>> From the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. [ Pause ] [Applause] >> So the Law Library of Congress was created by statute in 1832 and the statute created the library to support not only Congress but also the Executive Office and the Federal Judiciary. And today, in addition to these entities, the Law Library serves a practicing bar, state and local governments, scholars, American businessmen and really the world legal community. So part of our mission is to sustain and preserve a universal collection of law for future generations and we do that through our collection of more than 5 million items in multiple languages and various formats. And we say that we are the largest law library in the world and the largest law library anywhere in the globe, in the world, in the universe. So throughout the year though, we also have a number of lectures and events and as an example, one event that we are preparing for that's on the horizon, it's a very special event to us, and it's to commemorate the 800th anniversary of Magna Carta. So in the fall of 2014, we hope to exhibit the Lincoln Magna Carta which is one of only four exemplification of the Magna Carta from the year 1215. We hope to exhibit that here at the Library of Congress, and in addition, we will have various other events associated with the celebration of this great charter of rights and liberties. But coming back to today, May 1st, which is Law Day, the Library of Congress has traditionally celebrated Law Day through a lecture and we are committed to doing that because it helps promote the rule of law and the law's contributions to the freedoms that Americans enjoy. So as part of this year's celebration for Law Day, we are delighted to welcome Richard Dreyfuss to talk about the revitalization of civics education in our schools. [ Applause ] We're all very familiar with the great success that Mr. Dreyfuss has had on the stage and on the screen. But really, equally impressive is his longstanding commitment to an advocacy for their revitalization of civics education in America. And after many years of speaking on this topic, he founded the Dreyfuss Initiative in 2010 with the mission to educate the next generation about America's system of government and how to participate in it. So as Mr. Dreyfuss says on his website, we must "Teach our kids how to run our country before they are called upon to run our country. If we don't, someone else will run the country". So I encourage you to take a look at the Dreyfuss Initiative website. I believe the address is in your program handout but if not, it's the dreyfussinitiative-- all one word-- dot org. And I hope you can discover how you can be involved in that project and support Mr. Dreyfuss. So now, it is my great pleasure to introduce Richard Dreyfuss, thank you. [ Applause ] >> Thank you or thank you. [Laughter] I have six titanium rods embedded in my back, so I'm going to be sitting down. [ Noise ] [ Laughter ] I don't know how many of you read science fiction, I don't know how many of you read alternate history. But alternate history is as valid a way to study history and human behavior as the actuality of history because history is not meant to teach us about the facts of empire or the artists and dates of their birth or death. It is an area within which we get to practice and hone to excellence the tools of our brain. It is subject to a hundred different interpretations and one day, when my mother, I was telling a story about the family in front of my mother and she said, "You know, you don't tell the real story, you tell variations on a theme", and I said, "Well, that's what we journalists do". And I was 11 years old at that time [laughter] and in repeating that story to a table full of journalists, a woman got her nose out of joint and said, "Wait a minute, I'm a journalist, we're all journalists here and we don't do any such thing, we deal in facts". And I said, "With all due respect, you don't do any such thing. You have a tale to tell and you tell it and you cover the facts that impede that tale and you underline the facts that help your tale. If there was only one history, there'd be only one person sitting at this table". So what you're about to hear is me and my take on what I consider to be the greatest idea for governance in the history of the human race and one, as Shakespeare said, "That we will throw away as we throw a pearl away because we have lost all knowledge or understanding of its innate beauty and its high respect for mankind". There was a New York Times reporter or editor by the name of Carl Van Anda, and when asked one day, he said, there's really only one war, it lasts forever and it's between the haves and the have nots and I have said it various times in my life. There's not a mote deep enough or a castle wall high enough to protect you from them crawling over and eating you if you piss them off enough and what we've done right now is a very rare moment because we have taken the written word that we have taken oaths to, and we have brazenly ignored those words. The English who are slier than we are don't write down their English constitution so it can be anything it needs to be at any given moment. We did something different, we sat down and rode it out and that means that the whole world knows when we get it right and when we don't. And that act is one of the few acts that is a perfect metaphor for this country. It is naive, it is arrogant, it is cocky, and it is brilliant and it is courageous beyond words. Every time we've broken the bill of rights, we've also put into the works the machinery to correct that wrong. Until very recently, in the history of mankind, one could say that we were the most admired and the most devoted to, a nation that deserved its title of being a good guy. And in the last 15 years, you may have noticed that art which actually has a job description of reflecting back the society that it's connected to. Film, as one of the arts, has been for the past 20, 20 some odd years about nothing at all except teenage angst disguised as vampire films or self congratulation about the science of film like Avatar. And Steven Spielberg once said to me, "One day, someone who is not yet born will put it all together and make a great film about a great subject". That can't happen until we anchor art back to where it belongs. I have, I must confess one advantage over you. I've been an actor my whole life and I have loved acting in a way that is completely beyond my ability to articulate. But I know that it is of high purpose because we are the ones who have an art that is dependent solely on pretense. Acting says no truth. We pretend that the clothes we wear are ours, the words we say are ours, the movements we make are ours, we pretend we don't see the stage and off stage, and we pretend we don't see the audience watching us and the audience pretends that they are not watching actors, they pretend that they're watching real life. And what an audience does when it comes into a theater is unconsciously hold hands because what they're about to undergo is a reflection of their own life, their own yearnings, their own most secret truths. She expresses love as I wish I could, he is afraid as I am afraid, and this house of pretense builds truth and art. And for 50 years without a qualm, I submitted myself to this art. And then I remembered that I had made a promise to myself when I was 12 and that promise was that when I was in my mid 50s, I would retire and I would become the senator from California or New York, and then I would retire and teach history. The only thing that ever changed was then I've decided not to seek elective office but I come from a very politically active family. My great aunt assassinated Czar Alexander, and that's the truth, and my mother-- my grandmother was a witness to the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire and became Eugene Debs' private secretary. After 50 years of acting, I remembered that I had promised myself that I would go to something else I loved as much which was my country. Now, I don't know what party you are or are not of, I don't care. I know that George Washington said that he feared parties because all they were were lobbying interests. And he was afraid that they would make the constitution marginal. Well, that's happened and the Constitution of the United Sates is marginal and the parties aren't. I will tell you now what I promised when it happened, I would tell you. The leaders of the democrats and the republicans in the Senate, Mitch McConnell and Harry Reid, when they heard that I had this initiative said to me, "Why didn't you come to us? We would have passed a resolution". And I said, "Well, I didn't because you're politicians and there's a 100 percent agreement in the country now that anything a politician says in public is inauthentic," and they laughed and agreed and said "Actually, anything we say about education is nonbinding because it's, after all, it's in the hands of the states". Three weeks later, the punchline to the story is that not only were they not able to give me a resolution that fire walled the learning of the maintenance of political power, otherwise known as civics, they could not get the votes out of Harry Reid's office to endorse the Constitution of the United States. And I promised them then that I would tell you that if anyone does not feel that we are in an accelerating decay of values and meaning and that we have lost track of what is noble I have a mandate to restate an initiative to detail in all of its four legs and reason enough to get to it because though I can't tell the future, I can tell many futures and most of them include your denial of the problem I'm about to outline. So, to leave time for any questions of substance, I will skip the salacious anecdotes of my depraved life in Hollywood, drugs and sex and synthesized music and later, if there's time, I'll tell you all about Sharon Stone and Laurence Harvey. But right now, let's talk about education. I believe you cannot get an agreement on what is the mandate of public education? Is there anyone here who thinks that they can state the mandate of public education and prove me wrong? Anyone? Okay, the mandate of public education is very simple. It is the development of the agile mind, the mobile mind as described by Professor Howard Gardner of Harvard and the Ancient Greeks. That is a mind with more than half-filled glasses of a myriad of subject knowledges. With the ability to know more as needed and the lightness and confidence to move from one subject to another, one issue to another. Learning more and factoring that in without defensiveness as we are presented with pertinent changes of fact. It's a willingness to say I don't know if the situation requires. Many of you probably have teenage children and you know that they would prefer to gnaw their arms out of traps before they would admit to not knowing anything. So they're burdened with having to appear as if they know all about all which is the cross to bear by young people and TV commentators. A subset of this mandate by youth is the learned ability to lose such unnecessary baggage and get to problem solving as early as possible. It is easier to state than it is to do. But it is part of what we could be teaching to our children in schools and in most interaction. The ability to say "I changed my mind" is one of the rarest statements you've ever run across. It is a goal and it should be a sign of maturity. In D.C., apparently, it is a cause for accusations of flip flopping so that a specific set of intricacies for Washington, D.C. residents and workers is called for. We do not ask people to stand on knowledge that is proven wrong and go down with the Titanic. We know we teach our children to adapt to the facts and say I've learned something, I was wrong and now I know better. We don't see that reflected in our education or in our politics. The reason why public funds are spent on schooling our children is that education always created frustration and unhappiness in the natural order of things. The aristocratic classes never denied eduction And they did everything possible to deny it to everyone else. Because they knew that it did create restlessness, it created a desire to better your status in life, and they didn't need that problem. What I learned as a young actor was a book called the Elizabethan World Picture by Tillyard which describe for actors how Elizabethans looked at the world. It could best be described as a vertical world where God told the king or queen and the queen told the aristocrats, the aristocrats told the courtiers, the courtiers told the salons who told the newspapers who, which were read by tavern keepers and their customers, who argued about each story and widened the knowledge that started at the tiny top with God speaking to one monarch and eventually, got to everyone who knew the world from beneath the weight of all those classes and castes. Shakespeare has this much bragging rights as Diderot and Voltaire in changing that world picture. It was during their lives at the turn of the 17th century that the individual common man was proclaimed as having rights and the governments were found to be the protectors of those newly understood rights and not only the wall that separated the monarch from his people and protected him from them. From the writings of these men, Diderot, Voltaire, Kant, Rousseau, and the salons of those highly thoughtful and daring women who were dissatisfied with any prohibitions that surrounded their sex, came what we have come to know in history as the era of enlightenment. And before that era ended, as the men who wrote the tracts and art that opened the door of enlightened thinking and who became terrified at what that door showed them ad closed it as quickly as they could. During that era were born James Madison, George Washington, Ben Franklin and a number of others who wrote from that new world picture that the whole structure of known civilization and behavior was turned inside out, upside down, topsy-turvy. The Declaration of Independence, the Constitution of the United States, the political struggles that called upon perfect British citizens who happened to be insulted by their king's ministers' insistence that they weren't citizens of anything, they were colonists, were written during that historic odd bend in the way of things that allowed for principles that had been glacial in their speed of changing Europe. Made lightning fast across the divide of 200 years in the New World and the Atlantic Ocean. Changing British citizens who lived in the New Great Britain and to men of equal status to those born in London caused them to fight for an independence from their mother country, and as they began, they found new ways of defining themselves. And when the British gave up the war, the new Americans set out to codify this new form of country and new form of classes based not on bloodlines or on ancient regimes, which barely touched their new realities. If anyone is in any confusion about what the Old Order meant, I will tell you this. In 800 years of the Old Order in all countries of Europe, six people of the aristocratic class were indicted for capital crimes. That was the world in which we live. We wrote out a constitution which describes the separate classes, not as one better than the other, but with different but shared responsibilities. Not so different from parliament except that no king or executive had gifted them with a legislative body but who shared authority with them. And instead of saying these are obligations you owed your king, but what the king or the executive or the nation owed their people. When we told the world that our names were affixed to that announcement of independence and to our constitution and most especially to our bill of rights and we put it on a public wall in plain sight with our names on it, not many, not many people could say they had ever done such a brazenly courageous thing. More than read or write or do sums, the American was encouraged to become more than a sum of his parts. And he picked up the throne, the love of his former betters, and he looked them straight in the face and accepted the challenge. You who have cursed the majority of mankind to imprisonment in his own head, in his own ignorance, we invite you to a better world and if you can get here, if you can literally make the journey. And the Irish wanted to come here so bad, they came as ballast. If you get here, we offer you mobility We offer you the right to learn all, offered to all. We offer you a legal code that no office holder or king was above. We give you intellectual reach, creative reach and the reward that is due to those who create industry and trade and a second chance. No guarantees but opportunities to try, that we promise you. That was the most important political message in all of human kinds' civilized history. And they heard it in every corner of this world. We learned the phrase checks and balances. We learned it so much we want to scream. But what are they? They are checks on man's innate misbehavior and balances that said unfair advantage was unacceptable. The Constitution of the United States was the greatest tip of the hat of respect to the common man of men, the majority of mankind than ever offered. It was heard everywhere and from everywhere they came. They didn't go to Norway. They didn't go to Togo. They came here because they knew us to be a political miracle and safe haven and a second chance. And I want to ask the federal judge, very right wing federal judge, why did people come here? And he started to laugh so hard he spit his milk up through his nose. And then he said, why do they come here, because they could. That's how bad the world had been. The world was a truth of darkness and blood and rape and killing. And the few nations that had ever achieved prosperity could be put in a thimble. And three things happen to a nation when it becomes prosperous. It forgets what it took to get there. It forgets that it needs defending and it forgets that the people who do that defending can't live by the same code you live by. Synchronicity or the unintended consequence of history, the enlightenment when reason, intelligence and sense triumphed over fundamentalism, stupidity and senselessness was an era whose time was finite and it was our good fortune to time our political life and values threaded exactly through that era whereas man had to spend his entire life begging people to spent public money to attain the brain power of the unique requirements that are necessary to know authority and sovereign power. But the checks and balances that describe maturely the virtues and vices of mankind were real. And they had been part of our DNA and we would not become taken by the better angels of our nature without a lot of effort. And the only time that this or any other nation has to teach its values to a large enough group of people who cannot leave the room are the years of public school when there's a large enough body to get to them and to teach them the outrageously arbitrary difference between all of history and what we presented. If you want to know how different the world would be. If you could remove the United States and its government, not its bullying and not its taking advantage, but what it wrote and what it said it valued, imagine a world without it. Imagine Hitler as normal. And that's where history was leading. Never forget that. Never forget that to the question that is asked by every theory of governance and every religion. How can people learn to live together with some sense of decency and freedom and mobility of thought? The best answer to that question so far is the United States, if we work at it. If we don't, if we leave it to the rich, if we leave it to people who pay us to think badly then we will lose it. And no one, as Abraham Lincoln said, no one is going to beat us except us. No one will beat us except us if there's one terror event more on the soil of this country we won't wait for anyone's permission, we will throw the bill of rights into the ocean by our own volition and that's a pearl that we would have thrown away. If we leave civic training to the university level which was rolled out by the White House a few months ago, it says something large It leaves us with a narrow niche class of governance by the wealthy. And that is exactly why we fought a war of independence to begin with, so what the hell are we doing going backwards? I have asked, why is our war of independence a revolutionary war and nobody can tell me. They say, independence from Great Britain, and I say no, wars of independence are cheap. You can throw a rock in any direction and head a war of independence. But what did we offer that was revolutionary, a legal code that no king or president was above and the willingness to teach all to all. If we had been a European power, they would have killed us Don't ever forget that when the French announced the rights of man, the French didn't have to attack anybody. All of Europe attacked them at the same time because they knew what was dangerous. What was dangerous was people who could actually think with clarity and use their brains. Buckminster Fuller once said, this is the most powerful tool in the universe but it comes without an operating manual. Well, we offer that operating manual and so we are a danger to all of the haves. This is the methodology of the Dreyfuss Initiative. It is in one part the teaching of how to maintain and understand this particular republican democracy. We don't have a pure democracy and Alexander Hamilton said it best. When asked at the constitutional convention, "what about the people", he said, "the people, sir, are a great beast". But we wanted people to run this country. And so, we created a republic, which are speed bumps in the road to give us time to think, and republican democracy is based on one word, trust. So, that every time you hear term limits and every time you hear the federal government wants to prohibit judges from sentencing, what you're hearing is, if you enter public service, you're a crook. Now, that does put an end to calling politicians a noble calling, doesn't it? By definition, we're saying, if you enter public service, you're a crook. Well, maybe I'm dumb and I'm not, but I'll take the crookedness of Tammany Hall, over the crookedness of Rupert Murdoch any day of the week. Because Rupert Murdoch has done his level best to attack western civilization, the freedoms of speech, and expression, and religion, and the press. He's done level best by buying them out. George Washington said we need this freedom of the press, for instance, because we need to be protected by a variety of opinion. John Adams said we need to protect religion by never putting one religion over the others. And then presidential candidates picked up the constitution and say, this is a Christian nation, and nobody says boo. Do you know that they calibrate what they do and say according to how stupid they think we are? And when you remove from public schools the only legitimate way for kids to learn how to run this republican democracy in the future, and when you do teach it, you teach only that which was written in the document and leave out television, and money, and pressure. When you don't teach at all the reality of politics, you are not serving your people, you are dumbing them down. Do you think that there could have been a patriot act under any other earlier circumstances? I went and saw Sandra Day O'Connor because she had a civics organization, and I said to her, the rumors are that you were the one who was most afraid of the political chaos in 2000, and that you were the engine behind that decision. And she said to me, well, I was not the originator, but I was afraid of that chaos. And I said, it hadn't happen yet. It hadn't happen yet. All that had happened were legal moves by both parties all in the name of republican democracy and all of them legit. You were afraid of the chaos that hadn't happen. Doesn't that mean some kind of basic mistrust of republican democracy, which after all can be defined as the willingness to share space with those with whom you disagree. Well, steam came out of her ears. And I said to her, you know, I'm really happy that I'm not a young lawyer facing you while you're still on the court but you're still wrong, and why is it that you let money be the only entree into the political debate? And she said, what's wrong with money? And I said nothing, if it's not alone. But if it's the only virtue then there's plenty wrong with money, because it can subvert, as it has, the entire process. She didn't agree. I tell you that we have morphed out of all shape whatever was intended by the men we call our founding fathers because of money. And so I wrangled an invitation to speak to the 50 chief justices of the state supreme courts in Anchorage before Sarah Palin was on the ticket. And I said to them, I am going to give you an argument, and I want you to tell me if I'm crazy. And I will tell you in the interest of full disclosure, that my father is a lawyer, all of his brothers are lawyers, my sister is a lawyer, my cousins are lawyers, I got my own bar association in my family but here's an argument. If you got word in a letter from your local TV news outlet, the traffic congestion news was from that moment on going to be on a 4-dollar surcharge. You'd hit the roof, wouldn't you? And they said, yeah. I said that's because that's news, right? Right. Well, so is politics. Politics is not a commodity, you can't profit from the selling of politics the way you can profit from the selling of tissue paper. Why is it that politics is treated by the news dissemination industry as a product? Why aren't you obligated to follow the news as news, follow the debate as debate, and why isn't there a constitutional amendment that firewalls completely money, television, and politics because technology does make a difference and there is a difference between newspaper as in articles, billboards, and even radio, and television. Television creates its own danger, and one of these justices, and I wish to God I knew his name, got up and said, you know, if you had a tough lawyer, you could win that in this court. Now, I don't know if that's true, but I do know that you let money be the entree to our political process when we have been a revolutionary nation that has said that we will not be ruled by the haves. And all they did was wait, and wait, and wait, and the moment we blinked they grabbed us. Because the darkest never dies, it just waits. The methodology of my initiative teaches not only civic training. It teaches clarity of thought because once you start to teach the young at the time that their brains are capable of learning and you teach them the talent to reason with logic towards clarity of thought and expression, and ultimately, to critical analysis which is the only thing you need emotional maturity to exercise, you can also teach in all other subjects, classroom exercises of dissent, debate, civility, context, and opposing views. Whether you're teaching sewing or cosmic physics, you will teach better cosmic physics and you will learn the values of the enlightened because civility is better than incivility and intelligence is better than stupidity. If you learn sewing, you have to learn the history of sewing. If you learn the history of sewing, you learn capitalism. Adam Smith describes capitalism in one chapter in the Wealth of Nations brilliantly. And I've always thought we live under 2 discoveries, inventions of the mind of men that by definition says that they're imperfect, republican democracy and capitalism. But we learn capitalism from birth, don't we? Every kiss, every trading card teaches us how to negotiate and barter, teaches us how to trade, and we learn that as little, little children. If we put off the learning of republican democracy then one cannot be the safeguard over the other, oppressive government is possible. Oppressive capitalism is possible, some might say probable. The people didn't take to the streets recently because capitalism was unfair, they took to the streets because capitalism, knowing it was unfair, put advantage on advantage on advantage, and kept adding more and more. If you go to Las Vegas and you put 100 dollar bill in an ATM, you get charged 90 bucks and you just take it. I say, if they're thought equally, you can have a great, great country. If they're not thought equally, you're going to have your institutions like the banks that have admitted that they illegally foreclosed on your homes, not even think of giving them back. We passed NAFTA and a company taking advantage of NAFTA drops a workforce in Tennessee and goes to Ecuador. Does anyone ask them for a quid pro quo? Does anyone ask them that if you're going to drop 30,000 people in Tennessee, that there might be an algorithm that you might have to go through with extra taxes or a health plan or education, or retraining? No. We just bail them out. This is nuts, this is lunacy. We are living in a world of common senselessness. Common sense is not common, it's rare. To support the excellence that all subjects require, these exercises are thought in every classroom and they are the way that the brain can hone its talent for clarity and thoughtfulness and the absolute reality is, you will need clarity of thought long before you need the Mercator map or geological strata info. You will need how to think clearly because life is not pro-American. And you are the generation, we are the generation that gets an F in giving the American dream, because we can't give our kids a country better than the one we got from our parents. We can't do it, we owe too much and we don't have the creative thought. We think that taxes are an added burden as opposed to citizenship. And Frank Luntz who invented the sound bite is on my board, why? Why would Frank Luntz be on my board? I'll tell you, because in his words and the words of his last book, what America really wants really. What America needs really, really is clarity and honesty. And you can find Frank wherever I am usually floating around on the back muttering Richard, you're talking too much, God you're talking too much, you talk so much, oh my God. And I don't deny that. But one day I turn to him and I said, "Frank, you wrote 3 books with a high vocabulary and great political wisdom to explain to America why you didn't need great political wisdom or a high vocabulary. You only needed sound bites. So shut up." And he said to me, the only thing he ever regretted in his whole life was the invention of the phrase "tax relief" because it made people think that paying taxes was an added burden when in reality it's simply citizenship. In the 204 Democratic Convention, I was stopped by a group of radio conservative talk show hosts, they all said the same thing. "Government is too big, government is too big." And I said, "Let's start again. Who-- do you believe that police could live above the poverty line? Yes. Do you believe that fireman should be able to live in the communities that they serve? Yes. What's that called, who pays their salaries?" "Well-- " I said, "No, no, who does it? Taxes." I said, "So, let's not start from too big, too small. Let's start from what do we need?" And if you do that or in the words of my CEO who is a conservative republican, if people bothered to read the reports they ask for from the General Accounting Office, we'd have the perfect government. But they don't read them because they're afraid of what they will say. Because they are not afraid of big government, they're afraid of bureaucracies that never die. And Pat Moynihan said to me in what was the last interview he gave, he said, "For all intents and purposes, I invented welfare and it failed. And I'll tell you why." I said, "Okay, why?" And he said, "Because we didn't establish specific goals to be met at specific times and we didn't have a sunset clause." And I thought to myself, why doesn't every major piece of legislation have a sunset clause? Put it 12 years down the line when you cannot predict who will be in power and subject that piece of legislation to strict series of rules. And if they don't pass muster, the last bureaucrat turns off the light. And that way you don't have a big government. Now, in a country of 300 million people you're going to have a big government whether you like it or not. But, at least, you'll have a more honest big government. And at least you'll have people paying their share freight. And if anyone thinks that our tax system allows people to pay their fair share and their fair weight, then join that other group in therapy. So the culture surrounding and paying for education should be able to receive the values that are taught in schools. To do that, we have created an American history play competition among all the regional theaters of the country. There is 75 theaters, we have 34 so far because my finger went numb but not one of them has said no. And I'll get them all and the requirement is perfect market freedom. If an artistic director feels that that play would do well in his season all he has to do is put the play in his season. And we will send judges of every political stripe and every year we will award a McArthur sized prize and do that for at least 20 years. And when you give an award of 300,000 bucks, that's a real spur to learning how to write plays. And if you open it up to everyone, not just pros, not just students, but to pregnant cab drivers from Iran and anyone else who writes about American history, all you got to do is write about America, its past, the past that might have been, the future of the many futures it will have. I personally am a Burrite, I like Aaron Burr so I want to see someone write a play about the Burr administration but that's just me. We will also create a series of clubs. You can call them civic clubs but civics everyone tells me is the most boring word in English. And it's true, it even puts me to sleep so, and it's the only class that needs some kind of translation. When you say civics, someone says, what is that? Well, I call it what it is which is power. Practical, political power, like Tammany Hall, like money for TV, like the percentage that the media advisors take off the TV ad buy [phonetic], whether they're representing the losers or the winners. Which in some cases might be called a conflict of interest because it doesn't matter whether his man wins or loses he still gets his 10 percent. But we don't know about the conflict of interest anymore. We pretend to. So we will establish a series of clubs, and those clubs will be voluntary and they will not be on school grounds so they will not be obligated to No Child Left Behind and they will not be obligated to state standards. They will be attended by nerds like me. Guys who love history and couldn't tell you why, AP students and the teacher will have her salary paid or his salary paid by the check the kids write for the rent of the hall and the park near the school. And if things fall out the way they might, and there are enough clubs near the-- enough high schools, we will have created a civil society. And you can take as its template the federalist society, although its content would be completely different, but it would be a society nationwide. And as the Republicans answer a specific issue and the Democrats do, lo and behold, so could the civil society and the society we live in could learn over years that we can trust what's coming out of that civil society because it has no political baggage. It has no bias, it has no partisanship, it is simply the solving of problems. I once got a call from Wayne de LaPierre, the head of the National Rifle Association. For some reason, he assumed that I was a liberal who would be marginalized as he would be if Rupert was successful in buying the FCC again. I didn't bother to tell him that he was wrong on both counts. I was neither a liberal nor would, as he called it, he called me a member of the gaggle of Hollywood liberals. I said I gaggle for no one. I am however a libo, conservo, rado, middle of the roado. Just like every one of you, you just haven't given it any thought lately. But there is no such thing as a conservative in this country. And there's no such thing as a liberal. And if you haven't changed your politics over the course of your lifetime, join the group of therapy over there which is getting more and more crowded as the speech goes on. But he called me, and he wanted to strategize about what we should do with this terrible thing. And then-- and then those days I had the breath to do this without having to stop and take another breath. I said to him, can I ask you a question? He said, yeah. I said, I'll give it to you that the Second Amendment is ambiguously written and no one's going to agree on whether it's about militia, people or what. But I would imagine that you would agree that there's an inappropriate amount of gun violence in the country. Why don't you take care of this? And he said, what do you mean? And I said, why don't you take care of this? It's an old American tradition. Organizations that are not of the government like the AMA, you wouldn't let a doctor touch you or your loved ones if they were not vetted by the AMA. So why don't you license and train gun owners, create the shortlist of the ones that are allowed at home and then all the other nuclear semiautomatics that you want to say you have the right to have should be in the control of the NRA. You're always saying you don't trust the government. Nobody trusts the government. So why don't you do it yourself? It's been happening for 200 years. And his answer was to hang up, literally. Because he couldn't answer me because he knew that he was really just a lobbyist for the Remington Company and he had no political philosophy. But I'm telling you, I'm a citizen, that's all I am. I stopped what I was loving and I went to school again and I came home and started to speak to people but I'm just a citizen and I'm telling you that in the course of being just a citizen I learned that there is one solution to all of our problems and that is teaching our kids to excellence in clarity of thought and in political representation of this republican democracy. That's it. I've been asked to teach a class in San Diego about culture and ethics. And I said I'd do it if every kid in that-- in the class saw at least 50 American films made And, then I can take any day's newspaper and find a story, and walk it back to the decay every one of you are feeling right now about America. Anyone who thinks that we are cozy and comfortable, and everything is just fine-- [Laughter] Because it's not fine, and it's an urgent and critical problem. Why? Because we've lost every binder we've ever had. Americans used to be able to stay-- wake up in the morning and stand up on a foundation, strong and firm, based on enlightenment values and from that foundation disagree with one another to their heart's content. And now, there is no foundation. Now, we make everything a fight to the death. We don't let our opponent win one, ever. Yesterday, I spoke to the Burroughs [phonetic] Organization of Pennsylvania. And I had them do the pledge of allegiance twice, one's with under God and one's without. And then I said, we have argued so bitterly over that phrase that we forgotten that we're pledging allegiance to the republic. We forgotten we have to teach our young what this government is. There is no them, there is only us, and if we don't teach it, it's not true. If we don't exemplify reason and logic and sense, if we don't let our neighbor have a disagreement of politics with us, somehow, we now believe that it's our duty to persuade our neighbor to our way of thinking and if he doesn't get persuaded, we get to treat him like crap. And that's not true. We should be able just to have strong neighborhoods of people who disagree with one another about everything, I would've asked you, I would've asked you, if anyone in here could tell me the preamble to the constitution. And if there was someone here who could, I would've asked you to sign it. Sign it again. We know it's been signed, we know it's been agreed to, and we know that the people who signed it are people we all have respect for. And maybe it sounds silly but I would've asked you to sign it again, because I see no reason why the Koch Brothers or the head of the communist party of the United States wouldn't sign the preamble to the constitution, because the preamble is a description of the noblest goal that any nation has ever had. And then I decided, there was too much going on and too much willingness to look for a fight, and I don't want to fight. I want to remember how much we agree on, not what we don't. What we don't agree on is this big, what we agree on is this big and changed history. Don't ever forget, whether it's luck or whether it's meaningless, America is the finest answer to the oldest and most complex question. And when I was a young man, we all knew. Whether we knew it or not, we knew that America and all of its sins and all of its fumbles and its-- and all of its bullying, is without a doubt the best answer thus far to how people can live together. And you are closer to seeing it at its end than any other generation. And your children will look you in the eye and say, how could you have abandoned us like this, because they don't know how to cook or sew, or anything else. You think that it's too costly in money. I'm saying, it's too costly in your heart. It's too costly to our nobility not to do it. So if we don't do it, okay, then we deserve what every nation deserves, to become anonymous, to become part of the darkness of history, and be forgotten. Right now, we have a pretty good shot at being remembered. Okay, I will tell you one more thing. In Charles Town, Virginia, there's a property of the George Washington family, it's 12 and a half acres. We've been offered that property because there's never been ever an institute for the study of the enlightenment or the constitution of the United States, ever, ever. Which makes, what Madison pulled off in 1787 that much greater. But there's never been an institute, and we can have it for a million dollars. And if we get a partner, let's say, the University of California, we can blanket the nation and there's not a scholar in the world who wouldn't want to be a scholar and residence because he's only an hour and a half away from making pretty good money in D.C. [Laughter] And for under a thousand dollars, we can be connected to every learning center on earth. We can bring together all the writings of all the enlightenment authors and their office numbers. For that, for that alone, I'd go to heaven. Help me to get there and help America. Thank you. [ Applause ] >> This has been a presentation of the Library