Ken Burns suspends “long-standing attempt at neutrality” This clip is a week old, but it’s flying around the internet this weekend. Documentary filmmaker Ken Burns addressed graduates at Brandeis University and warned about the threat to America’s “fragile, 249-year-old experiment.” On our “existential crossroads”: Burns cites Lincoln’s Lyceum speech (Springfield, Illinois, January 27, 1838) on “the perpetuation of our political institutions.” Lincoln was 28: At what point then is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer, if it ever reach us, it must spring up amongst us. It cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide. Lincoln continued: I hope I am over wary; but if I am not, there is, even now, something of ill-omen, amongst us. I mean the increasing disregard for law which pervades the country; Burns’s point was that while history never repeats, it sometimes rhymes. And the rhymes are unmistakeable now. The speech in its entirety is here and worth your time. I’ve begun “reading” historian Erik Larson’s “The Demon of Unrest” about the six months between Lincoln’s election and the first shots of the Civil War fired against Fort Sumter. For its flaws, Larson’s tale provides cultural context beyond the usual North and South grievances we know. Southern planter-aristocrats had a kind of pop-cultural fascination with their own supposed nobility, a duel-enforced obsession with honor, and novels celebrating…