By By JOHN EBY / Dowagiac Daily News
BENTON HARBOR - His award-winning trilogy took Ken Burns 17 years to make, but the documentary filmmaker acknowledges that with "The Civil War," "Baseball" and "Jazz," in many ways "I have made the same film over and over again."
Studying civilization 2,000 years from now, it is predicted that Americans will only be remembered for creating three things - the Constitution, baseball and jazz music.
His 10-part documentary broadcast in January 2001 depicted jazz, "an utterly American art form. The genius of America is improvisation. The Constitution is the greatest improvisational document ever created. Four pieces of paper written in the18th century is able to adjudicate our thorniest problems in this new 21st century."
Its vitality rests in it identifying the nation as "in the process of becoming, always striving to become a more perfect union."
The Declaration of Independence dwells on the pursuit of happiness. "It insures our future by making Americans unusually curious and unsatisfied."
Jazz exceeds the mere boundaries of music. It is "a window through which so much of American music can be seen. It is a curious and unusually objective witness to the 20th century, so our series necessarily became a story again about race relations and prejudice, about slavery, minstrels, Jim Crow, lynchings and civil rights, about progress forward and progress backwards. African-American history is a minor, inconsequential, politically correct addendum to our national heritage, relegated to February, the shortest, coldest month.
As the nation matured and lost touch with place by moving around, personal chronicles dried up in most communities.
Half a century ago "we partially woke up to this problem and began to insist on relevance in our teaching of history," which yielded "social history," a bottom-up endeavor "focusing on real people and recognizable things," Burns said.
But people did not respond. "Relevance became an excuse for not even teaching history in our schools."
Swathed in statistical demographics and political correctness, this "new era" became "equally devastating to our national memory."
The pendulum swung so far the other way, "A history of Illinois could be written without ever once mentioning Abraham Lincoln. Something obviously had to change, and I'm pleased to report in some ways it has," Burns said.
For the Red Sox fan who lives in New Hampshire, "Baseball offers a unique prism through which one could see refracted much more than the history of a simple sport. This is the story of labor and management … of immigration and assimilation … citizenship is made not by a sheet of paper from the State Department, but by participating in the national pastime of their adopted land. This is the story of popular culture, advertising and mythmaking - how the country really is and how we would like to see ourselves. This is the story of heroes, villains and fools … a story of growth, decay and rebirth of American cities … and, of course, the story of race.
Yet "emotional connections" from anecdotes, stories, memories and feeling "become a kind of glue" that makes the most complex of past events stick in mind.
Terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, "ruptured our sense of invincibility and safety that we had gradually acquired as the Cold War receded into the past. Still, as we struggle to define ourselves in the wake of that rupture," he said, "it's interesting that we come back again and again to the Civil War and Mr. Lincoln for the kind of sustained vision why we Americans … are still stitched together by words and their dangerous progeny, ideas. It was altogether fitting and proper that some of those powerful words and ideas of Lincoln's echoed at Ground Zero on the first anniversary of Sept. 11 … We have counted on Abraham Lincoln for nearly a century and a half to get it right when the undertow in the tide of human events has threatened to overwhelm us. We return to him for a sense of unity, conscience and national purpose. And still, he and the Civil War have so much they can tell us."
Fifteen years ago, in September 1990, PBS broadcast Burns's Civil War series featuring Dowagiac visitor Shelby Foote. "Paradoxically, to become one, we tore ourselves into two" in the Union and Confederate War Between the States. Though fought more than a century ago, it depicts "the real cost of war."