Name: Theo and Ken Burns Discuss What it Means To Be An American
Uploaded: 2025-10-09T17:08:45.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Theo and Ken Burns Discuss What it Means To Be An American' from Theo Von Clips on Comedy Buff. Published 2025-10-09. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Theo and Ken Burns Discuss What it Means To Be An American' from Theo Von Clips on Comedy Buff. Published 2025-10-09. Transcript available.

Theo and Ken Burns Discuss What it Means To Be An American

Lincoln, as a young lawyer, not yet 29 years old, 28 years old, addresses the
Young Men's Lyceum
in Springfield, Illinois, and they're discussing foreign policy. And he says,
Whence shall we expect the approach of danger? Shall some transatlantic giant
step the earth
and crush us at a blow? And then he answers his own question, never. All the
armies of Europe,
Asia, and Africa could not by force take a drink in the Ohio River or make a
track in the Blue Ridge
in a trial of a thousand years. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be
its author and
finisher. We are a nation of free men who will live forever or die by suicide.
So there's our
challenge, right? You want to get self-involved. You want to make your neighbor
your enemy. You want
to make lots of them. Then you are headed towards that self-destruction that
Lincoln's talking about.
You want to figure out what we share in common, this corny sort of civic virtue,
civic energy that
comes from the Declaration of Independence, like how you can work together to
do it. And, you know,
a lot of people who are unbelievable citizens, it's like they go to the school
board meeting.
Like they participate in, you know, I live in New England and we have a town
meeting and, you know,
sometimes the biggest decision is whether to buy a new pumper for the fire
department. That's a big
deal. That's civics. That's dealing with the stuff. And it's also saying I've
got to vote and I have a
responsibility as a citizenship to do it. And then we'll save our country. Then,
you know, if you like
the abstraction of disagreement and violence and all that sort of stuff where
suddenly just because
your feed tells you one thing that somebody's an enemy, then you're lost. But
if you look across
the room and you say, you know, I don't share in common that much with somebody
who comes from
Louisiana and lives in Tennessee. I was born in Brooklyn and grew up in
Delaware and Michigan and
now I've lived in New England for the last, you know, uh, 54 years. What would
we have in common?
We share a love of those ideas. We share a love of that process, the pursuit of
happiness.
God. Yeah. It comes so much back to like your own integrity with yourself, you
know? And I think
it's, it's interesting whenever, like, as I'm watching your documentary, it's
like you learn that,
like, even as you were saying earlier, that this is like the first time that
people thought of
themselves, um, as not under rule, but of like, it's almost like we were away
at summer camp or
something and you kind of, your imagination started to bloom. That's right. You
know,
like that's kind of the feeling that I get of those, uh, of the first colonists
here.
It's so, it's so exciting. There's a moment. I mean, it's blooming on somebody
else's land as
well. It's definitely blooming on native Americans. So I don't want to not say
that. So here's,
here's the deal. You ask any school kid, how's the, um, how were the colonists
who threw the tea in
Boston Harbor dressed? And they say as native Americans, why were they dressed
as native
Americans? And they go to deflect the blame. And you go, no, they were dressing.
And it's so ironic
that we were saying to Britain, we're no longer part of you. The scholar Phil
Deloria says,
we're Aboriginal. We choose to dress this way because we're severing our
feelings and our
affections with the motherland because of what you're doing to us. And who do
you choose? Oh,
the people that you've spent the last 150 years dispossessing of their land.
And oh, by the way,
you're going to spend the next 150 years continuing to dispossess them of their
land. So there's a
great irony, but there was a point you made a second ago, a little bit later in
the declaration after he
says pursuit of happiness. There's the phrase he says, Jefferson says, all
experience has shown
that mankind are more disposed to suffer while evils are sufferable. It's not
that difficult.
Take me through that a little bit, but can you break that down for me a little
bit so I can
understand it? So he says, basically, he says, all experience has shown that
mankind are more
disposed to suffer while evils are sufferable. Meaning, heretofore, all human
beings have been
under the boot of an authoritarian. And basically, it's the human lot to just
put up with it. And we are
creating something new called a citizen. It's going to take hard work. It's
going to take that self
examination. It's going to take that self-criticism, which we're so unwilling
to do. It's rather
criticize the other than ourselves, rather to assume the discipline necessary
to have the virtue, getting
better as a human being, to be a citizen. But he's putting it right down there.
You will devolve back to
that state where when somebody comes in who is acting as an authoritarian, you'll
go, fine, take it over for me,
Mussolini. The trains are running on time. That's all I need is for the trains
to run on time. You know, you think that's
what it's about? It's not about. We know what the story of tyranny is. And we
know what our story is. And our story is not the
tyranny. And it never happens with a light switch. It happens incrementally.
It's like two frogs sitting in the boiling pot of water. And somebody says,
they're still saying to
each other, I really like a hot bath, you know, until they're cooked. Right?
And so at some point,
what Jefferson is saying is, do not be so disposed to suffer while evils are
sufferable. Meaning,
do not put up with the yoke of authoritarianism. You know, be more active as a
citizen and understand
that that person that you disagree with, we want them to disagree. Remember, we're
the first country
on earth that didn't establish a religion. Like, almost all of the wars that
are fought are over some
interpretations of religion or some other such thing that devolves from that.
And we were saying,
make no notice of it. Thomas Jefferson himself said, if my neighbor believes in
20 gods or no god at all,
it neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg. And like, New York and
Pennsylvania have got worked
into their state constitutions, just not paying attention to a particular
religion means you are
free from all the tyrannical thou shall rather than this is. Like, the thing
that you're talking about,
that individual responsibility- That's another them and me.
That's exactly, when it is, this is, and it is an acceptance, thou shall is
telling somebody else
how to be and how that's wrong. So the whole story is trying to figure out, you
could say that we're
a nation in the process of becoming. Like, and what do you want to be? Ever see
the movie?
You should always be a nation in the process of becoming. Of course. Otherwise,
what are you?
You are static. You're, you know, Putin's Russia. You're Xi's China. You've
just got people telling
you what to do. And nobody wants that. You want to develop ideas. You want to
pursue science. You
want to pursue arts. You want to have a lot. You want to tolerate lots of
different points of view.
And right now we've gotten to the place where we don't even want to listen to
another point of view.
We only want to hear the information that, you know, sat us. Oh yeah, that's
what I agree with,
you know, and not sort of expand ourselves and say, I can listen to someone
that I totally disagree
with. And I don't have to then make that person the enemy. That's the key to
the American experiment.
Yeah. Well, I think even as a conversation like this, man, it's so good for me.
Like,
it's so good. It takes me out of this. Like, I don't get too caught up in the
like us and them thing,
but it puts me back in a place of like, oh yeah, well, I'm here with a purpose,
right? Like,
it gives you a purpose of like being a citizen, of being a human, right? Of
like,
of like a Rubik's cube that will never be solved, right? It's like, I don't
need to win,
right? Like, but I, I do need to keep playing and also be a good competitor and
an earnest competitor.
And, um, yeah, it just, it puts it more back on you, right? It makes the mirror
a little bit
stronger. I think it gets nice. That is a beautiful thing. And it goes along
with your dream of the,
I mean, Jefferson wrote that to Adams, you know, they were friends and they
were enemies. And then
they were friends again at the end of their life. They both died on July 4th,
1826,
50 years to the moment of the signing of the declaration. And they both thought
the other
was alive. Uh, Jefferson had died first. Adams survived him by a couple of
hours, but just
before he died, he said, you know, I liked the dreams of the future better than
the history of
the past. And, and, and we, and so we shall go on. So we will go on and shall
go on puzzled and
prospering beyond example in the history of mankind. And I love that idea. That's
puzzled and
process. I gave a commencement address last year at Brandeis university. And I
was talking about how
we're so preoccupied with these binaries, you know, red state, blue state,
Democrat, Republican,
young, old, black, white, gay, straight, rich, poor, East, West, North, South.
We always have these
divisions. They don't exist in nature. They're just arbitrary divisions that we've
imposed on things.
And so I said, when you look at things and you see how it's going, the opposite
of faith is not
doubt. Doubt is central to faith. The opposite of faith is certainty. I was
going to say certainty.
Certainty destroys the mystery of this thing that you and I have been talking
about. Who wants to stop
that? Unless it's a vow shall, you can't dance. You can't do this. You can't do
this. You can't
all the things that were told, or because you do this, you are not a good
person or you are not a
real American or what, what's a real American. There's got to be that thing
that you and I,
the essence of what we've talked about. It seemed to me has been about this
incredibly difficult thing,
which is self-discipline. Like I need to actually do the work on myself. I
cannot assume,
I cannot insist that you do the work for you before I'm willing to do it for
myself.
But there are people now where it seems like a lot of people are doing people
like the people who have
been doing the work and following the rules hypothetically and be trying their
best to be
an American. I feel like some of those people are starting to wear thin because
it seems like
everybody doesn't want to. And that may be, and that may be that their idea of
what being an American
is, isn't the same as the other people, right?
Well, I don't think that's the case. I think a lot of it has to do with this
device in our back pocket
and all the atomized sources of information that we have. Like when I grew up,
there were three
channels and PBS, which I works, all my films on PBS and maybe an independent
channel. You basically got
your local newspaper that had a staff of lots of people who covered the school
board meeting and
this. And so people knew what it was. Now, you know, Daniel Patrick Moynihan,
the late Senator from New York
here said, everybody's entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts,
right? We do know that the
Battle of Gettysburg happened on July 1st, 2nd, and 3rd, 1863. But what we're
now in a situation
is, and this is the greatest danger, is that we are being told things that aren't
true. And there's
not amongst the exponentially greater number of possibilities of outlets that
everyone has,
anybody saying, well, actually that's not true. And so what happens, that demoralization
that you're
talking about or that sense that I played by the rules or whatever, it may be
more imbalanced by the
fact that they have been convinced of a lot of things that aren't necessarily
true. You know,
one in one has got to equal two, right? Except in our faith, in that faith,
where one in one has to
equal three, that we say the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. So
here are the sum of the
parts, and here's the whole. And so what's the difference? That's where we want
to 