COMPLEXITY: "Always listen to others," he said!

TUESDAY, MAY 28, 2024

Also, "There's only one way you can vote:" We were perhaps a bit surprised by something we heard this morning.

Tomorrow, Judge Merchan will give his legal instruction to the jury in New York City. "It is expected to take about an hour," we heard Mika Brzezinski say.

(In the previous hour, we had heard Jonathan Lemire say the same thing.)

It's expected to take an hour? Just to explain the law under which Donald J. Trump is supposed to be judged? 

There's a lot of complexity in our world. Sometimes, we cast it aside.

We're going to spend some time this week attempting to explain the offense with which Donald J. Trump stands charged. A certain degree of complexity has been involved in those charges.

We're even going to show you the text of some of the New York state laws which are involved in this matter! Complexity can breed confusion, even concerning a case which has been heavily reported and endlessly pseudo-discussed.

For ourselves, we're sorry that charges were brought in this particular case. As a societal matter—in the interest of "our democracy"—we don't think there was anything wrong in paying Stormy Daniels to basically shut the heck up.

We don't think voters needed to hear her "tell her story." We've been stunned—occasionally, perhaps a bit embarrassed—to see so many of Blue America's high-end pundits parrot the opposite line.

A fair degree of complexity is involved in the legal charges against Donald J. Trump. We'll try to explore a few possible sources of confusion as the week proceeds.

First, though, we wanted to share something else we heard this morning. We want to share some basic excerpts from Ken Burn's commencement address.

Ken Burns is a good, decent person. He's also highly accomplished. Plainly, he knows a lot.

Last Sunday, he delivered Brandeis University's undergraduate commencement address. Excerpts from his remarks were played in the 6 o'clock hour on today's Morning Joe.

We agreed very strongly with some of the earlier excepts. You can read the full text here, but this is the first chunk we heard:

BURNS (5/19/24): For nearly 50 years now, I have diligently practiced and rigorously tried to maintain a conscious neutrality in my work, avoiding advocacy if I could, trying to speak to all of my fellow citizens. 

Over those many decades I've come to understand a significant fact, that we are not condemned to repeat, as the saying goes, what we don't remember.  That is a beautiful, even poetic phrase, but not true. Nor are there cycles of history, as the academic community periodically promotes. 

The Old Testament, Ecclesiastes to be specific, got it right, I think. "What has been will be again. What has been done will be done again. There is nothing new under the sun."

What those lines suggest is that human nature never changes, or almost never changes. We continually superimpose that complex and contradictory human nature over the seemingly random chaos of events, all of our inherent strengths and weaknesses, our greed and generosity, our puritanism and our prurience, our virtue and our venality parade before our eyes, generation after generation after generation. 

This often gives us the impression that history repeats itself. It does not. "No event has ever happened twice, it just rhymes," Mark Twain is supposed to have said. I have spent all of my professional life on the lookout for those rhymes, drawn inexorably to that power of history. 

Human nature never changes, he said—or if it does, it changes slowly. In the excerpts offered on Morning Joe, we then heard a part of the speech with which we strongly agreed:

BURNS: "The best arguments in the world," [the novelist Richard Powers recently] said, "Won't change a single person's point of view. The only thing that can do that is a good story." 

I've been struggling for most of my life to do that, to try to tell good, complex, sometimes contradictory stories, appreciating nuance and subtlety and undertow, sharing the confusion and consternation of unreconciled opposites.

But it's clear, as individuals and as a nation, we are dialectically preoccupied.  Everything is either right or wrong, red state or blue state, young or old, gay or straight, rich or poor, Palestinian or Israeli, my way or the highway. 

Everywhere, we are trapped by these old, tired, binary reactions, assumptions, and certainties. For filmmakers and faculty, students and citizens, that preoccupation is imprisoning. 

Still, we know and we hear and we express only arguments, and by so doing, we forget the inconvenient complexities of history and of human nature. 

We strongly agreed with what we thought we heard him say. We would have thought we heard him saying that there is always more than one side to every story.

As citizens, we shouldn't get trapped—"imprisoned"—by tired old certainties, we thought we heard him say. We can't ignore the inconvenient complexities with which we're all surrounded.

That's what we thought we heard him say. And then, the excerpts jumped ahead, and we saw Burns saying this:

BURNS: If I have learned anything over those years, it's that there's only "us." There is no "them." And whenever someone suggests to you, whomever it may be in your life, that there's a "them," run away. 

Othering is the simplistic, binary way to make and identify enemies, but it is also the surest way to your own self imprisonment. Which brings me to a moment I've dreaded and forces me to suspend my longstanding attempt at neutrality.

There is no real choice this November. There is only the perpetuation, however flawed and feeble you might perceive it, of our fragile 249-year-old experiment or the entropy that will engulf and destroy us if we take the other route. 

When, as Mercy Otis Warren would say, "The checks of conscience are thrown aside and a deformed picture of the soul is revealed." 

The presumptive Republican nominee is the opioid of all opioids, an easy cure for what some believe is the solution to our myriad pains and problems. When in fact with him, you end up re-enslaved with an even bigger problem, a worse affliction and addiction, "a bigger delusion," James Baldwin would say, the author and finisher of our national existence, our national suicide as Mr. Lincoln prophesies. 

Do not be seduced by easy equalization. There is nothing equal about this equation. We are at an existential crossroads in our political and civic lives. This is a choice that could not be clearer.

Everywhere, we're trapped by tired old certainties, we thought we'd heard Burns say. We mustn't forget the inconvenient complexities of history and of human nature. 

There is no such thing as us and them, we plainly did hear him say. Suddenly, though, we saw him say this:

There's only one way to vote this year. It's my way or the highway!

We'll be voting the same way Burns will. But so it goes with human nature, which doesn't much change over time.

For the record, we don't understand the logic of the turn he suddenly seemed to make. That doesn't mean that the turn he seemed to make was "wrong," although it theoretically could be.

Ken Burns is a good, decent person. At first, he had us cheering along. A bit later, all of a sudden, what he said surprised us.

Burns was largely discussing moral complexities in his address. There are also reams of legal complexities in the law and in the various ways it works.

We'll try to address a few of those complexities this week. That said:

In our view, most of us people are people people. We're inclined to behave in ways which are old and very familiar.

Before the week is done: "I'll let you be in my dream if I can be in yours," we once heard someone say.