Ken Burns

probably for the most part.

But they also are central to what happened.

They're the calling of balls and strikes.

And I think there's something exhilarating in that complexity.

And this notion that certainly among authoritarians that you want to reduce it to some simplistic slogans is ridiculous.

We're making a film on it called Emancipation to Exodus about Reconstruction, the last known period.

It does poison it, Chuck, because you're smart and discerning and have read enough.

But for the people who are picking it up, they then become- And what if it's the only thing they read about it?

The only thing they read about it, then that's what I worry about too.

And I can't do that.

I can't ignore that George Washington-

um, own hundreds of human beings.

You can't, as the writer, Rick Atkinson said in the, you know, he's now two thirds of the way through his marvelous trilogy.

You can't square that circle that he makes, you know, tactical mistakes that he's rash on the battlefield, but all the other things add up to something.

And, and you don't need to throw the baby out with the unforgiving revisionist bathwater, nor do you have to subscribe to the Parson Weems treacly, you know, never tell a lie, chop down a cherry tree, throw a coin across the dollar.

You can, you can,

unsubscribe from both of these tyrannies and come to a much more complex thing.

And that's where you bother people because they want things to fit in.

They just want it to be white or they want it to be male or they want it to be dimple or they want it to be still encrusted with the barnacles.

But we don't even have to look at the big ideas that we're supposed to be protecting because if you look at those big ideas, you begin to understand even further the complexity and the beauty