tv Deadline White House MSNBC December 24, 2024 1:00pm-2:00pm PST
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hi there, everyone. thank you so much for joining us for a very special edition of "deadline white house," something we're really excited about. september 23rd, 1990, was a sunday. since there was no google, email or iphone in 1990, it took two whole days for people to find out. the civil war on sunday night was the most watched opening episode of a series ever to play on public television. they weren't talking about the civil war. they were talking about the smash hit by ken burns, burns told the times this, quote, i can't believe it. this is higher than anyone guessed. and he meant that. he did not expect his film to be a sensation. in fact, he was told it would
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bomb. quote, in the '80s ken burns went from meeting to meeting to pitch "the civil war." the answer he kept getting was, no one would watch this. it wasn't that he was proposing a work of epic length, it was also because documentaries were not considered commercially viable and yet when the civil war premiered on pbs in 1990, nearly 40 million people watched. it remains the highest rated program in pbs history. the week of its premiere sales of blanka set tapes on which it could be recorded shot up 40% nationwide, and you can see why. >> by this century the country was deeply divided. northerners feared slavery might move west. as each new state was added to the union, it threatened to upset the delicate equilibrium of power.
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there are grave doubts at the hugeness of the land, and whether one government can comprehend the whole. henry adams. violence reached the floor of the united states senate where preston brooks savagely beat charles sumner with his cane. southern sympathizers sent brooks new canes. members began carrying knives and pistols into the chamber. meanwhile, the nation's chief executive, james buchanan, did nothing. a house divided against itself cannot stand. i believe this government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free. i do not expect the union to be dissolved. i do not expect the house to fall. but i do expect it will cease to
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be divided. it will become all one thing or all the other. >> political violence, divided country, it is like that mark twain quote, history doesn't repeat itself but it often rhymes. a truism ken burns has talked about on this very program. "the new york times" calculated that if you watched all of ken's films back to back to back it would take over 232 hours, a full nine days. but if you do have a spare nine days to watch them all in one sitting, what you will witness is proof that generation after generation history is rhyming right before our eyes. >> martin luther king was shot and was killed tonight in memphis. in this difficult day, this difficult time for the united states, it's perhaps well to ask what kind of a nation we are and what direction we want to move
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in. >> over the next week african americans americans, grieving, frustrated, angry poured into the towns of more than 100 cities including new york and oakland, newark and nashville, chicago and cincinnati and baltimore and in wa washington, d.c., where fire came within two blocks of the white house. antiwar students seized two building the at columbia university. the occupation lasted more than a week. the first time in american history that students forced a major history to shut down. policemen eventually drove the demonstrators out of the buildings and sent more than 100 students to the hospital. the united states now appeared
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to be more divided than at any time since the civil war. >> more divided than at any time since the civil war. ken was told, nobody will watch this. the 40 million people do, because our understanding of our past has the singular and unique ability to educate, inspire, captivate us, give us comfort and give us courage. so what happens right now? what can this arc of american history teach us about what we're living through today? it's where we start today with emmy award winning filmmaker and document taryn, our friend ken burns. we are lucky enough to have ken for the whole hour so we can marinate in the glow of his wisdom and genius and do a deep dive into his extraordinary body of work and your life, everything from the civil war and civil rights and some things you've opened up about. thank you so much for being here. >> thank you, nicole. i'm privileged to be with you again. thank you. >> can i start with your
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history? because i have not heard you talk about this very much, and there's this wonderful, wonderful piece of report being that's been done in "the new york times." i want to play a little bit of the interview that's done with you. is that okay? >> sure. >> okay. let's listen. >> reporter: the story that ken tells about his origin and film making dates back to a little bit after his mother died in 1965 when he was 11. she had breast cancer. and he describes how his dad had never cried, not in all of the years that his mom was fighting this excruciating illness. not even at her funeral. and the first time that ken sees his dad cry is when they're watching a movie together. >> we were watching "odd man out" by sir carol reed and it was about the irish troubles in the 19 teens and early '20s and at the end my dad just wept.
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>> reporter: and ken looks over and he understands that his dad is not weeping over what is on screen, he's weeping over the loss of his life. >> he would cry later on at other things. like a favorite sound track that he and my mom liked. i decided then that's when i decided that's what i wanted to be. >> so my mother was sick with cancer, started in her breast, metastasized. she died a few months short of my 12th birthday when i was 11. therefore, nicole, there was not a moment in my life where she was not dying, where that horrific sort of damaclise was not hanging over our very fragile, very tenuous family of her very strong, very heroic, very kind, very inspirational for everyone around her. my father who clearly suffered from some kind of undiagnosed mental illness and my younger brother rick and me. so when she finally died, it was
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this incredible release for many of us, but my father hadn't cried when she was sick and hadn't cried at her death and hadn't cried at the funeral which was incredibly sad, and neighbors had noted this. and then he cried at this movie, and i got it. i mean, i was now 12 and he had a strict curfew but he let me watch movies with him. i realized, this is what i'm supposed to be dock. at that point it meant becoming alfred hitchcock, john ford, howard hawks who were great hollywood movie directors at the time. i ended up at hampshire college that had just started, a new experimental school, wonderful, wonderful thriving place in its second year in existence. all my teachers were social documentary still photographers and film makers. they called hollywood industry. it's borne out of loss and i think so many of us are defined in this way.
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we forget we try to select for a metaphorical gated community. they will visit us and it's what we do in those moments that define us. it's true of individuals. it's true of families. it's true of communities. of course it's true of nations. theis where we can see the similarities that begin to accrue and develop and that i remember working on raising money for my first film, "brooklyn bridge" and i looked 12 years old. i got hundreds and be hundreds of rejections. at one point i remember writing a letter before commuters, writing that i felt i was an emotional archaeologist and facts of the past but some glue. some higher emotional thing.
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and it took me decades to sort of realize that that was rooted in this excruciating loss. it's now, nicole, 59 1/2 years that i've been without her. there's not a day that goes by that i don't think about her, and that is way too long to be without your mom. >> you're going to make me cry here at the beginning. what i wanted to ask you about the work though is i think the reason, if you read through all of the naysayers and the doubters at the beginning of your career, it's almost unfathomable to everyone who knows you and -- you know, people put your premieres on their calendar to make time to watch your work when it comes out, but i think the fact that it has always been this phenomenon of someone who experienced pain and loss but stayed open. can you just -- how do you do that? how did you do that?
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>> i don't think i did very well. i mean, i can remember just being in the back of a station wagon when a friend's mother's picking us up from school and it's a new mother and she said, what does your father do? anthropologist. what does your mother do? and be i would freeze and say, she's deceased as if using some kind of an know dine, anachronism would make it not so. and that's where this process was so many decades for me and coming to understanding. i was already practicing it in my work at a fundamental subconscious level. i was an emotional archaeologist. people were responding to these films, particularly the civil war in an emotional way. it wasn't just a history lesson that was going to have a test on tuesday, it was something that was involved these deep, powerful emotions. i didn't know it. i remember in a crisis i went to my late father-in-law who was a
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psychologist. i told him the date of her death, april 28th, 1965, was always approaching but never -- and receding but i was never present on that date, ever. he said, i bet you you blew out your candles as a kid wishing she'd come back. and i kind of went, how did you know? then he listed five other things and i looked at him like, how did you know this? he said, well, look what you do for a living. you wake the dead. you make abraham lincoln and jackie robinson come alive. who do you think you're really trying to wake up? i was 39 or 40 and all of a sudden it was like losing one stage of the rocket and i could then invest personally with my brother and myung daughters in understanding finding my mother, who had never been -- there was no burial. she was in a pauper's grave. my brother and i had to track her down and then put a memorial. then we had to be present every
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april 28th. now it's not a problem. now my little girls, i've got two sets of gals, my little girls text me almost every day calling her mommy, mommy. they call their mom mama. we have this connection. that's an animating spirit. it's one of those mysterious things that happened again not just within individuals or between individuals but within the story of nations. i think i asked a question about our country in every film and i think our answers are the reverberations. they're never really answers, you deepen with them each successive project. become equally as personal and sort of general and what you expect. you know, the aerial top down views. we try to meet it with a bottom
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up history, the so-called ordinary people. there aren't any ordinary people ever, but not just the bolt faced names. american history is not just the sequence of presidential administrations punctured by war. if it is an administration and it is a war, then we also need to hear from the people who did the actual fighting and dieing and the people who were home worrying about them and the people who were excluded from the ideals of freedom that we continually promote as we celebrate our supposed exceptionalism. >> supposed is something we'll spend a lot of time rumbling with. ment what is it like to live in a moment where you walk down the town, new york city, anywhere that you are, and the stakes, no matter who you voted for, the stakes were about who you voted for. that wasn't an artifact, that was in the views of all of the people on the ballot last
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november. >> i think it was there and i think if we had listened to it we would have known there would have been some sort of intermediate short-term understandings about just how much it costs to buy some groceries, what people -- how fears have been exploited, about immigrants, which this is nothing new. this is the important part. if mark twain said it, he's supposed to have said history will repeat itself but it rhymes. let's stop and think about it. no event has happened twice. we're not reliving history, what we're reliving is human nature and there's lots of greed in human nature and lots of generosity. lots of venality and lots of virtue. i'm working on the big history of the american revolution, if you think it's white guys thinking great thoughts, that's a huge part of the story, in philadelphia, you're missing a huge, important thing in which you begin to go, oh, my goodness, our revolution was a civil war, and more of a civil
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war than our civil war. very few civilian deaths outside of missouri and kansas in our civil war. it's a sectional war. one party against each other. it was a way to pipe it and sell it. a revolution is a civil war, at least a fifth, maybe a quarter of the people are loyalists and they're killing patriots and patriots are killing loyalists. there's huge stakes involved that aren't just involved with sturdy militia men hearing the bell and running to the moment's notice, but how do you, you know, start and -- a new government? why did you call it if you are clinging to the eastern seaboard a continental congress and then spend the next 250 years saying we've been uninterested in empire or call it the continental army and then say we've been uninterested in empire? this is a global war that involves more than two dozen
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nations. european as well. women and children are part of the moving armies. they're into the back home stoically doing those things, they are, but they are along. it's the same with german immigrants, recent immigrants, it's about indian land and all sorts of complicated things. what we've traditionally done is we've seen our history in a very narrow fashion, that top down version, but if you pull out the lens, you begin to add complicating characters, and that complication doesn't in any way diminish the beauty or even the exceptionalism of that tapestry, it just allows it to be in a more profound and a more truthful relief, and that's what we've tried to do in all the films. in fact, i have in my editing room a little neon sign that says, it's complicated. when you are a filmmaker, the scene is working, you don't want to touch it.
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we don't have a set research period, shoot it, edit it, boom, done. we never stop researching, editing, shooting. so we're constantly writing and rewriting and we have a relationship to this material which is fluid. and you could say we're courageable. we want to be shown that simplistic or seemingly simplistic answer isn't true, and it isn't. it's said sometimes the thing and the opposite of a thing are true at the same time. we can't do that in a divided politics. it's too super figures allmendinger. -- superficial. rather than get into the push me/pull you of that, it's super important for us to step back and understand there are exi again sis for everyone that don't obey the binary rules that actually don't exist. those rules, whatever they may be, red state, blue state,
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young, old, gay, straight, we can go endlessly on these and it feeds the big machine of disunion and media, but it's not how people live. "duck dynasty" boat guys went and saved brown people in houston during a hurricane. so how does that fit in with the comfortable narrative that we want. >> i want to press you more on this because i think a lot of people feel that we live in a country where the two sides don't always see each other, hear each other. i have to sneak in a quick break before we do that. as i say, ken stays with us for the hour. when we come back, we'll have that conversation. families divided. if your family feels torn apart by politics, ken's lessons of our history may offer you some hope. also ahead, what reverend martin
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luther king jr.'s legacy can teach us about our journey and setbacks. later, our nation turns their lonely eyes to legends like jackie robinson. what baseball is telling us about healing our nation. all of those stories and more when "deadline white house" returns. don't go anywhere. n't go anywhe. ...that stayed clear, even at 5 years. serious allergic reactions and increased risk of infections may occur. before treatment, your doctor should check you for infections and tb. tell your doctor if you have an infection, flu-like symptoms or if you need a vaccine. emerge with clear skin. ask your doctor about tremfya®. ♪♪ my moderate to severe crohn's symptoms kept me out of the picture. now i have skyrizi. ♪ i've got places to go and i'm feeling free. ♪ ♪ control of my crohn's means everything to me. ♪ ♪ control is everything to me.♪ and now i'm back in the picture.
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country's being torn apart. so i saw somebody who looked like my dad hitting somebody who looked like me. oh, my god! whose side would i be on? >> families divided, torn apart by politics. we have been there. we're back with ken burns. ken, this feeling of fights within, within families, is -- i mean, it became a line that governor tim walz used. thanksgiving has come and gone, the holidays are here. people who had their candidate prevail probably feel good. people who accepted these arguments we've been talking about about democracy on the line, most of them feel very worried, and i wonder what your counsel is for both sides, for the sides that prevailed if there -- if you think there are any signs of a capacity for humility in our politics which
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feel pretty broken, and on the side that feels disappointed. there's a lot of anecdotal evidence that people want to disengage, they don't want to dive into the lessons of histories. they feel disheartened. >> you can't do that to the latter. none of us are getting out of this alive. this very small, precious life we are given and one could presumably take that information and sit, you know, locked in the fetal position sucking your thumb, but we don't. we raise children and we tend gardens and we write symphonies and we have television shows and make documentary films, so you have to actually fight against that impulse at discouragement. you know, i think you either believe that all men are created equal, or you don't. if you do, huge responsibilities come along. one of them is accepting the results, however unpleasant, of
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elections, you know? we also have to deal with in this binary world the fact that the binaries don't actually exist, how do you disenthrall yourself from them? you see them from a different perspective. dr. samuel johnson said lost souls escape their loss of control in patriotism. we think of all the ways in which patriotism is misused and abused these days. it's so easy for things to be destabilized. do you remember that tocomanaro's bridge, galloping girdy in 1930, started to shake, wove itself into destruction. we have that tendency to do that with the combination of the ferocity of our rhetoric and the hand wringing that often accompanies this it. the chicken little and the aggressive other side of that. i think we have to figure out how to disenthrall ourselves. i came across a quote in the --
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that's in our american revolution film when i was thinking of talking to you. it's very short, by he had manned burke, a philosopher. i haven't yet put it on my hard drive. he said, the americans have made a discovery or think they have made one that we mean to oppress them. we have made a discovery, or think we have made one, that they intend to rise in rebellion. our severity has increased their ill behavior. we know not how to advance. they know not how to retreat. some party must give way. this is -- >> wow. >> -- what happens. the more i tell you, king george and parliament, the more you're tyrants, the more you act like a tyrant. the more they tell us we're acting like rebels and radicals, the more re bell yous and radical we become. then you have a hard time separating. the famous first inaugural of lincoln, the beginning of it is
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a measured thing. he said basically you want to secede? so if a state can secede from a nation then a county can secede from a state and then a community can secede from that county and then a neighborhood and then a family. what are you left with? essentially your question, the dining room table at thanksgiving. so where do we as human beings find the grace and the patience and the love, willing to allow some of these binary constructs that sometimes are durable. you know, let's just say when we point out the revolution as i've done in my comments, or the civil war, or vietnam and we see, wow, that's divided like now, we also forget for marginalized people, for women, for black americans, for native americans, for many, many other groups, there's been perpetual violence of that kind of community destroying, family wrecking kinds of things that take place when human beings do
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the bad things they do to one another, and yet virtue is around the corner or right in front of us. there's courage. my mother's courage still reminds me. i met people long after she died who said i was in the same hospital room with her and i knew i was getting out and she knew she had a death sentence and she was cheerful and cheered me up. i just needed to communicate to you what that means. and all around us are these examples of that kind of simple human decency and courage. i think the way in which you conduct yourself in the way you pursue the ies that you do has driven many people's space to explore not just the binary, oh, my god the sky is falling, but something that is more nuanced and something that asks us to take responsibility for it, to not just say, oh, it's them. that's what i've been on your program so many times saying, that's the problem.
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when we make a them when there's only us, the u.s., only us, that's where the problem begins. so one of the ways we stop is go, you've got to do it first. you've got to stop that first, right? i'm not going to be sure that it's going to be all right until you stop doing this, and that's not the way they work. we have many people in our past, particularly dr. king, who just talks about an army of love, who talks about the ability of all the teachings that animate all the major religions of the world, of the sanctity of human life and the willingness in the christian religion to turn the other cheek is the phrase but also that is everything. the to give up and find how rich you are in the giving up of things. >> to be the light. the to sort of be the thing that you are craving. god, i love that. we need more and more and more. i have to sneak in another break. when we come back, martin luther
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king jr.'s iconic "i have a dream speech" and what that moment calls on every person be to do now. later on why jackie robinson should give everybody hope going into 2025. don't go anywhere. >> rab! keke, i won again? ow! daddy will be back soon. [cries] -ha ha! -boom! we're swimming in it now. -rent's due. -toodle-oo! busted! nothing beats playing with friends, except bankrupting friends. a chewy order for coal is on the way. because mom and dad told the girls if they weren't on their best behavior... this year, they'd get... coal? (puppy crying) (excited screaming) and with coal in the family, mom and dad used chewy to get everything delivered in time for the holidays.
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director of the fbi considered a communist sympathizer, and whose life was in constant danger from the people who hated the color of his skin and everything he stood forgave a speech that would be considered a turning point in american history. >> i have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. i have a dream today. >> the speech, of course, turning point and a triumph for the civil rights movement. as the nation would soon learn, progress is almost never a straight line. >> the mar on washington is a watershed moment in the movement itself, but this is also a turning point in terms of the violence that we associate with the movement. and the escalation of opposition. because the fear is that a civil
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rights bill is coming. it's only a month later that you have the bombing of the 16th street baptist church in birmingham, alabama, and killing four little girls. >> reminder of the victories, the tragedies, the progress, the backsliding that defines our history. ken is still with us, and we have been joined by distinguished political scholar eddie glad and former u.s. assistant attorney maya wylie. maya, start with you. >> well, eddie and i were talking about this off set. you know, the march on washington was an incredibly important thing for everyone in the civil rights movement. it was a watershed, but it could not have happened just because everyone had a dream. it could only happen because everyone was living activism into the dream. >> right. >> and because the local fights
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that were not nationally organized taking place in every community were building the hope that people felt for the possibility that if they fought, they might win. not that it was a guarantee. but that's what hope is, it's a passion for what's possible. and what was so important about dr. king's speech was that he was speaking out what people were already feeling and doing, and the importance of everyone coming together and having that many people saying, yes, this is our dream, incredibly powerful and important. but in this moment i think we have to remember that it was the on-the-ground organizing that enabled that to happen. and we should also remember one other thing because king's speech the night before he was assassinated was a speech that he gave, and when you talk about the mountain top, we always talk
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about that part of the speech, getting to the mountain top, i might not get there with you, that's always the part we talk about, but the more important part was the same thing be that kamala harris said, which is that in our darkest nights we can see the stars better. the stars are brighter, which means in the darkest hours we have to find that light and recognize -- >> to persevere? >> yes. even in the hard times we have to find that light. and the organizing helps bring it. >> i need to bring ken back in. i have to sneak in another break. we'll all be right back. deserves puffs indeed. america's #1 lotion tissue. (singing) i'll be home for christmas. you can plan on me.
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insurance, and estate planning. both producers: all with low fees. carl: we're experiencing technical difficulties... uh, carl... schwab! schwab. a modern approach to wealth management. —sounds like you need to vaporize that cold. dayquil vapocool? it's dayquil plus a rush of vicks vapors. ♪vapocooooool♪ woah. dayquil vapocool. the vaporizing daytime, coughing, aching, stuffy head, power through your day, medicine. we're back with three of my favorite humans walking the earth. eddie, just the language, i have a dream. do we still dream? >> sometimes. sometimes those dreams are nightmares. sometimes they're aspiration. it's really imagination
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constitutes the battleground. it allows us to see beyond our current condition, to imagine what's possible. le but sometimes to get to that we have to experience what is and the horror of it. when i think about dr. king's speech, i think about it being book ended by violence. the murder of edgar everett and the murder of those babies at the 16th street baptist. those students who had seen unimaginable brutality in the south, who are really exhausted. they didn't want to go to washington, d.c., because it distracted from what they were doing. the perform mative nature. i'm thinking about king actually appealing to kennedy to issue a second emancipation proclamation and they refused and instead invited black leaders to the white house as a response. so i'm thinking about the complexity of the moment and i'm thinking about the way in which we often reach for king's "i
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have a dream" speech as a way of saying we're actually decent. as a way of avoiding confronting the ugliness that surrounds him that actually put him in the coffin and, you know, that -- >> like the cherry picking of the story. >> the cherry picking.forgeting. the forgetting that situates and allows this evasion and deferral. we evade and defer and generations after generations have to deal with the evasion and the deferral. for some people, we have to raise our babies in the midst of it all. >> ken, that's the work, right? and that's why you're so flinching full length, right? no two minute 30 second piece of work that you wrote, right?
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tell me the importance of the whole story. >> well, i think that's it. that's at the heart of the -- you know, actually some people supported the civil war. most of the people who thought no one would watch it were critics said no one is going to sit still for 11 1/2 hours of still photographs about this event. that wasn't the case because we were all-star fd for meaning and all meaning comes from time. that's an important part. i think what we do is we still have to learn how to separate the binary, that while we do cherry pick, as eddie's saying and as maya's saying, we pick the nice, ripe fruit that's plucked there, we forget the underlying history of violence that's going on. dr. king said all people are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality. he's not talking about some black people or other black
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people or some northern liberals, other northern liberals tied in a single garment of destiny. he's talking about all people, and that's where in this weave of fabric, in this garment we have the seeds of the possibility of undoing our addiction to the binary, right? i don't like him. i like her. i'm for her. i'm against him. you're bad. that's why this thanksgiving is so wrong. so we're -- we've got our own work to do, and it has to do with obviously trying to preach the complexities of this history that isn't allowing us to just cherry pick these lovely moments. all of a sudden jack roosevelt robinson arrives and everything is fine. it wasn't, and it still is not fine. and it still goes on, and yet we still have these people within
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our midst who guide us and suggest the possibilities of our republic. they're always still there, even in the darkest night as maya said. the stars are bright and perhaps in the darkest night the dreaming -- i certainly know it's true up here in new hampshire, that you just look at something and you feel your atomic insignificance, which has a funny way of instilling you with bigness that, you know, just as the ego 'tis in our midst is disregarded, you have a humility that's required, as many of the civil rights workers did, put on their clean sunday best to go out, come back, put it back on again and go out again. brian stevenson said this to me the other evening, of course you put one foot going in front of the other. and the idea that you're allowed some sort of four-year time-out doesn't work. >> it doesn't work. i mean, it's not in anyone's
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interest. i wonder how you operationalize that, eddie? how do you get people beyond not just the logistical hurdles of getting back out there and fighting for what is good, how do you get them through the emotional hurdles of that right now? >> you really have to acknowledge it. you have to acknowledge that we're not okay. we have to understand our responsibility. baldwin said responsibility is not lost, responsibility is abdicated. if one refuses abdication, one refuses again. we are getting our babies to the other side of this. when the storm comes, the storms are always coming, our task is to make sure our babies get to the other side. that's how you wake up and put your feet on the ground and get up even though, as dr. king did when they attacked those elementary school babies who were let out of school early, they beat them with bats and tree limbs, it put him in the bed.
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someone had to come and sing pilgrim's sorrow to him to get him out of bed so he can go back and do it again. one of the difficult challenges because ken is speaking straight to the heart of it, but in the midst of this one of the most difficult challenges is how this country plays so fast and loose with our dead. >> yeah. >> all the people that have died that have made me and maya possible. the sacrifices of her father and her mother that made us possible, and the fact that we're supposed to just and fight the trumpist, find the energy. some days we've just got to say -- so that we can actually get up and move honestly. but some days we've got to acknowledge that we're not okay. >> i'm so grateful and so thankful that y'all do it around be this table. thank you so much. maya and eddie, thank you for being part of this conversation. we'll give ken the last word
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ken, everyone has a favorite ken burns and in our house where baseball is our family relidge be gone, baseball is ours. why baseball? why is it so much more than a game with a stick and a ball? >> it's interesting, nicole. you know, first of all, please tell eddie i'll come and sing a hymn to him. he's right about preparing our kids but also protecting them. one of the things jackie robinson did is prepare us, set the stage and not allow just black players to come in but brown players, asian players. i can go into a big argument about why it is the greatest game ever invented but just remember when you are talking about a football game, joe montana threw a ball to jerry rice in the last moments and we
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won. or, you know, michael jordan tongue wagging hit a three pointer at the buzzer and we won by one point but a baseball story always goes, i remember my mom took me to this game or my dad brought me here and i can't tell you after the series said my dad and i used to watch it every january. my dad passed away. now i'm showing my baseball series to my son and i never thought i'd have a chance to thank you. but of course the thanks isn't that, it's in the bonds that we have, the sport that has accompanied every generation of our national narrative, that has reflected us in good and bad ways, and still manages to have infinite chess-like combinations. as much as we want to revere some golden era you can't before jackie arrived or even after, right now at any time when the season is on you're seeing as great a play as there is. it just has a wonderful kind of
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comfort of continuity to it that i love so much. and i think, first of all, it's nice to sing together, right? >> yes. >> you're not angry. nobody asking whether you're a registered republican or democrat. >> never. >> and you sing that national anthem, you're singing together. it's like an amazing thing to do that. the seventh inning you sing "take me out to the ballpark" if you are at fenway or "sweet caroline." it's something about doing something together, the us part of the u.s. it's the key to getting out. the only thing i remember is franklin roosevelt accepted his nomination in soldiers field and says dante tells us the divine justice weighs the sins of the cold blooded and the sins of the cold hearted in other scales. better living in a spirit of charity than the consistent omissions of a government frozen in the ice of its own
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indifference. if you are looking at those stars, decide what kind of government you want to have. >> you have to come back before opening day and we'll have that hour-long conversation about baseball is the greatest game ever played. >> ever played. >> ever. ever. >> happy to. >> i love you so much and i love having all -- >> love you, nicole. boy, this was very special. >> thank you so much. >> thank you. thank you. thank you. >> you can navigate all of ken's films on ken's digital flat form, unum. we are so grateful to all of you for letting all of us into your homes for this very special edition of "deadline white house."
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