Washington ? Ken Burns, who made a 19-hour film about jazz that reintroduced the flagging art form to PBS viewers four years ago, speaks in a light, articulate, conservative jazz style. In his films, and in the speech he gave Monday night to the annual gathering of Americans for the Arts, he starts with a few big themes, presents them clearly, allows soloists to enliven them with a few riffs, and repeats his basic material with hypnotic and sometimes mind-numbing frequency. He entertains. He inspires.

In the Kennedy Center Concert Hall, he gave the annual Nancy Hanks Lecture, speaking to the arts enthusiasts and activists who come to Washington to lobby the government for more funding and arts-friendly policies. They descend here to celebrate the political and spiritual wings of the suffering minority of Great Art Lovers, a quasi-religious party which has become politely militant in the face of its fear of slow annihilation.

The group’s president and CEO, Robert Lynch, warmed up the crowd, then Burns took over, announcing that his theme would be the contradictions between the lives of three great architects and their work, and that these contradictions would help us understand “the remarkable republic that shaped, and was in turn, shaped by them.” His method, he said, would be storytelling.

His speech, like so many Washington big speeches preached to the choir, was basically a lot of very smoothly recycled material. Burns is a good talker — soft but clearly spoken, modest, always willing to use and acknowledge the words of others who said things better and more inspiringly. He gave what may be studied in years to come as an almost faultless rhetorical exercise in the dying language of Art, Greatness and Inspiration.

This language, spoken ad nauseam in too many documentaries, but also in the halls of this country’s large arts and cultural organizations, is a delicious pablum of associative thinking. It’s worth, for a moment, looking into its basic grammar.

It’s based on a set of basic assumptions: That contradictions yield deeper insights; that storytelling is the simplest route to truth; that humans strive and fail and it’s the striving that matters; that we are all flawed but should seek to be better; that genius points the way; that art is transcendent; and that there’s something called the human spirit, which is indomitable.

All of these bromides are marshaled in service of a basic sense of “we,” an us-ness that posits one human (or often just American) family, leaving to posterity the fruits of all its endeavor. Burns is a big user of the We trope, striving in his films and in Monday night’s speech to define America, Americans, the American spirit. He deals, typically, with stories that have broad appeal, drawn from “our shared past.” If these stories involve unpleasantness, such as racism or misogyny, it’s usually safely in the past, safely enough that We can feel a solacing collective shame.

Filmmaker Ken Burns gave the annual Nancy Hanks Lecture this week at Washington's Kennedy Center, speaking to the arts enthusiasts and activists in a light, articulate, conservative jazz style.

Romanian writer and philosopher Emile Cioran once wrote: “It is enough for me to hear someone talk sincerely about ideals, about the future, about philosophy, to hear him say ‘we’ with a certain inflection of assurance, to hear him invoke ‘others’ and regard himself as their interpreter — for me to consider him my enemy.”

Ken Burns isn’t anyone’s enemy, but he sure has that tone of assurance, and sometimes, despite or perhaps because of all its earnestness, it rankles.