Ken Burns speaks truth to power at Yale commencement

Ken Burns spoke at Kerry and Bush's alma mater today, criticising the war in Iraq and our current rash of leaders (and all our attitudes about black and white, good and evil in politics):

"Steel yourselves. Your generation must repair this damage, and it will not be easy," Burns told the seniors.

Burns quoted famed jurist Learned Hand as saying, "Liberty is never being too sure you're right."

"Somehow recently, though, we have replaced our usual and healthy doubt with an arrogance and belligerence that resembles more the ancient and now fallen empires of our history books than a modern compassionate democracy," Burns said, to applause from the 1,300 graduates and their families and friends.

He criticized what he called a culture of censorship and intimidation that was intolerant of others, as well as a compliant media and a consumer culture that values the pursuit of money above everything.

"We have begun to reduce the complexities of modern life into the facile judgments of good and evil, and now find ourselves brought up short when we see that we have, too, some times and moments, become what we despise," Burns said.

-- AP, quoted in the Record-Journal (Meriden, CT)

Although Burns is cited as being critical of the war, I think he speaks to a polarization I doubt in myself. Can the neocons really be as crazed as they seem to me somedays? (But then I go back and review PNAC). Sometimes it seems hard to believe.

I wish I could talk to Burns directly about his historian's perspective on the affairs of the day!