National This, National That

Ken Burns and Dayton Duncan, director and writer/producer respectively of the new documentary on the nation’s national parks, were interviewed recently by Bob Edwards on Sirius-XM Radio.  (The podcast is available for free on iTunes and at Bob Edwards Weekend.)

Burns’ six-part, 12-hour documentary has received rave reviews, and I have every intention of seeing it, just as I have every intention of finishing Burns’ Jazz documentary and eventually watching his Baseball series.  However, there’s something about (what my wife calls) the voice in each of these specials, riffing off the work David McCullough did in the Civil War and enunciating every syllable in slow motion (with strings) that makes watching these documentaries somehow less enjoyable than thinking of watching these documentaries.

Still, hearing Burns and Duncan discuss the making of the The National Parks: America’s Best Idea, was almost as fascinating as (I hope) the series will be.   My takeaways include:

ROI.  It took ten years of work to generate twelve hours of programming.  That’s not piece-work.  In fact, that’s the very definition of an investment made with the understanding that it must have an “incalculable ROI.”

Evolution.  The national parks began (yes, well before Teddy Roosevelt, who appears in episode 2) with “utterly spiritual impulses, because these where places we might be able to find God better than in a cathedral built by man.”  This impulse evolved over time to Roosevelt’s conservation ethic, and later to a patriotic one (the parks were called “vast schoolrooms of Americanism”)—and finally, an economic engine, receiving the first “shovel-ready stimulus dollars” of the New Deal.  Spiritual, conservatory, patriotic and economic—four great impulses in roughly the right order.

When Bad Things Turn Good.  When Theodore Roosevelt was a young, energetic alderman in 1880s New York City he read about the bison being hunted to extinction on the American plains.  He impulsively jumped on a train for the Dakota Territory, not to stop the slaughter, but to make sure he had the chance to shoot a bison before they disappeared.  As President, Roosevelt doubled the number of national parks, added one hundred million acres of national forest, created twenty national monuments and, in the words of Duncan, “entered the word ‘conservation’ into our bloodstream.”

Ecosystems. Men like Roosevelt and his “tutor,” George Bird Grinnell, began thinking about the concept of “ecosystems” long before that term became popular.  Their term was “reservoir”—a reservoir for wildlife, for example.

Reining in Rapacious Americans.  Burns says, “We are as a species, and perhaps particularly as Americans, an acquisitive, extractive, and some might even say rapacious group.  That is to say we look at a river and think ‘dam’; we look at a beautiful stand of trees and think ‘board feet’; we look at a canyon and wonder what minerals can be extracted from it.  And so, the whole history of the Parks is the battle against those forces.”

Likewise, Reigning in Commercial Americans.  Without National Parks, Burns says, we’d almost be choosing between Bedford Falls and Potter’s Field.  “If there were no national parks, the Grand Canyon would be lined with mansions. . .Zion and Yosemite would be gated communities. . .the Everglades would have long ago been drained and filled with track housing. . .Yellowstone would be some sort of crass “Geyser World.”

Of course, the preservation of public land underscores one of the central themes of the series, the idea that the Federal government can and must do things that a bunch of acquisitive, extractive, rapacious capitalists will never do. 

Likewise, I’ve been picking away at a similarly-themed book, Felix G. Rohatyn’s 2009 Bold Endeavors (with the less-than-subtle subtitle, How Our Government Built America, and Why It Must Rebuild Now).  That kind of thing makes the rapacious American capitalist see red, but you’ve got to hand it to Rohatyn—he makes a heck of a case with some stellar examples.  The author claims “the federal government has traditionally been the indispensable investor in our nation” and uses as his exhibits (are you ready?): the Louisiana Purchase, the Erie Canal (though state government), the Transcontinental Railway, the Land Grant Colleges, the Homestead Act, the Panama Canal, the Rural Electrification Administration, the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, the G.I. Bill and the Interstate Highway System.

So, with that kind of precedent, what’s a little National Healthcare?  (In fact, I expect to see President Obama doing an ad before each Burns' installment, carrying a Rohatyn book in his hand.)

I don’t really pretend to understand all of the issues involved in the (single payer-mandated coverage-public option-Medicare Part D doughnut hole) healthcare debate, but after listening to Burns, and reading Rohatyn, and understanding the kind of overwhelming good the Federal government created with the G.I. Bill and the Interstate Highway System, I can take the very visionary, (occasional) CEOish position of saying 1) we’re the richest nation in the history of the world, 2) we figured out how to make Post-Its and Cherry-Vanilla Diet Coke, and 3) isn't the mark of a civilized society how it treats its weakest members (?).

Then, as CEO, I hand it over to the COO, tell him to use Ken Burns and Felix Rohatyn as “best practices,” and, like Jean-Luc Picard, command, “National Healthcare: Make it so!”

Posted by Entrepreneur Generations

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