Ken Burns

And people are using Vietnam analogies to talk about that.

And then, you know, the film comes out essentially 10 years after that, 40 years, 45.

Two years after that.

And you begin to realize that your job is to use the passage of time as triangulation, to use the scholarship as triangulation, to figure out how to more firmly understand an event by what you've done and sort of average out those things.

Disaster.

Not a disaster.

Disaster again.

And so Vietnam undergoes lots of things.

And of course, it's none of those things.

It's never... History doesn't repeat itself.

No event has ever happened twice.

Never has, never will.

And so...

the trope of that becomes a kind of prison for us to get in.

And so what you have to do is be dispassionate.

You have to sort of like Odysseus, tie yourself to the mast so that you can hear Circe's sound, but you don't want to like point arrows.

Isn't this so much like today?

Because as I said, you're dated instantly by that.

And you've become, you know, the historical profession has gone through many fashions of historiography, right?

So after World War II, narrative's bad.