Ubiquitous PBS presence, documentary director, and dogmatic liberal Ken Burns is making the media rounds for his latest upcoming 12-hour, six episode epic The American Revolution, debuting on most PBS affiliate stations Sunday night. Burns spoke to Newsweek late last month about the project, codirected by Sarah Botstein and David Schmidt.
If Burns' interviews reflect the doc’s content, we may in for less a celebration of the Revolution and more of a lecture on America’s past sins.
Burns' thesis is that the Revolution--both the six-plus years of actual fighting and what arose from the "conversations in Philadelphia" around it--is best understood as a messy and even hypocritical battle of ideas about the natural rights of man that were bubbling up during the Enlightenment, and grafted onto a fledgling country where slavery was still the modus operandi in all 13 colonies. How the stakeholders juggled those diametrically opposed ideas--liberty and self-governance but also slavery and their horrific treatment of the Native American population--is the part of the human experience that Burns is most interested in exploring….
Burns makes a determined effort to address the many contradictions of the war. How could a revolution be fought for "the rights of man" when the very people promoting such an ideal were slave owners?”
Newsweek noted that American Indians and enslaved blacks will have their stories told alongside Thomas Jefferson and George Washington. Burns painted himself as liberating the masses from their poorly formed patriotism:
He said the way Americans learn about their war of independence, by way of textbooks and museum exhibits, had become “sentimentalized” over the years, “encrusted with the barnacles of sentimentality and nostalgia that had been constantly used or misused as a cudgel against political enemies.”
But focusing in on the Indians and the blacks isn't that W word:
"It's not woke," Burns said, perhaps anticipating the backlash. "It's just a good story. And a good story requires that you call balls and strikes."
Burns has always considered himself an optimist, though he says he's never been as pessimistic as he is at this moment. A longtime supporter of Democratic causes, he doesn't mention Trump's name but suggests that the president's theory of nearly unlimited executive power is precisely the thing the founders and patriots were trying to build a bulwark against….
Burns doesn't have to point out anti-Trump messages in his docs; liberal journalists will happily do it for him. In a Boston Globe interview Sunday, Burns was lauded by writer Mark Arsenault for highlighting “a spine-tingling quote from Thomas Paine, about how the American Revolution proved that the ‘powers of despotism consist wholly in the fear of resisting it.’ It's a sentiment that would be at home on a handmade poster at a No Kings political rally.”
Even Burns’ actor-narrators had political points to make, like veteran actor Peter Coyote:
Things were once so bad it makes today look like a dispute at a picnic, and we came from that period of the Revolutionary War and somehow forged a nation with a Bill of Rights and a Constitution, and pushed this experiment and held the forces of autocracy at bay, basically until the present moment.
