fallen empires. The sense of commonwealth, of shared sacrifice, of trust, so much a part of American life, is eroding fast, spurred along and amplified by an amoral Internet that permits a lie to circle the globe three times before the truth can get started.

We no longer have the luxury of neutrality or “balance,” or even of bemused disdain. Many of our media institutions have largely failed to expose this charlatan, torn between a nagging responsibility to good journalism and the big ratings a media circus always delivers. In fact, they have given him the abundant airtime he so desperately craves, so much so that it has actually worn down our natural human revulsion to this kind of behavior. Hey, he’s rich; he must be doing something right. He is not. Edward R. Murrow would have exposed this naked emperor months ago. He is an insult to our history. Do not be deceived by his momentary “good behavior.” It is only a spoiled, misbehaving child hoping somehow to still have dessert.

"Did Ken Burns 'in' Eleanor Roosevelt?"

Asks John Aravosis.

"I've never seen a beer hall on a campus before... I'm not sure how I feel about that!"

A lady from Nebraska tried to understand the Rathskeller.

(By the way... are you watching that Ken Burns "Prohibition" series on PBS?)

In a violent emergency, who will step up? The men?

This was a topic of conversation here at Meadhouse last night, as we were watching "Day After Disaster" on the History Channel:

Against a morning sky, a mushroom cloud spirals heavenward. A nuclear bomb has detonated in the heart of Washington D.C., incinerating 15,000 residents in just 15 seconds. More than 50% of the population living within a 1/2 mile radius of the explosion is either dead or severely injured. The next 24 hours will determine whether the rest of the city lives or dies. To survive this horrific ordeal they will need a plan. And lucky for us--there is one. But will it work? For the first time on television, the Department of Homeland Security reveals the most detailed and comprehensive plan to save America should terrorists go nuclear. This chilling two-hour special delves into the complex and highly secretive world of disaster planning.

Okay. Cool TV show. A nice alternative to that godawful Ken Burns swill about the National Parks. (If you don't stop tinkling that piano, I'm going to advocate painting mustaches on Mount Rushmore.) We're only halfway through the nuclear aftermath, up to the part when there are suffering survivors in the radioactive wreckage and nothing like enough emergency workers. It made me flash back to 9/11, the image of so many men converging on NYC, propelled by a drive to save people. Who will step up? Men. But it's not always and only men. 

I thought of that conversation this morning, as I read this news story about a 21-year-old Pakistani woman, whose family's house was invaded by terrorists. She had been hiding under the bed, and they were beating her father (who had resisted their demands for food and lodging).

[S]he ran towards her father’s attacker and struck him with an axe. As he collapsed, she snatched his AK47 and shot him dead.

She also shot and wounded another militant as he made his escape.

Miss Kausar said she had never fired an assault rifle before but had seen it in films and could not stand by while her father was being hurt. “I couldn’t bear my father’s humiliation. If I’d failed to kill him, they would have killed us,” she said.

Rukhsana Kausar, setting a good example!