Loading summary
Transcript57 lines
- [00:01]
Commercial Narrator
Ten years from today, Lisa Schneider will trade in her office job to become the leader of a pack of dogs as the owner of her own dog rescue. That is a second act made possible by the reskilling courses Lisa's taking now with AARP to help make sure her income lives as long as she does, and she can finally run with the big dogs and the small dogs who just think they're big dogs. That's why the younger you are, the more you need AARP. Learn more at aarp.org skills hey, Ryan.
- [00:31]
Ken Burns
Reynolds here wishing you a very happy half off holiday because right now Mint Mobile is offering you the gift of 50% off unlimited. To be clear, that's half price, not half the service. Mint is still premium unlimited wireless for a great price. So that means a half day. Yeah, give it a try@mintmobile.com Switch upfront.
- [00:54]
Commercial Narrator
Payment $45 for three month plan equivalent to $15 per month required new customer offer for first three months only. Speed slow after 35 gigabytes of network spizzy taxes and fees extra. See mintmobile.com with the state of today's economy, it is more important than ever to invest in products that last for years to come. As the seasons shift and get cooler, make sure your closet is stocked with durable layers that stand the test of time From American Giant American Giant's clothes work harder and are wearable season after season. Their greatest hoodie ever made is made of the highest quality materials that are cut and sewn right here in the United States. So you're investing right back into your local community. Choosing American Giant means taking a stand for a American manufacturing and hard working Americans something other mega corporations don't care about. From fleece to knit, all in a range of colors for versatile daily wear, American Giant delivers everyday pieces designed for everyday life. Feel the difference of quality made to last Clothes from American Giant get 20% off your first order with code STAPLE20@american-giant.com that's 20% off your first order at american-giant.com with code STAPLE20.
- [02:01]
Interviewer/Host
The MAGA Republicans in Donald Trump's Cabinet and in the House of Representatives and Senate losing their minds after the release of those 20,000 Epstein emails. And also they're now hiding the economic data. They're saying that the Bureau of Labor Statistics no longer has good data. They're blaming the shutdown and they may not provide data into the future. Then you have Trump's top economic advisor Kevin Hassett saying, well, maybe we're just going to have to concoct some information. Who knows, maybe we'll concoct it. Here, play this clip.
- [02:35]
Political Commentator
And the household survey wasn't conducted in October. So we're going to get half the employment report. We'll get the jobs part, but we won't get the unemployment rate and that'll just be for one month. But yeah, it is true that we probably will never will be maybe be able to concoct something that will never actually know for sure what the unemployment rate was.
- [02:52]
Interviewer/Host
We'll never know. We'll just maybe concoct it. I mean, when it comes to important financial data, the word concoct isn't the word that you like to hear. Then they bring in the other economic adviser, Peter Navarro, who says he toggles between there's no inflation and then the inflation is all Biden's fault. And let's blame Biden for everything. Here, play this clip.
- [03:14]
Political Commentator
Explain really carefully about this Democrat con job and let's be clear what it is they want to blame Donald Trump for. What is Biden legacy inflation.
- [03:27]
Interviewer/Host
Yeah.
- [03:28]
Political Commentator
And we have to be very clear about two things. One, go category by category. Housing, food, transportation, health care. Exactly what we're doing. And we also have to remind people that everything the Democrats do pushes inflation up and that the only reason.
- [03:50]
Interviewer/Host
So let's take no responsibility for anything. Ten months into this administration and it's going to keep saying Biden's name 20 years from now. And they bring in MAGA Republican Congress member Pete Sessions and he's asked a very basic question. What's your reaction to these Epstein emails that mention Trump's name? I'm sure you have to have some view Sessions. Right? I mean, you're on the Oversight Committee. Anything you want to share here? Here, play this clip.
- [04:17]
Ken Burns
You say there are, there are many questions. You still have a question about whether Donald Trump knew about the sexual abuse of the hands of Jeffrey Epstein?
- [04:27]
Political Commentator
Well, I've not gone through all of the documents yet. As you said, there's 20,000 pages. Our staff is going through this. I have been back home in Waco, Texas for the last three weeks dealing with the shutdown there. I will get back to it. We will get this done. But what we're doing right now is taking this huge number of emails of data, of pages and going through it and there, and there will be on a bipartisan basis an agreement about how we're going to hold formal hearings, who we're going to ask.
- [05:02]
Interviewer/Host
Now, I want to do something different here. Now normally I'd show you a few more clips and I'll show you how I think insane and crazy and dangerous these MAGA Republicans are being in the gaslighting, the lies. But what we talk about here on the network very frequently is these broader values about our democracy, our nation's founding. So I want to do something different and remind us us of that. I want to bring in right now Ken Burns. Ken Burns, incredible filmmaker, documentarian, my favorite documentarian ever. You've been making films about the American story, about the American struggle for democracy for five decades right now, and you're out with the new one. I think it's very timely enough of that political stuff as you're talking about the American Revolution, how we moved away from kings into the country that we are today. And I think that's relevant and salient. I want to speak to you about that first. Let me ask you just about that. And then I want to show people the trailer here because it brought chills to me when I saw it, especially in light of all the craziness. But just talk to us about American revolution right now.
- [06:11]
Ken Burns
So I've been working for almost 10 years on a history of the American Revolution. I began it when Barack Obama had 13 months to go in his presidency. And of course, there's been a lot of water under the American bridge and the time then Mark Twain is supposed to have said that history doesn't repeat itself. He's right. No event has happened twice, but it rhymes. And for 50 years, I've been making films about subjects in American history. And it always rhymes. And those rhymes change, particularly over the course of projects like this one that took ten years, or the Vietnam War that took ten and a half years. The rhymes are pretty, you know, obvious. However, as filmmakers, we have to have blinders on. We want to just acknowledge them and just be disciplined to not say, isn't this so much like today? Because they change. We have a German, the voice of a German officer's wife who's crossing the Atlantic to join her husband, part of the Hessian mercenaries the Brits have hired to augment the British Army. And she's heard a rumor that Americans eat cats. Now, if the film had, for some reason, the grace of God and funding come out last year, that would be a big deal. And people would say, can you put that in there? Because of the crazy arguments about immigrants eating cats in Springfield, Ohio, I think it's going to go On Sunday the 16th over, everybody. Nobody's going to notice that. But there may be other rhymes that they pick up. I pay that no mind. But Let me just say, as you suggested, that the Old Testament says there's nothing new under the sun. On July 4, 1776, there was. Everybody up to that point had been under authoritarian world, had been a subject. It was in the interests of their rulers that they'd be uneducated, that they'd be super, superstitious, that they'd be distracted by conspiracies, and that suddenly had something new. And they were speaking not just about their present moment, but all of us, the unborn millions, John Adams said, who would benefit from the success of this revolution. And they were creating a new thing, citizens, and that the pursuit of happiness for them uniformly was not the pursuit of objects in a marketplace of things, but lifelong learning in a marketplace of ideas. Because if you continue to educate yourself, you would become more virtuous, less susceptible, as Adam said, ambition and avarice and greed, and that that virtue would allow you to enjoy and be able to have the active idea of citizenship. This is brand new in the world, and this is one hell of a story. And it isn't just guys in Philadelphia thinking great thoughts and we try to remove the opacity of many of them. But we introduce you to scores of other folks who didn't have their portraits painted, who are as important to the story of the revolution and their women. Half the population there's out of 3,500,000 free and enslaved black people who've been imported from Africa. They're native nations coexisting and assimilated within the thirteen colonies. And to the west are native nations really hoping what is going to happen regardless of who wins, that their lands will be protected. And they're of course not. It's an incredible dynamic. It's a revolution, it's a civil war. As bloody a civil war as we have our Civil war. War is not really a civil war. It's a sectional war, and it's a world war, the fourth World War for the prize, global war for the prize of North America. And that's a really interesting and complicated story that we. It's taken us 10 years, and when we started, nobody was talking 250. Nobody was talking about all this stuff. And of course, as I said, Barack Obama had 13 months to go in his presidency.
- [09:54]
Interviewer/Host
Right, because the film should transcend and it should appeal to our basic identity of Americans. I hope the Supreme Court justices are watching this because oftentimes they like to claim that they have historical perspectives or they're originalists and that they interpret these documental issues through their view of history. That's their new.
- [10:21]
Ken Burns
The last nine months I've been touring the country and I've said the same thing to everybody. Said the same thing to a two and a half hour conversation with Joe Rogan and you and Theo Vaughn, as I said, to the editorial board of the New York Times, to inner city school kids in Charleston, South Carolina and Detroit and Chicago, to general audiences from Seattle to Los Angeles, from Charleston to Boston and every place in between. And I say the same things. We're umpires throwing balls and strikes. But that's exactly what you want is to be, you know, we live in a world in. Which is just a highlight film, right? So Babe Ruth. If you're going to show Babe Ruth, you could just show him hitting a home run. Well, Babe Ruth strikes out more often than he hits home runs and he comes up only once every nine times at bat. And sometimes it's that middle infielder, the second baseman, or the shortstop who's making diddly, who comes up batting ninth, who's the star of the thing. The last World Series to the Blue Jays, ever loving, you know, despair is about that. So what we try to do is engage all of these stories. I was talking to the conservative scholar Yuval Levin and he said, you know, the founders would come to this moment, they would be unsurprised that somebody was seeking kind of monarchical power. They'd be devastated. That Article 1 of the. Of the Constitution, which is about the legislative branch, that, that would have abdicated their. What they felt was fundamental role in, in. In. In being the Czech, the governor, the, the determiner of what the executive was going to do. And that would be the big shame of it. And that's from a conservative scholar. So I have a feeling that when we're in the moment and we're so dialectically preoccupied, everything's red state or blue state, you know, rich or poor, younger, old, gay or straight, north, south, east, west. We forget the reconciling power of a good story. The novelist Richard Powers said that the best arguments in the world won't change a single point of view. The only thing that can do that is a good story. It's a kind of benevolent Trojan horse that comes out in the night not to murder the citizens of the city or to burn that city, but to remind them of the complexity of human life, that the dialectic of politics and of our computer system, everything's a one or a zero, do not permit us to enjoy. And so I've labored really long in this field. It's really tough to be disciplined but the rewards are great because you do have a chance to speak to people that not necessarily agree with your particular politics or one side or the other. And I was just recently on C Span which has this morning call in show they have a Democratic line, a Republican line and an independent line. And you know, I've been on it before and usually you're dodging bullets from one and the other. And all of them began their questions which is we really love your work. And so I just thought okay, great, maybe a story. You know when a, when, when a person's in crisis you go to a pastor or, or a professional and they ask about your parents and when you were born and your childhood. Maybe for a country in crisis, in division way more division divided during our revolution they're loyalists that were the patriots are killing civilians and, and, and, and vice versa maybe have a chance to go back and be healed to put I hope the US back in the US and maybe the divisions are a mile wide but only an inch thick.
- [13:54]
Interviewer/Host
You know what's interesting is as you say Article one total capitulation, Article three at the district court level and circuit court level, by and large the checks hold at the Supreme Court level in my view recognizing the doctrine of absolute immunity and using a historical perspective to justify absolute immunity to me makes no sense because the very nature of our country that's when people watch the American Revolution we'll see was against authoritarians, against the concept of absolute immunity. But then the only thing that seems to be kind of holding in an interesting way, in an ironic way is federalism in states rights and seeing blue states and I'm not trying to get into political here but states asserting themselves and the vastness of our country and it making it difficult for an authoritarian to control say something like California, that would be the fourth largest where I live, the fourth largest GDP in the world if it was a country or Illinois and sending in ICE agents there. But states fighting back in a way that.
- [15:08]
Ken Burns
Well, you know what? I really urge your listeners and you to watch this six part 12 hour series because I think it will arm you with an important set of facts. Not opinions, not reactions, but facts about what the United States is a wonderful. We follow as I was saying, scores of people that I'd never heard of and I'm guaranteed pretty sure you've never heard of either about it. And they're the, the German, the wife of German officers. There's a German soldier, Johann Evil, don't mean to pick on the Germans who's openly contemptuous throughout the film about the rebels, as the Brits and the Germans call the patriots. And yet he's in the surrendering army at Yorktown. And he said, who would have thought 100 years ago that out of this multitude of rabble could arise a people who could defy kings?
- [16:02]
Interviewer/Host
Are we defying kings right now? How do you see us in this moment?
- [16:06]
Ken Burns
I'm totally focused on the moment of the revolution where we were most definitely defy. I mean the odds at Lexington Green were zero of success of this new idea. And the loyalists aren't enemies in our film. They're people who say, look, all of my health, my prosperity, the land I own. My family had spent a thousand years working as dependents on somebody else's land in Wales and England and Scotland and Ireland. And now I've owned some land. Why would I throw this away way for this untested idea? But a lot of people did and it turned out to be a pretty good experiment. And I think by going back and gathering the threads of all the complexity. Democracy was not the object of the revolution, it was a consequence of it. You know, these, these guys were forming an elite as. As people would complain today of a republican, small Arab republican experiment. But in order to win that war, they had to. Teenagers were fighting the continental army. There were second and third sons laborers without a job, second and third sons without a chance of an inheritance, recent immigrants with no property. And a war that began to protect the rights of propertied males becomes fought by people who had little or no properties of democracy becomes part of the reward for helping the success of this. That alone is an interesting thing. And we also have phrases like pursuit of happiness, more perfect union. We're a nation in the process of becoming. This story of the revolution is the big ban and it's an ever expanding universe. Do we take steps back? Yes, we do. Does the acceleration slow? Yes, it does. But there are lots of ways in which the story of the revolution can give courage, can give hope, can provide optimism. I mean today optimism is looked at as a kind of naive and pejorative condition. But jadedness and snark, I mean jadedness. This is only for journalists and jet setters, it seems to me. And that you got to be a citizen and citizen is actively engaged in reminding people what the American project is have been about good and bad. It's. I mean you can get an A on your test in 8th grade if you say taxes and representation. But we put Indian land first. That's what we wanted more than anything else, this is the fourth global war over the prize for North America. And that prize is the land. And that land is occupied for 22,000 or 12,000 or whatever number you're going to say, by people. People who don't have the same sense of property and deeds and things that inherited from Europe, but they nonetheless have that land. And Benjamin Franklin himself, impressed by the Haudenosaunee, the Iroquois Confederacy, this sort of six nations that had figured out a way to have their own trade and foreign policy, but protect the state's rights. You're talking about California or Illinois or whatever it might be, and at the same time and protect the interests of their independent nations, sometimes with different linguistic roots, certainly with different kinds of people. And he says, why can't we do that? 20 years before the revolution doesn't work. Nobody wants to give up their autonomy. But 20 years later, the war cry that he had put at the beginning, Join or die. The picture of the snake cut up into pieces. The snake representing the various colonies becomes the war cry in the rev. In the most consequential revolution in history. So it's a good story and it's. It, it will, I think, I don't want to say arm. I think it will provide enough information to understand the complexity of then. To understand how they're way more divided then than now. And that, that might provide a new way or a new approach, a new tack to how you don't, as the novelist Richard Power says, don't make arguments, but tell stories that have the way of reconciling and, and sort of, sort of ignoring the dialectic which is the enemy of anything. Right, everybody. We know this in our personal lives. We know this in our love. We know this in our art and our literature. One and one equals three. Our faith. One and one equals three. You can't build a bridge but every, you know, or airplane without one and one equal, always equaling two. But the thing we look for, the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. You know, here's the whole. Here are the sum of the parts. What's this? That's why I make films about that.
- [20:29]
Interviewer/Host
Ken, can we watch the trailer together? I want people to be able to see it before you go, because I think the trailer is so powerful.
- [20:35]
Ken Burns
Yeah, sure, sure. I just want to say I didn't edit this. This is PBS pulling from our 12 hour film.
- [20:41]
Interviewer/Host
All right, let's play it.
- [20:43]
Ken Burns
Ark kindled in America.
- [20:46]
Political Commentator
A flame has arisen, not to be extinguished. We think about Independence movements of the 20th century.
- [21:00]
Ken Burns
You don't always recognize the fact the.
- [21:01]
Political Commentator
United States actually started that the American.
- [21:04]
Ken Burns
Revolutionary movement served as a model for freedom from oppression.
- [21:09]
Political Commentator
America is predicated on an idea that.
- [21:12]
Ken Burns
Tells us who we are, where we.
- [21:13]
Political Commentator
Came from, and what our forebears were.
- [21:15]
Ken Burns
Willing to die for.
- [21:18]
Political Commentator
Collins said, no taxation without representation.
- [21:21]
Ken Burns
The fear was, if we give in to this precedent, what will they do in the future?
- [21:26]
Commercial Narrator
Crisis changes people. It gave different people different ideas about.
- [21:31]
Ken Burns
What they should be doing. It gave them a space to make this democracy real.
- [21:43]
Political Commentator
The founders thought, we can start over again and we can begin the world anew. The British objective is to suppress the rebellion, force them to acknowledge the authority of the king. Washington understands the war he's fighting. He doesn't have to win. He only has not to lose. He becomes quite eloquent in trying to persuade people we're all Americans.
- [22:11]
Ken Burns
We see regiments whip individuals who are not carrying arms, doing essential labor, including women.
- [22:17]
Commercial Narrator
They are at the forefront of this movement.
- [22:22]
Ken Burns
One of the most remarkable aspects is.
- [22:24]
Political Commentator
That you had such different places come.
- [22:26]
Ken Burns
Together as one nation.
- [22:30]
Political Commentator
It mushrooms into a global campaign that touches Europe and all parts of the world.
- [22:37]
Ken Burns
It so excites us that we are.
- [22:38]
Political Commentator
The product of a revolutionary moment where the world turned upside down.
- [22:45]
Commercial Narrator
To believe in America is to believe in possibility.
- [22:58]
Interviewer/Host
Sunday, November 16, the first part. It will run until Friday. To believe in America is to believe in possibility.
- [23:06]
Ken Burns
Goes on and says even those people who lack the ownership of them themselves had on either side has something to believe in because these arguments between Brits suddenly get blown out into transcendent liberties. And that's where the. Why these people would continue fighting against all odds against one of the great military powers on earth, certainly the greatest navy on the. On the. On the face of the globe. And to win in six and a half long bloody years is just as. And Washington, who's the most important person. We don't have a country without him. For all his flaws and all of his rashness and all of his bad tactical mistakes he makes throughout it, nonetheless is the person who convinces people that you're not a Georgian, you're not a New Hampshireite, you're an American. This new thing. And he gives up his power twice, which is just the stunning thing. He's able to inspire people in the dead of night to fight. He's able to pick subordinate talent unjealous of whether they're better generals, and many of them were than him. But nobody had the rectitude, Nobody had the command. Nobody had the dignity. Somebody says, Benjamin Rush, the only physician who signed the thing, he said all other monarchs in Europe would look like valet de chambre next to him. Right? You know what a valet de chambre is? The guy who's pouring out the piss pot next to George Washington. So you have to wrestle with the complications. You've got this guy who owns other human beings that this guy who rides out and risks the whole cause by in the battlefield. And a guy who makes some tactical mistakes, particularly. I'm in New York, in Long Island. His. His failure to protect his left flank causes the biggest battle of the revolution to be lost and be a humiliating patriotic defeat that will just in a few days lose him not just Brooklyn, but all of Manhattan as well. And New York becomes, for seven years and two months, a loyalist and British headquarters. And it's not until two years after down that he gets to ride back in and kind of reclaim the city that his own mistake had lost. But without him, we don't have a country.
- [25:17]
Interviewer/Host
We still have our country. Yeah, we had until Thanksgiving. We still have it. And there have been very trying times in our history, America.
- [25:28]
Ken Burns
More trying than this. More trying than this. There are some aspects that are unprecedented. I think you brought them up. But at the same time, you know, you wouldn't trade this moment to go back in the revolution and remember how the Declaration ends. We mutually pledged to each other our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor. George Washington may be, you know, the richest. One of the richest men in America. Can you imagine any of the richest men pledging their lives and their fortunes and their sacred honor to a cause that's so untested and untried. And he did it. He spent four days at Mount Vernon. He's either in somebody else's house, that's why it's super important where George Washington slept. Or he's in a tent for most of the six and a half years of the revolution and his officers are deserting and heading back home because they can make money from both sides. You can play the patriot side, you can pay the British side, you can make money off it. And he stays. And so do the common people who fight the teenagers and the ne' er do wells and the second and third sons without a chance of an inheritance of those recent immigrants. And they win the war for you and for me.
- [26:35]
Interviewer/Host
And here we are. We fight. Ken burns, American Revolution.
- [26:38]
Ken Burns
November 16, PBS streaming for free@pbs.org starting Sunday. You can get the whole thing streaming if you want it for free.
- [26:49]
Interviewer/Host
Ken, thanks for all the work you've done in your incredible career. And thanks for this labor of love. And labor of labor. It took you 10 years.
- [26:55]
Ken Burns
Oh, I won't. You know, I tell you, I won't work on a more important film than this one.
- [27:00]
Interviewer/Host
Well, I'm excited to watch it. And I know our 6 million subscribers are as well. Everybody make sure you hit subscribe. Ken, thanks for joining us.
- [27:08]
Ken Burns
My pleasure. Thank you. Love this video.
- [27:10]
Interviewer/Host
Continue the conversation by following us on Instagram. It's touch and help US blow past 1 million followers.