The other DrC wrote a review of the Ken Burns PBS documentary on Benjamin Franklin and she wasn’t kind. I’ll grant that Burns’ pacing is slow, but I stayed awake for most of the first half, and all of the second half which I watched last night, while she slept through most of it.
Ben Franklin was a towering figure, by any standard you want to apply. Exhibiting no particular military prowess, he managed to live and thrive to be 84 in an era with little sanitation and no antibiotics or anesthesia.
He traveled throughout the British colonies in North America and much of Europe, made 4 round trips across the North Atlantic by sailing ship, and lived for several years each in England and France.
Like Thomas Jefferson, Franklin was a polymath. He started businesses, wrote books, charmed most of the people he met including many women, and had an amazing intellect which was nevertheless practical. He was a scientist of note, a successful inventor, a diplomat, and the most famous North American of his era.
He did his level best to win the full rights of British citizens for North America’s colonists and, when he failed at that, whole-heartedly joined the rebels and was there for the Declaration of Independence, the Articles of Confederation, and the subsequent Constitution.
Franklin was such an amazing human that Ken Burns’ slow pacing and less-than-vivid imaging couldn’t keep him from being interesting. The other DrC, with whom I agree about most things, is certainly welcome to disagree.
