That was a good film. The voice-over even then (by the end of that film) became a stupid gimmick, but he put it on the map as a (subsequently highly abused) technique. The liberal and Sclerotic Blue Nation nature of subsequent stuff by him was inferior. (Nobody normal really cares what Mario Cuomo or Doris Kearns Goodwin has to say about baseball, and the USA was not the evil sinful earth and Jackie Robinson was not Jesus!) What's most interesting about the voice-over gimmick was that it was abused at least once by Nina Totenberg on her low-quality coverage of a Supreme Court event, actually descending so low as to have voice-over gimmickry imitating arguments and statements by various Supreme Court Justices. Our tax dollars, misappropriated once more. [sigh]

As to the national parks themselves, it touches on a long history of related items, the colonialist manner in which the Northeast has treated the West (and still does with federal land lockup and so much land in the hands of the federal government rather than owned more locally as it ought to be), which is augmented by post-1960s radicalism and misuse of wilderness designations and restrictions on land use to satisfy more openly political (and extreme) objectives, while in an earlier time (earlier in the 1960s), some astute observers noted the population distribution in the country versus where the parks are, and said, for example, that more national parks in places like Pennsylvania would be of more value than more in the more-remote and less-accessible and less-close-to-people parts of the West. Food for thought, for those who can and will think…

I'm not surprised that you would fail to grasp or to honestly describe the related truth here.

A few of us Tea Partiers don't mind regulation. We mind socialism and the tyranny of overtaxing. Since you pay more than 50% of your pay to taxes (income, FICA, sales, excise, fees,etc) I would think all of us would be protesting.

As for Ken Burns…. I've liked most of his films – especially “The Civil War”.
You'd expect as much with my name, right?

Nailed it! That euphemism by extension also means we are miserably failing the collective, ongoing national IQ test. Good thing the national parks are already in existence, could you imagine the ensuing madness if there was an effort to establish them today? Cries of socialism would be the very least of it.