[Thanks to scottbenbow for pitching this show.]

The Reading Room at the British Museum in London is another one of my favorite libraries. Marx, Lenin, Oscar Wilde, Rudyard Kipling, and H.G. Wells all had carrels there! [Christopher Chan / Flickr]

My own passion for libraries started early. I loved my local library. Growing up, I would go there at least once a week, browse with no agenda, and leave with two or three surprises. I read Paul Auster before I knew who Paul Auster was. I went through a biography phase, a John Bellairs phase, and an Ayn Rand phase (although I’d rather not think about that last one now). In that library were all the landmarks of my literary childhood.

On top of that, my mother works at the Library of Congress, a place she cheerily refers to as “the world’s largest repository of organized knowledge.” She’s one of the lucky few with check-out privileges, and when I was little she would occasionally bring me into the stacks — 530 miles of shelving that house 29 million books. I remember glancing through the shelves to find a copy of Uncle Tom’s Cabin printed in the 1890s, in Russian, or an obscure Japanese architecture magazine with an article about the Italian Futurists. It’s an amazing, cavernous place. And would you believe the librarians blared music while they reshelved?

Apocryphal stories about people like Malcolm X reading every book in the library (in his case, the prison library in Norfolk, Massachusetts) always gave me the sense that libraries are magical places where people who will one day run the world (or write about it) go to receive the wisdom of the ancients. The fact that Mary’s ferociously smart 9-year-old daughter, Annie, aspires to read every book in her school library only proves the point.

What is your favorite library or your favorite library memory? What did you get out of libraries that you might not have gotten elsewhere? Our favorite blogging librarian, Karen Schneider, told David that today’s librarians must be “spiritual advisors for information.” How should libraries adapt now that most people would rather google something than look it up? Are you worried about the future of libraries in the digital information age?

hurley was kind enough to point out that scottbenbow is not the only one who’s been angling for this show for some time now.

Long live the public library! Especially for kids!!! In our little town here in central MA we are having trouble getting it together to put up a huge addition to our little library which began as a private lending institution in 1792 and grew into a public institution by the 1880’s. Today it is the tiny library that it was a hundred years ago and it desperately needs updating. Will the town fight for it?

Is the library essential anymore or a luxury today?

I think a show devoted to libraries and how they are changing or have to change to survive, how important they are to us as a society would be a a great topic.

Potter, in a comment to Open Source, 12/6/05

I think a show focusing on the nature of libraries in the digital age would be fascinating. Some of the points brought up during the Google Print show touched on some of these issues, and I think it was clear that this is a deep topic worthy of exploration. How has the way we understand and access information changed? How does that impact the role of libraries, schools, and unversities and guardians and storehouses of knowledge?

tsackton, in a comment to Open Source, 12/6/05

Thanks guys.

Rick Prelinger

Founder, Prelinger Archives
Board President, Internet Archive

Paul Whitney

City Librarian, Vancouver Public Library

Bernard Margolis

President, Boston Public Library

Amanda McKeraghan

Director, Stevens County Rural Library District in Washington state

Extra Credit Reading

Michael Baldwin, Can Libraries Save Democracy?, Library Journal, October 15, 2002: “The American public library is the most important invention of our democratic society after the Constitution itself. Libraries can provide the social leverage to return America to a democratic destiny. We will be condemned by history and by ourselves if we allow democracy to perish. I’m no Tom Paine, but I’ll borrow his mantle for a moment. Now is the time for all good librarians to come to the aid of their country!”

Ron Miller, It’s Comforting to Know The Librarian is Still a Journalist’s Best Friend, by Ron Miller, May 8, 2007: “Honestly, I do most of my research online now, but remembering this chestnut of wisdom, I decided to ask the expert. She suggested I go to the University library, so I got in my car again, drove to the University library and spoke to the UMass research librarian, a fellow who looked very harsh sitting up in his chair, but smiled warmly as soon as I addressed him.”

Megan Shaw Prelinger, To Build a Library, Bad Subjects, April, 205: “Most libraries in educational and research institutions hold books in closed stacks. Closed stacks structure access to knowledge in a query-based format. In query-based access, users have to know what they are looking for in order to request it, in order to “find” it. In this system the process of discovery is channeled from one direct link to the next.”

Siva Vaidhyanathan, Siva in Chronicle of Higher Ed: A Risky Gamble with Google, Sivacracy.net, December 2, 2005: “It pains me to declare this: Google’s Library Project is a risky deal for libraries, researchers, academics, and the public in general. However, it’s actually not a bad deal for publishers and authors, despite their protestations.”

Phil Bowermaster, Library Conference, Day 2, The Speculist, May 9, 2007: “So we’ve got all these older people, showing up in libraries because of an extraordinary invention called retirement. Very recent – roughly 1900 did the idea of a pension-supported retirement emerge. Before that, you just became incapacitated. Often impoverished and then dead.”

Joshua Harris, The Room, via Snopes.com: “When I came to a file marked ‘Lustful Thoughts,’ I felt a chill run through my body. I pulled the file out only an inch, not willing to test its size, and drew out a card. I shuddered at its detailed content. I felt sick to think that such a moment had been recorded. An almost animal rage broke on me. One thought dominated my mind: ‘No one must ever see these cards! No one must ever see this room! I have to destroy them!’”

Bill Barnes and Gene Ambaum, Unshelved, Overdue Media.

LOLbrarians: “im in ur cattylog, makin up subj3ck hedinz.”

Marian the Librarian

Is your payment on time? [Claire Sutton / Flickr]

People all over the country are losing their homes, in rather startling numbers. Because of a meltdown in the subprime mortgage market, in Detroit, one out of every 21 mortgages foreclosed last year. In Colorado, 1 out of every 33; in Georgia and Nevada, 1 our of every 41. The national rate is 1 in 92, which last year meant a million households. Estimates predict another 2 million could lose their homes in the next few years.

As a result, subprime lenders — companies that lend money to people who wouldn’t otherwise qualify for loans because of bad credit history and the like — are shutting down or going bankrupt in record numbers. And this is causing scary ripples in the larger economy. Not just in the housing market, but on Wall Street, too.

How did this happen? The housing bubble is partly to blame. Bolstered by the hot real estate market, subprime lenders made loans to people who probably couldn’t afford them (and conversely, people took on loans they couldn’t afford, or thought they could afford but now can’t). Now that the market has cooled down and the terms of their loans have switched from their initial, enticingly low rate to a higher new one, people are defaulting on their payments. There are accusations of predatory lending, but also of unsophisticated consumers getting in over their heads. It’s pretty messy. (For a more complete and pretty accessible explanation, check out this report [pdf] from Congress’s Joint Economic Committee.)

We’re not entirely sure what shape this show is going to take yet, but we know we’d like to find a good “explainer guest” to sort out all the financial mumbo-jumbo. We’d also like hear the stories of people directly affected by the crisis. We’re tempted to take a race and class lens to this story, as minority homeowners and minority neighborhoods have been severely, and disproportionately, affected.

So tell us how this crisis has been affecting you or your neighborhood or your city, and help us figure out how to shape this show.

Ira Rheingold

Executive Director and General Counsel, National Association of Consumer Advocates

Guy Cecala

Publisher, Inside Mortgage Finance Publications

Mariah Crenshaw

Cleveland homeowner facing foreclosure due to subprime loan
Member of ACORN

Extra Credit Reading

Hearing on Subprime Mortgages: Clay on Race

Beth Ann Bovino, Left Out In The Cold: The Impact From The Sub-Prime Mortgage Collapse, 3 Quarks Daily, May 14, 2007: “While it is obvious that homeowner defaults hurt mortgage-lenders and homeowners, these defaults must be put in a broader economic context. Questions include: How will they affect the broader housing markets? Will it spread into the larger economy? Who will be hurt and how? What will the impact of sub-prime problems damage credit availability?”

Greg Ip and Damian Paletta, Regulators Scrutinized In Mortgage Meltdown, The Wall Street Union, March 22, 2007: “Changes in the lending business and financial markets have moved large swaths of subprime lending from traditional banks to companies outside the jurisdiction of federal banking regulators. In 2005, 52% of subprime mortgages were originated by companies with no federal supervision, primarily mortgage brokers and stand-alone finance companies.”

Robert Reich, The Fed and the Sub-Prime Lending Debacle, Robert Reich’s Blog, March 22, 2007: “The Fed’s decisions can either be a great boon to poorer Americans or a huge curse, depending on how responsibly the Fed manages the credit markets. In this respect, it’s done a lousy job in recent years. In the early 2000s, rates were so low that banks didn’t know what to do with all the extra money they had on hand. But instead of keeping an eye on bank lending standards, the Fed looked the other way.”

JP Smith, You remember the black home ownership rates Bush flaunted?, black…MYstory, December 20, 2006: “What Bush didn’t tell about black home ownership, or even home ownership in general, was that too many of these home were purchased with subprime loans. In other words, with loans having high interest rates and unreasonable terms.”

The Holy Fatman, In the Well, DUHHHH, department, Holy Buck, Fatman!, December 20, 2006: “Not many college students graduate with the ability to even balance their checkbook, pay off their credit cards monthly or open savings accounts, let alone IRA’s and 401K’s. They ruin their credit by the time they graduate and when the times comes to buy a home, they are meat for the subprime lending beast.”

Casey Serin, Last Foreclosure… No Houses, No Money, No Stereo, I am Facing Foreclosure .com, April 27, 2007: “Today I lost my last property to foreclosure. The worst part is that BOTH the first and second approved the short sale but the first (Countrywide) refused to give the buyer a small extension to close. They had a solid offer for $300,000 on the table!”

Alec MacGillis and John Solomon, Edwards Says He Didn’t Know About Subprime Push, The Washington Post, May 11, 2007: “Edwards said yesterday that he was unaware of the push by the firm, Fortress Investment Group, into subprime lending and that he wishes he had asked more questions before taking the job.”

As we first touched upon in our anthropomorphism show, the world of science is offering up a lot of interesting new research pertaining to animals right now. For example: elephants suffer from PTSD. Squids, finches, and even fruit-flies have personality. Chimps have a sense of morality, and rats laugh:

Oh yeah, and dogs like beer. (Ok, just kidding about that one but it’s probably true.)

It begs the question: is “the rat laughed” still an anthropomorphic statement if it’s been scientifically proven that rats actually laugh? Does it force us to reconsider the most basic divisions between what is “human” and what is “animal”?

We want to hear from scientists doing original research about animals and ask them: what do we know about animals now? How are they both like and unlike humans? If animals have personality, morality, and senses of humor, is there anything left that distinguishes “us” from “them”? How does this new science force us to reconsider our place in the greater animal kingdom?

Marc Bekoff

Professor of Biology, University of Colorado
Author, The Emotional Lives of Animals

Jaak Panksepp

Chair, Animal Well-Being Science, Washington State University
Author, Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions

Lori Marino

Senior Lecturer in Neuroscience, Living Links Center, Emory University
Author, Mirror Self-Recognition in the Bottlenose Dolphin

Extra Credit Reading

Smart Crows and Ravens

John Noble Wilford, Almost Human, and Sometimes Smarter, The New York Times, April 17, 2007: “Other researchers combine field work showing chimp behavior in natural habitats with laboratory experiments that are created to disclose their underlying intelligence — what scientists call their ‘cognitive reserve.’”

kittenz, in a comment on Cryptomundo, February 24, 2007: “Reptiles are thought to be pretty low in intelligence, so the idea of a reptile using tools is, well, a novel one. But I had a Burmese python who did learn to use a tool to get what she wanted.”

Steve Wood, human morality qua animal behavior, mai bLog, April 26, 2007: “I’m convinced that what distinguishes human morality from other animal behavior (such as the concern for conspecifics shown by primates) is our ability to reason about our emotional reactions to ‘moral’ situations.”

Jennifer Viegas, Animal Intelligence Resists Definition, Discovery News, June 30, 2006: “‘Chickens practice deception, pigeons can categorize images in photographs as quickly as we can, a gorilla plays a joke on a human teacher, and a tiny fish leaps from one tide pool to another using a mental map formed during high tide.’”

Pete Mandik, Mental Representations in Non-Human Animals, Brain Hammer, March 7, 2007: “Consider the impressive feats of maze learning exhibited by rats. A Morris water maze is filled with water rendered opaque to obscure a platform that will offer a rat a chance to rest without having to tread water.”

Good blog on the subject: Animal Intelligence

roseinpants, in a comment to Open Source, April 29, 2007: “Oh good, this show look like it might address exactly the problem I had with thte anthropomorphism show, namely that if animals and humans share characteristics (and we do), then identifying such surely *isn’t* anthropomorphism? Or is it still anthropomorphism as long as we call them “human” attributes (even if it’s just our shared mammalian past showing through)?”

mynocturama, in a comment to Open Source, April 30, 2007: “What constitutes self-recognition in general? What are its components and levels of complexity? I remember someone on this site, I’m not sure who, on some thread, asking if the fact that animals (All? I can’t say for sure, though I’d think so) don’t self-cannibalize, don’t try to eat their own limbs, constitutes an elementary self-recognition or self-identity. But then, what about thumb-sucking or fingernail chewing?”

The ur-lolcat. [I Can Has Cheezburger ]

If you only use the internet for boring things like, you know, reading the newspaper and listening to smarty-pants public radio shows (psht), you’ve probably missed one of this year’s most ridiculous, anthropomorphic, internet memes – the lolcats.

The recipe is pretty simple: take a picture of a cat or another animal which may or may not be funny by itself, add a caption, and voila, hilarity ensues. The blog I Can Has Cheezburger? has collected some of the finer specimens.

I used to think these picts were just random. But after talking to one of the guests for tonight’s anthropomorphism show, I realized they were also a little profound. Marc Shell teaches a class at Harvard on talking animals in culture high and low, from Poe’s Raven to Pepe Le Peu. His thesis is that giving animals speech and then making them talk funny is all about distinguishing who is like us and who is not. Not just who is human and who is not, but also, who is a native English speaker and who is, say, a Mexican immigrant. I was shocked to go through the list of classic Warner Brothers cartoon characters and realize that almost every one of them, from Porky Pig and Foghorn Leghorn, to Elmer Fudd and Bugs Bunny, have some kind of outrageous accent or speech impediment.

[I Can Has Cheezburger ]

[I Can Has Cheezburger ]

The lolcats are not that far off. Each picture’s caption, which is usually like a little speech bubble, is almost always messed up in some way. Bad spelling, bad grammar, misused words, etc. In other words, the lolcats are funny because they don’t know how to “speak good English.” So to speak. For some reason, it’s a lot funnier to picture a cat saying, “I can has cheezburger?” than it is to picture it saying, “Can I have a cheeseburger?” Eschewing for the moment that these are cats and that they can’t…talk…at all.

Not to mention the fact that this isn’t just about animals talking. The “lol” part of lolcats stands for “laughing out loud,” an acronym that comes from instant messaging. Other computer-esque typos or abbreviations are common in the captions, including 1s instead of exclamation points and thx instead of thanks. So now, it’s not just about animals talking funny; it’s about them typing funny, or even (gasp) sending each other instant messages. Weird, right?

A variation – the “lolrus” bucket saga. [I Can Has Cheezburger ]

I think the lolcats also reveal the anthropomorphic way we think of our pets. They’re something more than animals, yet something less than hapless toddlers (or ditzy teenagers). They can communicate with us, but they haven’t quite mastered our codes. They have a life of their own. When we’re not looking, we just know they’re secretly engaged in human activities – like fixing computers or even BDSM. The rational part of us knows this isn’t so, but somewhere deep down we want to believe that our cats could really be cyclists. Or hovercrafts.

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled yesterday that the Environmental Protection Agency can regulate the carbon emissions that cause global warming. In doing so they ruled for an assortment of states and environmental groups, and against the EPA and American automakers.

Add this decision to the daily litany of the Big Three’s woes: falling sales, layoffs and buy-outs, and staggering health care costs, for starters. In our Global Warming Goes to the Supreme Court show we delved into the specifics of the case, including states’ roles in emissions regulation, businesses’ claims they could handle the emissions themselves, and carbon trading. Now we’re wondering what this ruling means for Detroit’s Big Three, and the future of the American auto industry.

Those Big Three now say they’ll work with the EPA to craft new emissions standards. But what kinds of standards can we expect? And are efficiency standards alone the best method for reducing CO₂ emissions — especially if our insatiable demand for speed and power remains unchanged?

James Womack

Chairman and Founder, Lean Enterprise Institute
Author, Lean Solutions and The Machine That Changed the World, among many others

Joseph Romm

Founder and Executive Director, Center for Energy & Climate Solutions
Author, Hell and High Water: Global Warming–the Solution and the Politics–and What We Should Do
Blogger, Climate Progress

Kevin Wilson

Senior Editor, AutoWeek

Extra Credit Reading

Jon Gertner, From 0 to 60 to World Domination, The New York Times, February 18, 2007: “By any measure, Toyota’s performance last year, in a tepid market for car sales, was so striking, so outsize, that there seem to be few analogs, at least in the manufacturing world. A baseball team that wins 150 out of 162 games? Maybe.”

David Shepardson, Auto emissions ruling could cost Big Three, The Detroit News, April 3, 2007: “Ann Klee, a former EPA general counsel in the Bush administration, said the decision ‘will dramatically change the regulatory landscape for decades to come, laying the groundwork for far-reaching new air standards based on potential global climate change.’”

Joel Makower, The Detroit Auto Show: Where Did the Green Go?, Joel Makower, January 8, 2007: “This year, environmentally minded vehicles and innovations seemed few and far between. The well-choreographed and elaborately staged press events focused far more on horsepower and high-technology than on hybrids and hydrogen. “Muscle” was probably the show’s most exercised buzzword.”

Sebastian Blanco, AFVI Show: notes on the opening speeches (CIA assassination, GM < Honda, and more), AutoblogGreen, April 3, 2007: “Pete McCloskey was the best of the bunch. He served in the U.S. military and as a Republican in the U.S. Congress and gave the most animated talk of the morning. He gave warnings about our energy future, and told stories about how he helped get Earth Day started and the power of the environment in politics in the ’70s and today.”

Kevin Meyer, That Sneaky Honda!, Evolving Excellence, March 11, 2007: “Our friend Mr. Womack even weighed in. You may recall that a year ago he was taking a pretty light stand on the problems with the Detroit Three until many of us in the blogosphere convinced him to start telling the brutal truth.”

Paul Niedermeyer, Detroit Deathwatch – The Prequel (Part 2), Thr Truth About Cars, March 6, 2007: “If you had to pick a moment when The Big Three’s hegemony ended, it’s October 17, 1973. On that day, the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) initiated an embargo that effectively doubled the cost of crude oil. And the resulting price shock tipped the U.S. economy into recession. Even worse, Americans experienced massive gas shortages.”

Brij Singh, Joseph Romm on climate, One More Idea, February 18, 2007: “Dr Michio Kaku’s interview with scientist Joseph Romm was by the far the most chilling scenario I have heard in recent time. Coming from a scientist who knows what he is talking this should make people sit up and do something about this global issue. His book – Hell And High Water; uses tons of scientific data to make dire predictions. Which includes Manhattan under 10 ft of water by 2050!”

I had actually booked someone I hoped would act as a bit of a counter to these other guests. Someone to talk about daily life in Iraqi Kurdistan and maybe offer a reality check against the ad campaign. But as you may have noticed when Chris mentioned it on the air, we missed hearing from Bilal Wahab because of problems with the international phone lines. It was really too bad. Bilal is a blogger and NGO worker who grew up in Iraqi Kurdistan, left for a year or so to do a Fulbright scholarship in DC, and has now resettled with his wife in Erbil. When I spoke to him the day before the show, he and his family were headed to Erbil’s biggest park to celebrate the new year, all dressed in traditional Kurdish garb. He said that over 10,000 people were gathered in the park that day. It was a lovely image.

But Bilal also had a lot of criticisms of the KRG and expressed frustration about the small but important inconsistencies of daily life there. Here are some of the notes from our pre-interview. Square them, if you like, against the picture that was painted on the show.

Kurdistan is booming in terms of construction but at a price. Sometimes I think it’s more expensive for me to live here than in DC…When you try to see how the construction boom is affecting people, you find out it’s very elitist. There are very few people benefiting from it. My wife is a school teacher and she earns about $250 a month, and the local hotel is $250 a night.

In Erbil you have only two gas stations that sell at the government subsidized price – you get 30 liters for a week, and you have to wait in a long line for five or six hours, sometimes longer. The other way to get gas is through the black market. The electricity is worse than when I left two years ago. We still have shortages in electricity and power. The local government blames it on Baghdad: ‘It’s Iraq, we don’t have refineries.’

Bilal Wahab in a conversation with Open Source, 3/21/07

With the KRG, at least now you’re talking about one KRG – we used to be talking about two KRGs [when there was a civil war between the PUK and the KDP in the mid '90s]. The unity government is doing much better than people expected…The public problem we have is that we have 1 million public employees and only 10% of them are needed. The government hands out 60% of its budget in salary. It is a loss in money and manpower. The excuse is that the government is feeding the people in a way. But it plays out badly during elections in our region, where many aspects of life have been politicized. They say, if you don’t vote for me, you’ll lose your job.

The media is more vibrant than it used to be. They’re more critical of public officials and corruption; on the other hand, officials are more immune. Newspapers and magazines no longer beat around the bush but rather name public officials, including heads of parties. We have officials who spend like Gulf emirs – they have villas, they go on expensive vacations – but you have a media increasingly critical of that.

Bilal Wahab in a conversation with Open Source, 3/21/07

Do we ache for what’s going on in Baghdad? My father’s generation does. They have friends there. The generation of my young brother doesn’t. They don’t speak Arabic, they think about Kurdish nationalism and Gap jeans and that kind of thing. Some people realize that this region cannot be stable unless Baghdad stabilizes. Then some think the worse Baghdad becomes the better we become…

I don’t see Kurdistan being an independent state any time soon–there is more talk about independence than work in that direction. One big Kurdish nation that homes all Kurds is a far-fetched dream. The people on the street are increasingly realizing we need electricity and water and sanitation and health care more than we need a flag. If you, an American, ask a Kurd, now they will be nationalistic to the bone. But when we talk at home, as friends, nationalism is not a priority. Our daily priority is filling up the tank and switching from one power source to another. People still cling to a hope that things will become better.

Bilal Wahab in a conversation with Open Source, 3/21/07

I’m going to see 300 w [James] Der Derian bc Slavoj Zizek said we had to on your show.

Shepherd Laughlin, in a text message to Open Source, 3/21/07

Awesome. Town.

Thanks to brent for pitching us a show about the Kurds.

[This show will record at 4pm EST.]

When we did our show on Iraq’s Oil Future(s) back in December, I was impressed with the quiet, deliberate, even brazen forward momentum of the Kurdish Regional Government. While the rest of the country had yet to arrive at any sort of consensus about how to manage their reserves, the Kurdish north had already invited a Norwegian oil company to start drilling. What was going on with the Kurds in the north?

Turns out a lot. Under the Iraqi constitution passed in 2005, the Iraqi Kurds have a good deal of regional autonomy, and they’ve made good use of it: they have their own parliament, their own army, and depending how you read the Constitution, a certain amount of discretion over the region’s oil.

The region people are starting to call Iraqi Kurdistan, or, The Other Iraq, also has a shocking degree of stability and prosperity compared to the rest of the country, which they’re eager to tout:

While the south struggles daily with car bombs and sectarian violence, the north is attracting foreign investment and has opened new shopping malls and a brand new English-language university. None of the guests in our show about who won in Iraq mentioned the Kurds, but you could argue that’s a pretty glaring omission. Even though Iraq’s Kurds have been living in a semi-autonomous region since the US established a no-fly zone after the first Gulf War, Iraqi Kurdistan as it stands today is the closest thing to a fully functional, independent nation-state the Kurds have ever had.

But to what end? Do Iraq’s Kurds see themselves as part of a federalized, multi-ethnic Iraq or as trailblazers for a Kurdish state? Qubad Talabani, the Kurdish Regional Government’s U.S. Representative — and son of Iraqi President Jalal Talabani — will help us answer those and other questions. Here’s a few more for starters: what are the implications (regional and otherwise) of this quasi nation-state? Is there a conflict between what Iraq’s Kurds want, and what their leadership considers most prudent?

Qubad Talabani

Kurdish Regional Government (KRG) Representative to the United States
Son of Iraqi President Jalal Talabani

Bayan Sami Abdul Rahman

Chair, Kurdistan Development Corp
KRG Representative to the United Kingdom

Bilal Wahab

Regional Training Officer on local governance, Research Triangle Institute
Fulbright Scholar Alumnus
Blogger, Better Kurdistan and Iraq

Peter Galbraith

Former (and first) Ambassador to Croatia under Clinton
Senior Diplomatic Fellow at the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation
Advisor to the KRG

Thanks to Nick for suggesting Ambassador Galbraith

Extra Credit Reading

Qubad Talabani, Tennessee Voices: Success in Kurdistan should inspire rest of Iraq, The Tennessean, March 11, 2007: “While it is not fully clear what the future will bring and how Iraq will look, in the success of the Kurdistan region there remains hope for a federal democracy for all of Iraq.

Dr. Nazhad Khasraw Hawramany, Only Mountains, Marshes And Palm Groves As Friends, Iraqi Kurdistan, February 10, 2007: “I thought . . . there must be something wrong with the Kurds that no body cared about them . . . that there was no place any where for humanity in their souls.”

Hiwa, US trying to work out Iraq!, Hiwakan (The Hopes), January 9, 2007: “But I can tell from the Kurdish perspective what should be done to make him happy and consequently the British happy to really really realise that Kurds are different from the rest of Iraq, and the genocide on the hands of the Iraqis supported by both UK and US at its time is enough to consolidate KRG further to become a seed of stability in the north and also a real threat to Iran and Syria that we can stir you up if you act unaccordingly!”

Bilal Wahab, No Justice for Kurds, Better Kurdistan and Iraq, January 8, 2007: “Kurds seem to be running thin of friends. This is not a good sign, especially as the Turkish army lays bare its fangs against the only safe part of Iraq—Kurdistan.”

Seymour M. Hersh, Plan B, The New Yorker, June 28, 2004: “Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s government decided, I was told, to minimize the damage that the war was causing to Israel’s strategic position by expanding its long-standing relationship with Iraq’s Kurds and establishing a significant presence on the ground in the semi-autonomous region of Kurdistan.” (via hurley)

Yahya Barzanji, PKK Open to Peace Deal With Turkey , The Guardian, March 16, 2007: “Turkey is pressing Iraq and its American ally to crack down on rebels of the Kurdistan Workers Party, or PKK, who launch attacks on Turkey from bases in northern Iraq. The group has been waging a bloody war in southeast Turkey since 1984 in a conflict that has claimed 37,000 lives.” (via tbrucia)

Ed Morrissey, US Curbs Kurds, Captain’s Quarters, March 15, 2007: “The success of Kurdish autonomy in Iraq has fueled Kurdish desire for a de facto Kurdistan, but we cannot allow terrorism to operate under any pretenses in the new Iraq — not if we want to keep the Turks out of it.”

Michael J. Totten, The Kurds Go Their Own Way, Reason, August/September 2006: “Two hours into my first tour of Erbil, my guide for the day taught me to feel lucky. ‘If we were doing this in Baghdad, we would be dead by now,’ he said.”

Rancher, Our Friends the Kurds, Llano Estacado, March 16, 2007: “Whether you believe Palestinians should have a state before or after they stop killing Jews, how can anyone who supports them not equally support the Kurds?”

6:25

When the U.S. came into the country, they were greeted as liberators, candy and flowers and food were thrown in the direction of our friends that came from afar. And I think that really created such a positive environment, to know that that danger against our people, the danger that was Saddam, was no more.

Qubad Talabani

12:50

History has not been kind to the Kurdish people. There is a reality today that confines the Kurdish people to the state of Iraq, and when we’re building this new country called Iraq, many different ethnic and sectarian groups must voluntarily unite to form it. And we have committed to do so. The Kurds have committed themselves to a federal democracy in Iraq.

Qubad Talabani

17:25

People imagine that Turkey is very negative towards Kurdistan, but in fact, in terms of foreign direct investment, Turkey is the largest single investor in the Kurdistan region, having invested up to two billion dollars in the region in the past few years.

Bayan Sami Abdul Rahman

26:50

TThe tragedy of Iraq is the fact that the country was founded on faulty logic. These fault lines have existed in Iraq since the creation of the state of Iraq. And the insecurities that exist between the different communities are not three or four years old; they are hundreds, if not over a thousand years old.

Qubad Talabani

34:40

Where you have a people that unanimously don’t want to be part of a country, you can’t keep them part of that country, so the separation of Kurdistan from Iraq is inevitable. Both Bayan and Qubad are polite about it, but they know full well… among the population, it’s not just that they want indepenence, it’s that the history of these decades in Iraq has been so bitter that reconciliation with that country is simply not possible.

Peter Galbraith

38:00

Among other Turks, there’s a recognition that maybe this isn’t such a bad thing for Turkey. After all, who are the Kurds? They’re secular, they’re pro-Western, they aspire to be democratic, and they’re not Arabs; in short, they’re very much like the Turks. And of course, if Kurdista does become independent, it’s going to be dependent on somebody, and if the Turks play their cards right, that would be Turkey.

Peter Galbraith

46:20

I’ve urged that we redeploy our forces out of Arab Iraq to Kurdistan, both to provide protection there, but also because from Kurdistan, we can strike at Al Quaeda in the Sunni Arab areas, which is the only part of Iraq where it operates, if we need to: if the Sunni Arabs are unable to manage their own security.

Peter Galbraith

[This show will tape at 2pm EST to accommodate our UK guests.]

Zizek mimicking the rowboat scene from Hitchcock’s The Birds. [idealterna / Flickr]

Uber-theorist Slavoj Zizek and filmmaker Sophie Fiennes have teamed up to make a remarkable documentary called The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema.

To put it bluntly, this is one of the coolest and most compelling films I’ve seen in a long time. It’s about using film to understand psychoanalysis, and using psychoanalysis to understand film (both individual films and film as a medium).

Watching it is like stepping into an alternative reality behind the screen. Zizek hops from iconic moment to iconic moment in the history of cinema, moving from the Marx Brothers to Hitchcock to Alien in one fell swoop. Zizek and Fiennes went back to the actual shooting locations or reconstructed sets from many classic movies, like the motel bathroom from The Conversation and Dorothy’s living-room from Blue Velvet, which gives you the eerie impression that Zizek is actually talking to you from inside these films. All the while, he puts films into conversation with one another, using them to illustrate ideas about the unconscious, maternal angst, or the nature of desire.

The art of cinema consists in arousing desire, to play with desire, but at the same time keeping it at a safe distance. Domesticating it. Rendering it palpable…

The problem for us is not are our desires satisfied or not. The problem is how do we know what we desire? There is nothing spontaneous, nothing natural about human desire. Our desires are artificial. We have to be taught to desire.

Cinema is the ultimate pervert art. It doesn’t give you what you desire. It tells you how to desire.

Slavoj Zizek, The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema, 2007

We’re going to use this cinematic guide as a jumping off point to talk about film, but also about fantasy, reality, sexuality, subjectivity, and desire.

Do you think film is better suited than other art forms to get at the nature of human desire? Do you have a favorite film you’d like Zizek to help pick apart?

Slavoj Zizek

Philosopher and Psychoanalyst
Professor, Institute for Sociology, and the European Graduate School

Sophie Fiennes

Filmmaker
Director, The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema

Screening Room

The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema comes to theaters and film festivals in Boston, New York, San Francisco and Washington, DC this April. (Click here for a full list of screenings or to buy a copy of the DVD.) In the meantime, check out the following clips:

The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema, Theatrical Trailer

The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema – Excerpt 1 (about Francis Ford Coppola’s 1974 film The Conversation)

The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema – Excerpt 2 (about David Lynch’s 1986 film Blue Velvet)

Extra Credit Reading

Alok, The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema, Dispatches from Zembla, January 23, 2007: “I think he is arguing for ‘constructivism,’ the idea that reality is not ‘real’ but rather constructed and cinematic fiction helps us understand how this reality is constructed in tune with our desires and psychic needs.”

Joyce Huntjens, Vertigo. A vertiginous gap in reality and a woman who doesn’t exist, Image [&] Narrative, January 2003: “The construction of Madeline reveals that she is not a woman, but John’s object-of-desire, she does not exist as such. When the mystery of Madeline is unveiled at the end of the film, she turns out to be an ordinary woman. John is cured from his vertigo, but at the cost of the woman’s life, for a real relation turns out to be impossible.”

Theresa Duncan, Hollywood Gossip and The Woman Who Doesn’t Exist, The Wit of the Staircase, February 3, 2007: “A brilliant analysis of a bit of celebrity gossip we would otherwise have absolutely no interest in, in which a famous rock star discards his female mates, only to insist his new date transform, Vertigo-like into her predecessor….”

Chris, Analyzing the Exorcist, chris_nunnally, August 9, 2005: “It’s the concept of your body being invaded and destroyed by an alien force beyond your control – be it the devil or disease – that spawns a great deal of the terror that the movie generates. Remove the demon and replace it with cancer and a lot of things in this movie would not change.”

Matt Zoller Seitz, Matt Zoller Seitz, The House Next Door, December 3, 2006: “It hews to the anarchist vaudevillian spirit of its subjects, prefacing a detailed look at the dialogue-free mirror scene in Duck Soup with with a blank page that represents “ghostly, unreal silence.”

Movie Geek, how I see David Lynch, Penguin Pete’s Blog, January 26, 2007: “The point isn’t to be correct, because there is no correct answer to “what do David Lynch movies mean”. The point is to frolic on what Larry Niven would call a “playground of the mind”….First off, David Lynch is a moralist.”

kier, Alien gender or the “monstrous feminine”, Aussie Diary, January 25, 2007: “What is significant in this particular instance is the ‘othering’ of the organic, biological procreator – the alien. The maternal computer’s womb is crisp and sterile. The alien’s womb within the derelict spaceship is dark and slimy with a layer of ominous fog. Technology/masculinity is clean and safe. Biology/femininity is dirty and dangerous.”

6:00

The producers of King Kong visited the Soviet Union just before shooting the film, in the late 20s, and they were showing the modernist plans for the new Palace of Soviets. High tower, on the top of it, gigantic statue of Lenin. And they said, wait a minute, if we replace Lenin with the big ape, we have it. So, paradoxically, the origin of one of the exemplary, iconic, images of Hollywood — King Kong, ape on the top of the Empire State Building — is Soviet communism.

Slavoj Zizek

15:15

One of the things that I learned from Hitchcock was this point that he would always watch a film completely silent, before he locked off the picture, because then he would see how it worked purely visually.

Sophie Fiennes

17:50

And that’s for me the true mystery of cinema. How even after you see the machinery behind, the magic remains. It’s as if there is more reality, more power, in the magic, in appearance, than in the machinery behind.

Slavoj Zizek

26:00

The problem I see with [Werner] Herzog is often the overwhelming obsession, strength, that he puts in the creation of his films — it’s too strong, it simply overwhelms the films itself.

Slavoj Zizek

37:20

In Hitchcock there are always two stories: one story and its counterstory. And I think Hitchcock, in this counterstory of “Vertigo,” in the figure of Judy, presents a more substantial case for female subjectivity than many many of the official feminist films.

Slavoj Zizek

39:55

My own Betty Crocker home-cooked theory is this one which I call psychic transvestitism, where there’s an opportunity for me in fiction to actually kind of surf female experience that they can’t access or actualize for themselves in reality as such.

Sophie Fiennes

47:10

I love the strange moments that shift you, that films can generate. It’s beyond even the narrative, it’s when you actually have a sensation the film generates, and David Lynch is brilliant at manipulating those moments.

Sophie Fiennes

We started this conversation last week with our first show on Hannah Arendt and the “banality of evil.” An hour wasn’t enough. Now it’s time for part two.

Arendt resisted making an explicitly psychological analysis of Nazi official Adolf Eichmann in her lengthy report of his 1961 trial. Her assessment was that Eichmann’s ability to do evil came from his inability to think from others’ points of view, or to have an internal dialogue with himself. Evil itself was banal, she said, in that it was “thought-defying.”

All of the court psychologists who examined Eichmann pronounced him “normal.”
And yet, one wonders. What was going through his head? How is it that this seemingly normal German bureaucrat could be swept up in the tide of Nazism to become one of history’s most perplexing criminals? What explains the participation of thousands of ordinary Germans just like him, concentration camp guards and civilians alike? These questions broaden to become both more personal and more universal. What would I do if faced with these circumstances? Would I act for good, or would I succumb to evil?

Stanford Prison Experiment “inmates.” [Philip Zimbardo]

Probably nobody is more qualified to answer these questions than Stanford psychologist Philip Zimbardo. His true to life experiments have asked these questions and tested our shared notions about the boundaries between good and evil to shocking and edifying conclusions.

In his most famous experiment, the 1971 Stanford Prison Experiment, 24 normal, healthy, well-adjusted, college-age males were randomly divided into “guards” and “prisoners.” The “prisoners” were arrested and put in “jail,” and the guards were given custody over them. The experiment was supposed to last for two weeks. But by day two all hell broke loose; the guards were behaving sadistically and the prisoners were rebelling and having mental breakdowns.

The prisoners even nicknamed the most macho and brutal guard in our study ‘John Wayne.’ Later, we learned that the most notorious guard in a Nazi prison near Buchenwald was named ‘Tom Mix’ — the John Wayne of an earlier generation — because of his ‘Wild West’ cowboy macho image in abusing camp inmates.

Where had our ‘John Wayne’ learned to become such a guard? How could he and others move so readily into that role? How could intelligent, mentally healthy, ‘ordinary’ men become perpetrators of evil so quickly? These were questions we were forced to ask.

Philip Zimbardo, The Stanford Prison Experiment, 1999

Zimbardo stopped the experiment by day six.

A few bad apples or a poisoned barrel? [Dennis Dunleavy / Flickr. Originally secured by FOIA request, The New Yorker.]

Since that time he has dedicated his career to examining how ordinary people become capable of deplorable acts, and perhaps more importantly, how situational circumstances – the barrel, if you will – can poison the apples. He may also know more than anyone else about the monstrous realities of torture and abuse at Abu Ghraib prison, after serving as an expert witness for of one of the guards tried. (The defense asked Zimbardo to testify that the guard was not innately evil or sadistic. Rather, it was structural mismanagement and horrendous working conditions at the prison, including 12-hour shifts for 40 straight days and no oversight, that contributed to the guard’s actions.)

Dr. Zimbardo has a new book out; he’ll join us for part two of our look at the banality of evil, and inject his own new thoughts about the flip-side of the banality of evil, what he calls the banality of heroism.

We want your answers to the big questions we’ve been tackling the last few weeks (including how empathy plays into all this), but we also want to hear your stories. Have you or someone you know been faced with an opportunity for wrong-doing or heroism? How did you react, and what was going through your head?

Philip Zimbardo

Professor Emeritus of Psychology, Stanford University
Author, The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil

Good show. Very good show…solid overall…except regarding empathy.

Nick, in a comment to Open Source, 3/9/07

Some of you felt that the Hannah Arendt show ended on a strange, prickly note, with its heated conversation on the nature of empathy and its role as a counter to the banality of evil. For the public record, here’s what that sounded like:

Chris Lydon: [Quotes Kate McShane, then says,] give us a little of Hannah Arendt on empathy.

Jerome Kohn: Empathy is a fancy word or fancy theory that she argued passionately against. First of all she thought it was an impossible notion in the sense that it really means feeling what someone else feels. Sympathy, fellow feeling, is another thing. But empathy is the claim that you can actually feel what someone else is feeling. And for that Arendt found no evidence whatsoever. One could say it’s even the opposite of her notion of thinking from another person’s point of view. What you have to be able to do is to see a given issue from different points of view, to make it real. And then through those different points of view, with your own eyes, you don’t feel what the other person is feeling, you see what he is seeing through your own eyes, and then you can make a judgement. The more people you can take into consideration in this enlarged mentality, that actually is the foundation of reality for Arendt, the more valid your judgement will be.

Elisabeth Young-Bruehl: Jerry’s exactly right. Hannah Arendt was always opposed to these slurpy, murgy, touchy-feely notions about what binds people to each other. And she felt very keenly that what really binds one person to another is a commitment to try to see the world from that person’s point of view with your own eyes. Not to subscribe to their point of view or to merge with their point of view, but to be able to walk around and see what the world looks like from where they’re standing. But looking at it with your own eyes, so that you can then, as it were, discuss it with them. Not merge with them in some way, but discuss it with them. She was all about discussion. Not empathy in that sentimental way.

CL: And yet, well, there are distinctions without huge differences in some way. To put oneself in another’s mind is the beginning of something important.

EYB: To think that you can put yourself in another’s mind in the beginning of a terrible arrogance which has tremendous consequences. It’s a difference with great consequences. People who think they that they can know what another person thinks or feel what another person feels are narcissistic.

CL: Well, ok, I don’t want to make a philosophical or an endless argument about it. Isn’t it the incapacity and the lack of interest in that perspective precisely what she found at the core of Eichmann’s banality and Eichmann’s evil, really?

JK: Well, no, it was his thoughtlessness, his inability to think from any other point of view but his own.

EYB: Exactly. And these are very important distinctions.

Chris Lydon, Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, and Jerome Kohn on Open Source, 3/8/07

So, what do you think? Were Chris and our guests basically making the same point, only with different terminology? Is it thinking from another person’s perspective or feeling from another person’s perspective that can act as a counter to the banality of evil? Is thinking you can feel what someone else feels arrogant, or does it mean (as Kate McShane argues) that you’re on the “upper end of psychological health”?

We’re glad we have the upcoming show with Philip Zimbardo, best known for conducting the Stanford Prison Experiment, to tackle these kinds of psychological questions and any other unfinished business.

Claiming that evil is banal removes its power, yet also makes it harder to recognize…Even the most horrible things in our world do not have Satan’s hand behind them. Evil acts are not committed by ‘Evil-doers’ but rather by ordinary people who see them as ordinary acts. This, I believe, is the only evil which exists anymore.

Bobo, in a comment to Open Source, 2/18/07

By making evil the possession of others – it is outside of the self – you release yourself from responsibility – ‘I was only taking orders, my actions can’t be evil.’ To remove the overwhelming power of evil, is to place it in the individual, where it originates.

Lumiere, in a comment to Open Source, 2/18/07

It seems that in the American context the real banality of evil is that it is always the other that is evil, and even if it’s me, it’s the other me, in different time and place, while my real me is here and now, and it’s good.

Igor, in a comment to Open Source, 2/21/07

The word ‘Evil’ attempts to explain a concept that ‘exists’ exclusively in the (subjective) opinions of humans – it ‘exists’ entirely in our minds, not in the natural world. (Hence the definition’s concluding — and predictable — retreat into supernaturalism.)

Nick, in a comment to Open Source, 2/21/07

A little over a year ago, I was talking to an old man who sometimes begs on the street when he can’t get through the month. I told him that I had become homeless that day. He took $2 out of his wallet and told me to buy myself a hamburger. The people who were decent to me during that time tended to be poor people. They treated me with warmth and usually made a point of telling me that I shouldn’t feel ashamed that this happened to me…

Empathy is not banal. It is not common to all, pervasive, ordinary or unremarkable. If you are capable of empathy, you may assume that most people are capable of it, that what you see and feel is obvious. It’s not. Someone who is capable of empathy is at the upper end of psychological health. Empathy may even be relatively rare. Certainly, it is unusual.

Kate McShane, in a comment to Open Source, 2/18/07

A Hollywood icon peers down on Connecticut Ave. in Washingon, DC. [Shreyas / Flickr]

Al Gore may have made history by standing on stage to accept his Oscar last night, but he wasn’t the first politician to dip his toes into Hollywood. And it wasn’t the first time members of the Academy paid tribute to Washington.

Watching Gore and Leonardo DiCaprio bask in each other’s reflected glow, we here in our own green room started thinking about a list of other connections between Hollywood and Washington: Hollywood’s original ambassador Ronald Reagan and his political stepson Arnold Schwarzenegger; the blacklisting of writers and actors during the McCarthy era; Barbra Streisand in the Lincoln Bedroom; JFK and Marilyn; Jane Fonda posing on an anti-aircraft gun with the Vietcong.

Tonight we’re asking what exactly does Hollywood mean to America’s political imagination? Why does the specter of liberal Hollywood haunt our political discourse? Why do we assume, culturally, that Hollywood is the domain of the left, even when it’s given us some of our most memorable conservative politicians? Where does the Beltway meet the freeway?

David Thompson

Author, The New Biographical Dictionary of Film

Ted Johnson

Managing Editor, Variety
Blogger, Wilshire & Washington

Sidney Blumenthal

Former advisor to President Bill Clinton
Regular columnist, Salon

Paul Buhle

Lecturer, American Civilization Department, Brown University

Author, Radical Hollywood: The Untold Story Behind America’s Favorite Movies

Roger L. Simon

Nominated with Paul Mazursky in 1989 for an Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay for “Enemies, a Love Story”
CEO, Pajamas Media
Blogger, roger l. simon

Extra Credit Reading

Celebs Step Up, Politics Slaps ‘Em Down, ABC News, October 29, 2006: “For years, Hollywood has given a hand to Democrats. Humphrey Bogart stumped for FDR, Harry Belafonte for JFK, and Warren Beatty for George McGovern.”

Bill O’Reilly, Whoopi Goldberg on Holywood Politics, The O’Reilly Factor, February 2, 2007: “O’REILLY: But don’t you feel it’s his responsibility if he or Jane Fonda and the rest and you too are going to take strong policy stands, because people do listen to you… that you know what the heck you’re talking about?
GOLDBERG: When I take a stance on something, all I can talk to you about it how I feel about it and why. And I don’t have to justify it, and you don’t have to listen to it. But it is important for everyone to know that they have an opinion and they have a — have a right to express it.
O’REILLY: But your opinion is a little bit more heard than somebody — than Sally in Charlotte, North Carolina.
GOLDBERG: No different than yours.”

RJ Eskow, Horray for Hollywood!, The Huffington Post, February 21, 2006: “The Republicans certainly didn’t object to “Hollywood celebrities” when they ran Ronald Reagan for Governor and George Murphy for Senator.”

Michael R. Blood, Obama Attracts Celebrities and Cash, Newsvine, February 20, 2007: “The fundraiser underscored the intense competition among the party’s leading 2008 candidates for Hollywood dollars and endorsements.”

David Knowles, Hollywood Squares — Iraq Edition, The Stump, January 29, 2007: “What do actors have to do with politics? Nothing, of course, unless you’re Ronald Reagan, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Jesse Ventura, Clint Eastwood, Al Franken, Michael J. Fox, Charlton Heston, etc., etc. But flip the question and it’s even easier to understand the connection. What does politics have to do with acting? Plenty.”

Arianna Huffington, 2008: Will Al Gore Be the Anti-Hillary?, The Huffington Post, October 12, 2005: “Lawrence Bender, who after producing ‘Kill Bill’ is now producing what I hear is a killer documentary featuring Gore and his fight to get our country to take action on global warming, told me that the former VP ‘would be a hell of a candidate.’”

kos, Gore, Daily Kos, February 1, 2006: “Say Gore scores an Oscar and Nobel in the same year, he can announce in November and still become THE story in the primaries. It’s not as if he’ll need the full year to get his name recognition up or make the case for his candidacy. He would instantly raise gobs of cash (I’d bet on tens of millions in the first 24 hours) and become the media sensation of the winter. He would instantly make hundreds of millions spent by his primary opponents obsolete. Talent would flock to him, decimating the staffs of his opponents.”

11:15

Hollywood is not doing what Hollywood used to do. They know it, and they’re desperately worried. They feel like everyone in the media, that there are so many ways in which their power could be eclipsed, their market taken away. I don’t think Hollywood’s got anything like the confidence, or the identity and security, that you’re offering to it.

David Thomson

16:55

Hollywood really does want a star candidate, and they really do look for that kind of charisma. I can’t help but think back to 2004, when you had this field of contenders: you had some excitement behind Howard Dean, but you also had a lot of donors out there saying, God, I really wish that Hillary Clinton would enter the race. Thinking back, she was kind of the dream candidate that they wished would enter the race that year. Obviously things have changed quite a bit since then. But I really do think that they look for that star quality.

Ted Johnson

22:20

The other problem with [Clint] Eastwood is he’s too successful. The people who enter politics from Hollwood are people who have sort of reached a dead end one way or another in their careers, or are on the downslide… You know, if you’re looking for a future political figure out of California, out of Hollwood, we need to look at the failing stars.

Sidney Blumenthal

28:05

It’s been quite a while… since on general election day, California has been an important scene of the action. People in California are used to the fact that we don’t get very many campaign ads on TV now, because California is a lock, in terms of the general election vote. It isn’t an action state, is it?

David Thomson

40:25

It’s very amusing to me to hear Roger Simon echo these old 1940s charges, at the time of the Cold War, that Hollywood writers who are successful, and also were left-wing, were swimming pool communists, as they were called. Because they had houses, they had swimming pools, and what right did they have to script left-wing films.

Paul Buhle

43:35

In the past, one of the great curiousities of interviewing survivors of the blacklist, which I pretty systematically did before they died, was that they became supporters of the Popular Front because they believed that only a very different America would admit Jews on an equal basis. That may or may not have been true; from their view in the thirties and forties, it certainly seemed like it; from the Joe McCarthy view of the fifties it certainly seemed like it.

Paul Buhle

Thanks to Brian Dunbar, with assists from Jason Hoppes and Pboake.

So maybe this week’s most compelling space story actually has nothing to do with space. But there are plenty of interesting things going on in the final frontier that don’t involve attempted murder or adult diapers.

We have several billionaires building rockets and standing up companies to send tourists to space. Several others are building new launch systems for cargo. The ESA wants to do more in space, [and] we (via our agency NASA) are heading back to the moon…

98% of the resources in the solar system are extra-terrestrial, the sun is pouring energy across the solar system – we can go up and just get it for free. Given some luck and hard work it’s possible to relocate industry to orbit…

The solar system is becoming a more mysterious and complicated place the more we push out and explore…We might be on the cusp of a true space age.

Brian Dunbar, in a comment to Open Source, 1/11/07

Toys on the moon! [fdecomite / Flickr]

You’ve probably heard about the Mars Rover and space weapons a la China, but do you know about plans to build a space elevator? Or to mine asteroids? Do you know about the 181 things scientists hope we can accomplish by returning to the moon?

I know our blog is harboring a secret colony of space enthusiasts, so let’s have a go at this. What should we be doing in space? (And conversely, what should we not be doing?) Is space a future wasteland or a future gold mine? What are the most interesting, innovative, or unconventional projects in the works or on the horizon? What role, if any, should private space exploration play? What should be our motivations for space exploration, and should they be different than they were in the past?

Thanks for all your input so far guys. It looks like tomorrow’s show is shaping up to deal largely with the new frontiers of what some people call alt.space – private enterprise trailblazing the way forward. So adjust your antennae to think about the role of the market in space exploration.

Greg Klerkx

Author, Lost in Space: The Fall of NASA and the Dream of a New Space Age
Former senior manager, SETI Institute

Elon Musk

Co-founder, PayPal
Founder, CEO, CTO, Space Exploration Technologies

Michael Laine

Founder, president, LiftPort

Monte Davis

Author, Thinking Clearly About Space, adAstra Online
Helped launch Discover and Omni magazines

Extra Credit Reading

Patrick L. Barry, 181 Things To Do On The Moon, Nasa.gov, February 2, 2007: “More than half of the list deals with the many challenges of learning to live on an alien world: everything from keeping astronauts safe from radiation and micrometeors to setting up power and communications systems to growing food in the airless, arid lunar environment.”

Will Sullivan, interview with Robert Zubrin, Q&A: A Missionary for Mars Exploration, U.S. News & World Report, December 8, 2006: “The idea that your strategic goal is the moon as opposed to Mars I think is wrong. I think it’s too timid. I think it’s, well, un-American.”

Kelly Young, Budget cuts may delay shuttle replacement, New Scientist Space, February 5, 2007: “This could increase the gap between the retirement of the space shuttles in 2010 and the launch of their successors, the Orion spacecraft and Ares I rocket, forcing NASA to rely on Russian Soyuz and future commercial spacecraft to send astronauts to the International Space Station (ISS).”

Jeff, FY07 budget inches closer to approval, Space Politics, February 9, 2007: “The Senate is poised to vote on the FY2007 joint funding resolution as early as Tuesday, after a cloture vote to end debate on the bill.”

Bryan Bender, Pentagon eyeing weapons in space, The Boston Globe, March 14, 2006: “Rick Lehner, an agency spokesman, said there are no plans to base weapons in space, noting that out of $48 billion planned for missile defense over the next five years, just $570 million will fund space-related activities. ‘We just want to do some experiments’ on weapons technology in space, he said.”

Monte Davis, Thinking Clearly About Space Part I: Hustling the Future, Space.com, August 18, 2005: “I understand impatience for space: I’ve felt it since age six, when “space program” meant Wernher von Braun on Walt Disney’s TV shows. I felt it thirty years ago, as a science writer tracking the last Apollo missions and the development of the Shuttle. I feel it now, watching the evolution of the Vision for Space Exploration and of the private start-ups of alt.space. But our frustration will not be resolved by scapegoating, or – almost certainly — by any one radical development.”

William J. Broad, Orbiting Junk, Once a Nuisance, Is Now a Threat, The New York Times, February 6, 2007: “Early this year, after a half-century of growth, the federal list of detectable objects (four inches wide or larger) reached 10,000, including dead satellites, spent rocket stages, a camera, a hand tool and junkyards of whirling debris left over from chance explosions and destructive tests.”

Peter B. de Selding, French Government Group Wants Europe To Join 2nd Space Race, Space News, February 12, 2007: “A French parliamentary group said China’s recent anti-satellite demonstrations, plus Chinese and Indian plans for lunar exploration, are clear signs that a second global space race has begun and that Europe should join it.”

James Vlahos, Robot Subs in Space, Popular Science, February, 2007: “The hope is that whether in an unexplored environment on Earth or Europa, [the DepthX robot] could discover a new branch on the tree of life. ‘As far as human endeavor,’ Stone says, ‘DepthX is the coolest thing we’ve ever done, period.’”

Mark, Friday, October 13, 2006, Curmudgeons Corner: “Unfortunately a new controversy seems to have replaced Robots vrs humans in its banality and its capacity to make otherwise intelligent people take absurd positions. I call it, Public vrs Private Space Exploration.”

Andy Pasztor, In Race to Take Tourists Into Orbit, Partners Split, Spar, The Wall Street Journal, February 13, 2007: “Mr. Benson has challenged his foe ‘to sit down in a public forum and go over the 200 emails’ detailing core engine contributions. The showdown features two self-assured and stubborn rivals, both used to getting their way.”

4:50

I think that’s a real difference between the space entrepreneurs today and the space entrepreneurs of, say, twenty years ago. Because there have been space entrepreneurs for quite some time, but I think the group now really understands it as more than just a technological challenge. They understand it as a financial challenge and a public relations challenge.

Greg Klerkx

7:35

Yes, there are robotic missions which bring back science, that’s important. But there have always been other reasons why people have been interested in space. People have been interested in it because, not to be too bland, but because it’s there, because it’s a place that you can explore, that inspires people. And I think that idea is why people go into space, and why people will always go into space, because whatever robots can do, they don’t give very good soundbites.

Greg Klerkx

14:45

Imagine having a ball on a string, and you’re spinning that over your head. The string stays straight, right? Okay, so now imagine that as a huge, Earth-sized system, where the Earth is providing rotation, and you have a counterweight, a satellite deep out in space, attached to a very long, very strong string. All the physics are essentially the same. The string stays straight, and once you have established that, it acts like a ladder that you can use a robot to climb back and forth into space.

Michael Laine

18:20

And so in the early days you’ll have technicians, and ultimately, construction workers: I mean, we’re going to have factories, and solar energy dams out in space collecting clean, green, limitless energy. Somebody’s going to have to build those.

Michael Laine

21:10

My background’s not in engineering or physics or chemistry, it’s actually in finance and business. So I looked at this from the very beginning as: it doesn’t matter whether the elevator works or not, this is a good business.

Michael Laine

23:50

This is in the context of life itself. And I think if you were to consider the expansion of life for the first time to another planet, it would rank in importance in that category. It would be probably at least as important as life moving from the oceans to land, and maybe a little more important, because the oceans to land thing could be gradual, whereas, obviously, there is nothing gradual about life going to another planet.

Elon Musk

35:10

I have wanted all of that good stuff, everything that has been mentioned, from the solar-power satellites that Michael talks about to a permanently manned Moon base to exploration of the planets, as far back as I can remember. It has been borne in upon me that my fellow citizens don’t want it as bad as I do, and as bad as many space enthusiasts do. The first step in getting some patience and some perspective is to accept that.

Monte Davis

50:10

We as a species can say: look, we want to explore the universe. We want to go beyond Earth and live on multiple planets. And that alone is sufficient motivation to do so. We need look no further for a reason.

Elon Musk

Thanks to Tom B, who wants to read Hannah Arendt as much as we do.

A Volker Marz sculpture from the Berlin exhibition Hannah Arendt Denkraum. The show title translates as “a space in which to think about Hannah Arendt.” Which seems perfectly fitting, don’t you think? [Ovit / Flickr]

Hannah Arendt coined the term “banality of evil” while covering the 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann, a Nazi official charged with the orderly extermination of Europe’s Jews. Arendt herself was a German-Jewish exile struggling in the most personal of ways to come to grips with the utter destruction of European society. In a series of articles for The New Yorker that later became the book Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, Arendt tried to tackle a string of questions not necessarily answered by the trial itself: Where does evil come from? Why do people commit evil acts? How are those people different from the rest of us?

Her conclusions were profound. People who do evil are not necessarily monsters; sometimes they’re just bureaucrats. The Eichmann she observed on trial was neither brilliant nor a sociopath. He was described by the attending court psychiatrist as a “completely normal man, more normal, at any rate, than I am after examining him.” Evil, Arendt suggests, can be extraordinary acts committed by otherwise unremarkable people.

[Arendt] insisted that only good had any depth. Good can be radical; evil can never be radical, it can only be extreme, for it possesses neither depth nor any demonic dimension yet — and this is its horror! — it can spread like a fungus over the surface of the earth and lay waste the entire world. Evil comes from a failure to think. It defies thought for as soon as thought tries to engage itself with evil and examine the premises and principles from which it originates, it is frustrated because it finds nothing there. That is the banality of evil.

Amos Elon, The Excommunication of Hannah Arendt, the introduction to Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil

Marz’s miniature Eichmann from the Berlin exhibition. [Sniko / Flickr]

Is it any wonder that controversy erupted almost immediately after Arendt’s work was published? Or that she was ostracized even by fellow Jews?

In the past forty years Arendt’s ideas have been championed in two landmark psychological experiments — Stanley Milgram’s electroshock experiment and Philip Zimbardo’s Stanford prison experiment — but decried by luminaries like Norman Mailer.
Even if the phrase itself has lost some of its punch through sheer repetition, the ideas it embodies are no less relevant. It’s hard to talk about real-world horrors like the Rwandan genocide or torture at Abu Ghraib without referencing Arendt.

So for her centennial we’re reminding ourselves why her ideas still matter. Help us out by taking a stab at some of her initial questions: Where does evil come from? Why do people commit evil? Do you buy Arendt’s thesis, or do you think there is something else (be it religious or biological) that leads to evil and distinguishes good from evil people?

After doing some pre-interviews, talking about things internally, and mining this thread for good ideas, (empathy, the origins vs. the nature of evil, subjective vs. objective vs. moral judgments of evil) we’re leaning towards breaking this show up into at least two different shows.

The first show (tentatively scheduled for Thursday March 8th) would be more of an overview of Hannah Arendt’s life and work, introducing an introduction to the concept of the banality of evil as she described it. Our guests will likely be two of her last students who have spent their lives pouring over her work: Elisabeth Young-Bruehl and Jerome Kohn.

The second show would likely be a more in-depth conversation about evil, starting with Arendt’s concept. We may build this show around Philip Zimbardo, whose recent work has included extensive interviews with prison guards from Abu Ghraib.

Also, apparently Potter had the same idea I did: Meaning and Morality would be (ironically, since it’s been warming up for so long) a really good follow-up to these shows.

Elisabeth Young-Bruehl

Author, Why Arendt Matters and Hannah Arendt: For the Love of the World
Psychoanalyst
Former student of Hannah Arendt

Jerome Kohn

Director of the New York based Hannah Arendt Organization
Arendt’s Literary Executor and last research assistant
Editor of several collections of her essays, including Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought

Extra Credit Reading

Hannah Arendt, Power and Violence [audio of a lecture], Bard College, December 1968.

bardlib, Hannah Arendt Workspace: “The Workspace is an open access forum in which readers might look, as it were, over Hannah Arendt’s shoulder as she annotated the texts most important to her.”

Sarah Kerr, The Horrible and the Ridiculous, BookForum, January 2007: “Arendt “lives on in newspeak through just four words,” she notes on the first page. The media’s promiscuous overuse of the phrase “the banality of evil,” from Eichmann in Jerusalem, has turned it into an unhelpful cliche, she writes. Young-Bruehl directs us back to the philosophical problem of evil, a discussion begun two centuries earlier by Immanuel Kant that Arendt saw herself as extending.”

Jerome Kohn, Evil: The Crime Against Humanity, Hannah Arendt Center, New School University: “In a revealing passage she said: “Only the fearful imagination of those who have been aroused by [firsthand] reports but have not actually been smitten in their own flesh, of those who are consequently free from the bestial, desperate terror which . . . inexorably paralyzes everything that is not mere reaction, can afford to keep thinking about horrors,” adding that such thinking is “useful only for the perception of political contexts and the mobilization of political passions.”
(Read the full series of Kohn’s essays on Hannah Arendt here.)

David Byrne, Free Will, Part 2: Support Our Troops, Journal, February 7, 2007: “Ultimately, following that logic that makes about 3 or 4 people ultimately responsible, if the buck continues to get passed on up the chain of command. Of course, those 3 or 4 will blame ‘faulty intelligence’ or try to absolve themselves one way or another, and they usually succeed.”

Robin Varghese, Banality of Evil, The French Version, 3 Quarks Daily, February 27, 2007: “In Bordeaux he resisted in his own way, he said: taking names off arrest-lists, tipping off families in advance, sheltering a rabbi in his house. Why, he even chartered the city trams to spare the very young or old the walk to the station, and booked passenger trains, not goods wagons, to make their journey comfortable. These self-justifications came out at Mr Papon’s trial, one of only two of French officials who collaborated with the Nazis in their crimes against humanity.”

MC, People are willing to commit virtual torture too, Neurophilosophy, December 23, 2007: “In the initial part of the project, Slater et al have used an immersive Virtual Reality environment to re-enact the classic experiments conducted by Stanley Milgram in the 1960s.”

Philip Zimbardo, Power turns good soldiers into ‘bad apples’, The Boston Globe, May 9, 2004: “Now there is a rush to analyze human behavior, blaming flawed or pathological individuals for evil and ignoring other important factors. Unless we learn the dynamics of “why,” we will never be able to counteract the powerful forces that can transform ordinary people into evil perpetrators.”

What do you see in this picture? [Lisa E / Flickr]

Has any American icon been so variously reviled as Hillary Clinton? She inspires a kind of passionate hatred that somehow trumps the malice we feel even for other politicians. You hate her because she’s too far to the left, you hate her because she’s too far to the right, you hate her because she triangulates. You hate her for her hair, her looks, her marriage, her career. You hate her because she wasn’t a good wife to Bill, or because she refused to leave him when he cheated.

This is what Jack Hitt calls the Hillary Rorshach Test, a phrase that apparently originates with Hillary herself. Hitt argues that what’s interesting is not what our intense reactions to Hillary tell us about her, but what they tell us about ourselves.

The details of her life are familiar enough; perhaps that’s why all the profiles of her over the last 10 years have always seemed tedious and repetitive. It’s how we shape those facts that’s interesting…

Hillary is an avatar of an existential dread skulking in the hearts of every couple who’ve tried to put together a life since the feminist revolution. This anxiety explains why the darkest question a liberal feminist can ask is: Why didn’t she leave that son of a bitch? And it’s why the coarsest question a conservative man can ask is: Who would do the bitch? Both point to deep fears that emerged alongside feminism, grounded, as every question since that revolution is, in the politics of the bedroom.

Jack Hitt, Harpy, Hero, Heretic: Hillary, Mother Jones, Jan/Feb 2007

As Hillary prepares to seek the nation’s highest office – an office she once had not one but two offices next door to – we’re asking: does Hillary tell us more about what we still expect of our wives and mothers than what we expect of our leaders? Is how much we love and hate her really that much different from the kind of intense love and loathing we feel for other public figures, like say, her husband? Why do we hate her more than we hate Nancy Pelosi, or Barbara Boxer, or, I don’t know, Carly Fiorina? How will the ‘08 race change the Rorschach calculus, and how will that calculus change the ‘08 race?

Turns out that Hillary is just as incendiary as we suspected. This show post inspired a spirited debate over the weekend, which prompted Jack Hitt to respond:

I agree that yet one more discussion of how the media always comment on a high-profile women’s looks is tiresome. But I want to argue that Americans critique Hillary Clinton in a way that far transcends anything good or bad, political or personal, that gets said about Elizabeth Dole, Condoleezza Rice, Susan Collins or Mary Landrieu. It’s far more complicated with Clinton. I report the good side (Hillary has a hidden vote that supports her) and the bad (John McCain’s unforgiveable joke about Chelsea). All of this personal chatter points to one thing: that Clinton is still the trailblazer she was when she was the college valedictorian who infuriated the administration with her feminist address to the students, the first female law partner in Arkansas, the governor’s wife, the First Lady, the carpetbagging senator, and now presidential candidate. Sure, there were pioneers such as Margaret Chase Smith and Shirley Chisolm, but Clinton is the first candidate with a likely chance of winning.

Jack Hitt, in a comment to Open Source, January 28, 2007.

Jack Hitt

Contributing Writer & Editor, New York Times Magazine, Mother Jones and This American Life
Author, Harpy, Hero, Heretic: Hillary

Catherine Allgor

Associate Professor of History, University of California Riverside
Author, Parlor Politics and Perfect Union

Frank Luntz

Pollster, Luntz, Maslansky
Author, Words that Work

Linda Hirshman

Author, Get to Work
Author, You’ve Come a Long Way, Maybe

Bonus Tape

Earlier today we talked with Frank Marafiote, publisher of The Hillary Clinton Quarterly. Marafiote started the quarterly in 1992 after “awaking from a deep slumber induced by Ronald Regan and George H.W. Bush.”

Click to Listen to Frank Marafiote (1.4 MB MP3)

Extra Credit Reading

OliverCranglesParrot, in a comment to Open Source, January 26, 2007: “What is this kind of discourse providing, either by this writer or by those more coarser, linguistic rapist flame throwers? I fail to see why this sort of imprudent rhetoric is so highly regarded. President Clinton and Senator Clinton do not have to answer for their domestic life as long as it’s within the legal principles of the larger culture.”

Baldrick, Hillary Clinton for President?, MyDD, January 23, 2007: “I know a lot of people hated “the Clintons” but Bill’s ratings are still quite favorable. So why do people hate Hillary so much? There are a lot of complex answers, but I don’t see how her being a woman doesn’t feature prominently in a number of them. What would be acceptable or normal behavior is scrutinized, criticized, and blown up because of who she is and WHAT she is.”

Challicechick, So why do people hate Hillary so much?, The ChaliceBlog, November 16, 2006: “I get that Hillary is some sort of symbol for bitchy women, but I don’t quite know what she’s actually done to earn that reputation, particularly since her personal life offers a good deal of evidence to the contrary.”

k. randolph, Hillary pt. 2 (Liabilities), Voter Vault, January 23, 2007: “Her image: Divider; 60s radical; Powerhungry; Cold; Uncharismatic. That’s not saying she deserves those images, but they linger . . . she is hated like no other candidate.”

Linda Hirshman, You’ve Come a Long Way, Maybe, The Washington Post, January 28, 2007: “All the gender gap talk notwithstanding, there’s no guarantee that Clinton would receive enough votes from women to be elected. I’ve studied women and women’s politics for 20 years, and if there’s one thing I know, it’s that, except for possibly once in 1996, female voters have not by themselves put anyone in the White House.”

Camille Paglia, The First Drag Queen, Salon, January 28, 1996: “Hillary — whom her Wellesley College classmates called “Sister Frigidaire” — was a natural as a lawyer, but she had to learn how to be a politician, where flexibility and gladhanding cordiality are crucial. Year by year in Arkansas, especially after Bill was defeated in his first reelection bid, Hillary, a high-achieving firstborn child with two recessive brothers, taught herself how to act like a woman. The smoothly efficient First Lady we see before us, with her chameleonlike blonde hairdos and charismatic smile, is actually a drag queen, the magnificent final product of a long process of self-transformation from butch to femme.”

Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Hating Hillary, The New Yorker, February 26, 1996: “At times, she herself sounds at a loss to explain the level of animosity toward her. “I apparently remind some people of their mother-in-law or their boss, or something,” she says.”

18:16

This distrust, even hatred, fear of women in the polity — either as citizens or as part of the government — goes all the way back to Aristotle, and it’s been a large part of our Western political thought.

Catherine Allgor

26:07

A lot of men, when they want to denounce Hillary, they’ll tell you privately — and I got this all the time when I was researching this –- was that they wouldn’t “sleep with her.” It was a way of busting her back down to woman, and then rejecting her at that level.

Jack Hitt

32:02

She is not judged by her gender. She is judged by her politics, and by the way she carries herself.

Frank Luntz

40:40

To try to force her into a conventional sex role would be, I think, to amputate a part of her, and, I think, to amputate a part of any full human being.

Linda Hirshman

I often wonder how those who walk with decency internalize and respond to acts of violence, injustice, and how does that enter into their work.

Major Jackson

Poet Major Jackson. [Thomas Sayers Ellis]

Where are you from? For each one of us the answer to that deceptively simple question is actually an intersection of community, family memory, cultural history, artistic legacy, and literal geography. The award winning poet Major Jackson somehow manages to address each piece of this multilayered puzzle in work that takes its cues as much from his childhood in urban renewal era Philadelphia as it does from the cultural ideas and formal qualities passed down by mentors like Gwendolyn Brooks and the Dark Room Collective.

Out of punctured wounds we spun up, less
the phoenix, dive-bombers still. I am haunted
by shapes of trees, one whose arms, an excess
of mounts, from which ever leapers were vaulted, –
passing, flash-like semblances of flight.
This is where Darren measured absence round
visible stars the night his dad punched the bright
smile of his mother into a soundless
hole, where Wilbur went on a famine strike
scaling ten branches a day to purity,
to grace. Because her sister touched and stroked
her till she was gleaming and sticky,
Sam climbed so high we lost her shadow,
obscured by overstory’s thickening
lines. Scalloped leaves trickled below,
brittle telegrams. I sought the quickening
gaze of the dusky flycatcher and listened
to the greenish-black like a secret pitched
between a pair of crickets. No hungers, no wind
swayed the top of our corner’s paperback mapleleaf,
for Jamie. A nameless hurt so deep, he kept
the farthest, a branchless fall to his death,
from the top of Blumberg Housing Projects.

Major Jackson, XX, Urban Renewal, Hoops

1.

Dear Gwendolyn – or is it Dear Madam?
Or as Quarysh would more likely say
Mama Gwen. He, unlike orphaned Adam,
Had you no less arriving to the fray,
That surrogate mentor-friend who pays
Art’s admission fee. Only since your absence
Our tour’s been self-guided. Anthologists

2.

Disagree, respectfully of course – for what
Is a corpus but the Spirit on foot?
On such ground I begin my epistolary chat,
Although I gather you’d prefer we strut
On through, fisted pens raised imaging truth.
Plus up there you must I bet have other
Celestial errands with which to bother.

3.

I consulted Langston my son on this point
Who thought you now in charge of lyres
& harps, tuning strings, adorning joints –
An answer he imagined I’d like to hear,
The professional poet whose overbear
-Ing view, children best fulfill dad’s dreams,
Thus prove black laureates lurk in the genes.

Major Jackson, Fern Rock, Letter to Brooks, Hoops

We’ll have Major Jackson on for the hour reading his poems and waxing philosophic about where he, and where all of us, are from. Here’s a few of the questions he and I talked about just now, which we hope you’ll help us think about and answer on the air. How do you channel your life without being needlessly autobiographical? How do you represent the tropes of place and neighborhood without making caricatures of your characters? Can you address both the members of your own diaspora and the broader American audience in your work without alienating both? What is it about the life of urban America that makes it both so local and so universal? And what goes into making each of us who we are and where we’re from?

Extra Credit Reading

Major Jackson (and others), Does Poetry Have a Social Function, Poetry, January 2007: “If a poem has something to say and says it well, it will be remembered. However, what may give a poem its originality and heft—extraordinary language, searing imagery, high lyricism—may be too arcane for the layperson. Ms. Hardworking Roto-Rooter could care less about your dithyrambs. For her, the poem has value and purpose because it says something meaningful to her.”

Lauren Mitchel, The Function of Poetry, Outside Tena, December 31, 2006.

Dan Vera, Binding Solitudes – the Social Role of Poetry, VRZHU Bullets of Love: The Poetry and Arts Blog, January 4, 2007: “Major Jackson did great yeoman’s work to critiquing the slighting of “political” poets while they are alive and then heaping accolades once they are dead.”

Major Jackson, Major Jackson’s Journal, Poetryfoundation.org: “I’ll likely not use the word “blog,” too much, for its mundane “blather” and “blah blah blah” quality irks me; so, on that note, I’ll be Blog-Lite, hoping to avoid the risks of topicality and verbosity. Unlike a poem, which presents “a stylized self,” a blog hopes to capture a voluminous speaker, who reveals all of his/her loose, baggy, catch-all (and some more) aspirations. I hope to keep my weblog tight and neat, driven by some overriding metaphorical proposition.”

Robert Pinsky, Poet’s Choice, Washington Post, April 2, 2006: “In his book “Hoops,” Major Jackson emphasizes a garden’s hopeful and civilizing qualities by depicting two generations at work on a patch of earth. The grandfather resists the decay of his neighborhood and responds to a crime by planting a garden. The grandson vows to continue the work with a pen.”

Staff, Poet and UVM prof Major Jackson finalist for NAACP Image Award, Burlington Free Press, January 11, 2007: “Jackson is a finalist in the category of Outstanding Literary Work — Poetry. He was selected for his 2006 volume, “Hoops” (W.W. Norton).”

Artist Biography: Gwendolyn Brooks, Voices from the Gaps.

5:10

I should say that a good deal of my work is based in autobiography, but a good deal of it is not. This never happened.

Major Jackson

6:15

And again, for me, I guess it’s almost useless sometimes to say whether or not a poem actually is based in dripping facts, because it’s a construction of language and memory, and hopefully, through artfulness, it becomes something else. It becomes something more meaningful than that recalled moment. It becomes something transcendent for a reader.

Major Jackson

11:20

As soon as you say “urban,” or you say “hip hop,” instantly an image comes to your mind. And it may be one that’s not actually accurate. It may be an image that is produced and rendered so that we may fear each other. And I think that’s the story of America: fear of the alien. And it’s ironic because its the alien that gives our values of freedom, liberty, and opportunity its heft.

Major Jackson

15:25

It’s that assertion, that idea that he was from another planet, that really interests me most, because this is kind of a trope within the Afro-American community of artists: that they come from another place. And Sun Ra says, “I was sent here to save planet Earth, you know, what you guys are doing here is going to crush the cosmos.” And so his music becomes a message. But I also turn to him because he had a vision of himself as an artist that he adhered to over the course of his life, an artist who was independent of big recording companies. He self-produced most of his albums. And he also had a severe discipline about his work, his composition, his musicians; he demanded discipline of them, and that’s particularly inspirational for me.

Major Jackson

30:10

What [Gwendolyn Brooks] was specifically addressing with the black community was creating portraits that celebrated the African-American community during a time in which its humanity was being questioned, questions of rights were being fought for. Today, I think I’m still carrying that conversation on, as well as hopefully merging it with a kind of global conversation with other poets. I think ultimately we’re all asking what does it mean to travel this space and what does it mean to be human.

Major Jackson

39:00

But I also find myself increasingly speaking to young kids who do not see themselves reflected in the literature that they’re reading in school. And so the work becomes exciting for them, because they didn’t know you can write about certain subjects.

Major Jackson

Arredondo keeps a flag-draped casket with his son’s picture, combat boots, and dog tags in the back of his pick-up truck. [Brendan Greeley]

The trailer behind the truck is filled with crosses, crutches, and prosthetic limbs. [Brendan Greeley]

Alexander Brian Arredondo talking to Robin and Brendan this afternoon. [Brendan Greeley]

Arredondo’s son, 20-year-old Marine Lance Cpl. Alex Arredondo, was killed in action in Iraq in 2004. Upon hearing about his son’s death, Arredondo was so distraught that he set both himself and the Marine van that brought him the terrible news on fire.

Since then, he’s been driving around the country in a one-man pick-up truck protest. He’s met with political leaders like Hillary Clinton and Ted Kennedy, attended protests across the country with Cindy Sheehan, and parked his truck outside the city hall of Alexandria, Virginia on election day. He even scored an audience with Richard Perle, who Arredondo says gave him $1,000 towards a scholarship established in his son’s name.

Listen to last night’s protest show to hear excerpts of our conversation with Alexander Arredondo, and look here and here to see comments on last night’s thread from him and his wife.

Training instructors at Lackland Air Force Base saluted with a ceremonial fly-over. [Linda H. Rasch / Flickr]

The U.S. military has 1.4 million troops on active duty and another 1. 26 million in the Reserves, including 456,000 in the National Guard. We have 47,000 American troops stationed in Japan, 37,500 in South Korea, and 116,400 on bases all across Europe.

These numbers confront us with a stunning paradox: America has the second largest standing army in the world, and yet, is desperate for more troops. As the President announced his plans to add 21,500 troops to the 152,000 already in combat in Iraq, it was not entirely clear where he planned to get them.

There hasn’t been conscripted military service in the U.S. since 1973, but as the military moves thousands upon thousands of human chess pieces around the global board to meet its various needs, some people argue that a “backdoor draft” is already underway. For example: the military is making use of the long-established but usually rare practice of stop-lossing to keep enlisted men and women beyond their contractually agreed-upon period of active service, and is calling up reservists who may have thought their military careers were over.

What do these changes tell us about the wider goals and priorities of the military, and its future as a whole? How is the military coping with its need for more troops, and how are members of the armed services responding to these tactics? Are the problems facing the military just about this war and this set of demands, or does the shortage of troops bely larger problems in the structure of the military as a whole? Is there a way to redesign the all-volunteer military without pushing individual soldiers, their families, combat units to a breaking point?

David Segal

Director, Center for Research on Military Organization, University of Maryland
Co-editor, The Postmodern Military

Ralph Peters

Retired U.S. Army Lieutenant Colonel
Former Intelligence Officer
Author, Never Quit the Fight

Mark Zirkelbach

Deputy Adjutant General, Iowa Army National Guard

Extra Credit Reading

sixty-six, They say I will stay for an additional 4 months. And I say, “Roger.”, sixty-six.org, January 12, 2007: “Then I heard the news. Well, I read the news actually. I read it on yahoo. An email from someone I know State side confirmed it for me -my Brigade was to extend. Our guys started calling and emailing home only to find out their families had already been informed of the extension. Letters had been printed, signed, mailed, received and read before we had the faintest idea of what was going on. We were the last to find out.”

Suzanne, Tour Extension, Operation Norwegian Freedom, January 13, 2006: “About a week ago Marc and I were discussing a book I am reading – “Surviving Deployment”. The book mentions the phases and cycles of deployment including the phase I hoped not to experience – extension. Marc said I’d better read up on the chapter about tour extension.”

Fred Schoeneman, Cheese Dick, On Hiatus, June 2, 2004: “[When I was in the reserves,] I understood that Uncle Sugar owned me if it wanted me, and I knew what I was volunteering for. If he is charging that some of his men were lied to about this 8 year commitment, he should have them come forward.”

Andrew J. Bacevich, The Failure of an All Volunteer Military, The Boston Globe, January 21, 2006: “During the Vietnam War, thanks in no small part to the draft, the armed services had become estranged from American society. The all-volunteer force creation severed relations altogether.”

Gun-Toting Liberal, Pentagon: “New Rule” — Reservists and Guardsmen may be activated indefinitely, Gun Toting Liberal, January 12, 2007: “Why not just go ahead and sign up for active duty Army, Air Force, Marines, Navy, or Coast Guard if you are willing to ‘volunteer’ to serve on active duty for (‘UP TO’) twenty to thirty years consecutively? At least, THAT way, you would be able to enjoy the full medical and retirement benefits that go to those who are willing to give the rest of their productive lifespans to the military without playing the ‘gambling game.’”

Thom Shanker, Reserve System Needs Change, Military Experts Believe, The New York Times, July 4, 2004.