Ken Burns

But that is the understanding of the contingency.

David McCullough said, and Rick Atkinson, who is this great historian, a writer in our film, likes to quote it.

He says, in history, there's no foreseeable future.

Right?

There's no foreseeable future.

Nobody knows that Washington, as he rides out just like a couple miles from here at Kipps Bay in Long Island, I mean in Manhattan, he rides out and one of his aides is grabbing the horse.

He's going to be shot.

If he is shot, we're speaking English.

English or French or Spanish.

We're not who we are.

And to then understand and weigh.

I mean, we lament today.

And you were lamenting today, you know, we sort of don't have heroes, but a hero is not a perfect thing.

A hero is, and the Greeks brought it to us, it's their idea, that heroism is a negotiation between the person's strength and their weaknesses.

And sometimes that negotiation, it's all internal, is a war, a kind of psychological war.

Achilles had his heel and his hubris to go along with his great strengths and powers.

Right.

And so if you just want some sanitized Madison Avenue top-down version of the past, it's bankrupt.

If you just say it's only bottom-up and you throw out the Washingtons and the Jeffersons in that unforgiving revisionism –

it's bankrupt.