Award-winning filmmaker Ken Burns is bringing his new film “Prohibition” to the National Constitution Center in the hopes of promoting more civil national discourse.
Burns, who has won acclaim for documentaries including “The Civil War” and “Baseball,” said at a news conference Friday that highlights from his new 5 1/2-hour, three-part series, premiering this fall on PBS, will kick off a forum called “Civility and Democracy in America.”
The forum at the Constitution Center, a museum dedicated to explaining the U.S. Constitution, will include a series of group discussions over the weekend and a large town hall-style exchange that will be taped for a future broadcast.
The Jan. 8 mass shooting in Tucson, Ariz., that killed six people and critically injured U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords has stoked public debate about the potential harm of inflammatory political rhetoric.
Many lawmakers have called on their colleagues to tone down the vitriol, and former Presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton — a Republican and a Democrat — announced shortly after the Arizona shooting that they would be honorary co-chairmen of a new national institute to promote civility in political discourse.
At the Philadelphia event, not formally connected to the ex-presidents’ initiative, about 50 panelists with backgrounds in history, ethics, media, religion, politics and business will take part in sessions on civility and come up with ideas to continue the discussions with similar events around the country in coming months.
“We find ourselves … so preoccupied with identifying the divisions among each other that we forget to get the things done that we have to get done,” Burns said. “We distinguish red state-blue state, black-white, young-old, male-female, gay-straight, east-west, north-south, and forget to select the thing we have in common, which is that we are all Americans.”
Panelists will include high school teachers, college professors, religious leaders and public television executives. Among those slated to attend are former Justice Department lawyer John Yoo, now a law professor at Berkeley, who was involved in drafting memos on the legal limits of harsh interrogation methods used in questioning terrorist suspects during the Bush administration.
Other people planning to attend are former New York Times public editor Daniel Okrent, tea party activist Keli Carender and Jim Leach, a former Iowa congressman who chairs the National Endowment for the Humanities who currently lectures on the value of disagreeing without being disagreeable.
“Civility and democracy could not be more timely issues, and this conference could not have come at a better time,” Constitution Center president and CEO David Eisner said. “Dissent has a way of straying from civility and civil disobedience into everything from mudslinging to violence and in some cases even to civil war.”
Burns said the current national climate has many similarities to the Prohibition era: single-issue political campaigns that “metastasized” and produced unintended consequences, as well as the demonization of immigrants, unfunded mandates, smear campaigns against politicians, and a population that felt it had lost touch with its country and wanted to take it back.
Such struggles “speak as much to our period now as it does to the 13 years in which we were possessed by the fever to ban alcohol on this continent,” he said.
The past should teach us that failing to confront passionate issues with civility means our discourse and our democracy suffers.
“History is still a table around which we can all agree to have a civil conversation,” he said. “Quite often if we’re talking about a contemporary argument, whatever it might be … abortion or taxation or unions or funding for public broadcasting, we tend to lose our balance.”
Filmmaker Lynn Novick, longtime collaborator on many of Burns’ films, said the conference will touch upon ideas that coincide with “the essence of what the film is about — what happens when we don’t talk and we just yell and we don’t listen.”
“You end up with laws and policies that don’t make any sense and then you can’t find a way out of it, and that’s what happened with Prohibition,” she said. “It went on for a very long time because once the two sides were set, there was no room for conversation about, ‘This isn’t working, how can we fix it, what should we do?”
“None of that happened for quite a long time,” He said. “It broke down the respect for law and law enforcement, corruption was pervasive. … It was a corrosive problem.”
Disney Pledges $15 million In L.A. Fire Aid As More Celebs Learn They’ve Lost Their Homes
The Pacific Palisades wildfires torched the home of "This Is Us" star Milo Ventimiglia, perhaps most poignantly destroying the father-to-be's newly installed crib.
CBS cameras caught the actor walking through his charred house for the first time, standing in what was once his kitchen and looking at a neighborhood in ruin. "Your heart just breaks."
He and his pregnant wife, Jarah Mariano, evacuated Tuesday with their dog and they watched on security cameras as the flames ripped through the house, destroying everything, including a new crib.
"There's a kind of shock moment where you're going, 'Oh, this is real. This is happening.' What good is it to continue watching?' And then at a certain point we just turned it off, like 'What good is it to continue watching?'"
Firefighters sought to make gains Friday during a respite in the heavy winds that fanned the flames as numerous groups pledged aid to help victims and rebuild, including a $15 million donation pledge from the Walt Disney Co.
More stars learn their homes are gone
While seeing the remains of his home, Ventimiglia was struck by a connection to his "This Is Us" character, Jack Pearson, who died after inhaling smoke in a house fire. "It's not lost on me life imitating art."
Mandy Moore, who played Ventimiglia's wife on "This Is Us," nearly lost her home in the Eaton fire, which scorched large areas of the Altadena neighborhood. She said Thursday that part of her house is standing but is unlivable, and her husband lost his music studio and all his instruments.
Mel Gibson's home is "completely gone," his publicist Alan Nierob confirmed Friday. The Oscar winner revealed the loss of his home earlier Friday while appearing on Joe Rogan's... Read More