Ken Burns speaks to CBS (screen grab).
In an interview with the Daily Beast on a retrospective of his films, acclaimed documentarian Ken Burn spent the majority of his time discussing the candidacy of presumptive GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump and what it says about America.
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Discussing Burns’ film The Central Park Five — about five black teens who were wrongly convicted of assaulting a white woman in New York City — Burns recalled how Trump reacted at the time.
“He shamefully took out a full-page ad in all of the New York dailies asking for a restoration of the death penalty for two 14-year-old, two 15-year-old, and one 16-year-old innocent children,” Burns explained. “While New York State laws would not have permitted their execution, just the fact that there was a rush to judgment ought to be complete evidence of how temperamentally unsuited he is for the office he now seeks.”
Burns makes an excellent point here, in regard to Trump’s volatility. Trump is con man, always ready to twist in the wind, willing to change views in a heartbeat. All his viewpoints are on the repugnant side, which should be enough to scare people away, but it isn’t. Given that, people should seriously consider Trump’s eruptions into temper, and how that would translate in an office of high power.
“I find Donald Trump more of a super-predator. This idea that he can attack and attack and attack whole groups of people, and that we live in a media culture where that’s permitted to be tolerated—it’s the spectacle and not the truth of it,” he said. “An amoral internet permits a lie to travel around the world three times before the truth can get started, and we live in a place where lying is OK—where a lassitude develops where it doesn’t matter what the truth is—and that’s how it’s possible for someone like him to be advanced who is so clearly temperamentally unsuited and has no idea about governing.”
“The Republican Party has been extraordinarily successful at getting many groups of people to vote against their self-interest,” he continued. “Evangelicals are voting for Donald Trump. What part of Donald Trump reminds you of Jesus Christ? Trump lusts after his own daughter on national radio, talks about women’s bodies and breasts in such a disparaging way, and mocks them. How is this in any way Christian? When you make the ‘other’ the enemy, how is that Christian?”
Okay, that last question is silly. Christians are all about othering, it’s the lifeblood of their belief. If you don’t other, how you can get your self-righteous judgment on? (Yes, I know, #notallchristians.)
But what about all those successful companies he’s ran?!?!?! (into the ground)
Shiv:
I would have thought people would at least be concerned about his habit of running everything into the ground, or doing things illegally, i.e., ripping people off, but no.
And yet, even with the (milquetoast, I admit) criticism coming from within the bubble of right wing talking heads, there are still so many people supporting trump, my FIL being one of them.
I just don’t get it. Never will, I suspect. A couple (old white male) of the atheists at the local meetup were bonafide Bernie bros who are voting for trump now because…well, I couldn’t get a coherent reason out of them. The wierdest, part, to me, was the old white german immigrant who is so right wing because she hates immigrants….. Mind you, she’s a first generation immigrant, having grown up near Berlin. Of course, she cites as one of the reasons she left was all of the immigration in Germany….
CC:
Ouch. That’s gotta hurt.
I know that one! I grew up with it. One of my great grandmothers was an immigrant from Croatia, and unbelievably bigoted, hated on immigrants all the time. She reserved her vicious hatred for Jewish people though, even though her grandfather was a Russian Jew.