DeLaWho? DeLaWhat? DeLaWhere?

With Michael Moore's film "Fahrenheit 9/11", which critiques the Bush administration's foreign policies, taking the top prize at the Cannes film festival, fellow documentary filmmaker Ken Burns has joined in on the fun.

With presidential security helicopters circling over the Yale University campus, filmmaker Ken Burns denounced the war in Iraq on Sunday and told graduating seniors to remember history as they work to repair divides in American culture.
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Without mentioning Bush by name, Burns drew parallels between today's political leaders and the Iraq war, versus Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War, which he chronicled in an award-winning film series.

Both wars threatened to tear the country apart, Burns said.

"Steel yourselves. Your generation must repair this damage, and it will not be easy," Burns told the seniors.

Burns quoted famed jurist Learned Hand as saying, "Liberty is never being too sure you're right."

"Somehow recently, though, we have replaced our usual and healthy doubt with an arrogance and belligerence that resembles more the ancient and now fallen empires of our history books than a modern compassionate democracy," Burns said, to applause from the 1,300 graduates and their families and friends.

He criticized what he called a culture of censorship and intimidation that was intolerant of others, as well as a compliant media and a consumer culture that values the pursuit of money above everything.

"We have begun to reduce the complexities of modern life into the facile judgments of good and evil, and now find ourselves brought up short when we see that we have, too, some times and moments, become what we despise," Burns said.

Burns noted that it is tempting in such times to turn inward and ignore outside troubles, but he urged the seniors to reject that impulse and study history as a way to cope with these troubles and to figure out what to do about them.

"If you don't know where you've been, how can you possibly know who you are and where you're going?" Burns asked.