The son of a gun kept getting up. The baby among the Kennedy brothers got the only long lifetime in politics. He suffered unspeakable losses and contributed blunders of his own — cheating in college, toying with the life of Mary Jo Kopechne. Just imagine any of this happening to you or me: oldest brother dead in a war plane; his two political partner brothers shot by assassins; himself nearly killed and never again out of a back brace and awful pain after a plane crash 45 years ago. I happened to be standing (on newspaper duty) near Ted Kennedy, next to Richard Nixon, at Senator Allen Ellender’s burial in Louisiana in 1972 when the last salute burst forth in a crackle of rifle fire. Kennedy, in uncontrollable panic, collapsed on the ground. And then, alone in his embarrassment and recovery, he picked himself up.

He didn’t just keep getting up. He got better at the many complicated jobs he had: Senator, surrogate father, custodian of a legend, a sort of Napoleonic general of liberal values in America. He got humbler, and tougher. He got surer and more visionary all the way. It thrills you now to know that he judged his stand against authorizing the Bush war in Iraq “the best vote I’ve made”– 40 years into his job, only seven years ago.

As kids we were tickled when Eddie McCormack told him to his face in 1962 that “if your name were Edward Moore, your candidacy would be a joke.” Ted’s first premise in politics was obnoxious. The slogan in 1962 was: “He can do more for Massachusetts,” because his brother was president of the United States. Eddie McCormack was right. But the Democratic voters of Massachusetts made the wise choice. Kennedy himself liked to quote a mill-worker in Boston who told him on a factory visit in that first campaign: “They say you never worked a real job in your life? Let me tell you something: you haven’t missed a damned thing!” And then Ted buckled down to nearly five decades of a mission that reset the standard for both professionalism and passion in public life, with far the best personal staff and the best political instincts that anyone can remember in the U. S. Senate.

Let’s remember him as encouraging evidence that redemptive energy — grace beyond individual courage — underlies the life of a man and a country. Ted Kennedy will do as a sort of proof of Hemingway’s line that “a man can be destroyed but not defeated,” as he can also be defeated and not destroyed.

Eric Hobsbawm

It is impossible to talk about the political future of the world unless we bear in mind that we are living through a period when history — that is to say, the process of change in human life and society and the human impact on the global environment — has been accelerating at a dizzying pace. It is now proceeding at a speed which puts the future of both the human race and the natural environment at risk. In the middle of the last century we suddenly entered a new phase in world history which has brought to an end history as we have known it in the past ten thousand years, that is to say, since the invention of sedentary agriculture. We don’t know where we are going.

Historian Eric Hobsbawm in his forthcoming collection of essays and speeches On Empire: America, War and Global Supremacy, page 35.

Josh Marshall

Hats off and hearty congratulations to Joshua Micah Marshall on his Polk award and fitting splash on the New York Times business front this morning. Brown University’s own Joshua is beginning to look like the Henry Luce of our century for the fecundity of the TPM idea (fanning out in TPM Cafe and TPM Muckraker as the Luce empire spread from TIME to LIFE, Fortune and Sports Illustrated) at the same time TPM’s up-from-the-readership, anti-corporate and reformist zeal turns the Luce premises inside out.

And hats off, while we’re at it, to the New York Times itself, which really opened itself today as never before (that I’ve noticed) to the high, humbling winds of the blogosphere. Here is a glimpse of the blessed day coming when the Times makes the Web a two-way tool and lets its readers do a lot of its reporting. The subject at hand was Russia and the Times’s grim diagnosis of the consolidated Putinocracy. Last Friday the Times posted a Russian translation of the long article on Russia’s most popular blogging platform, and by Sunday evening had 3000 responses. Among them:

“It is funny to read this from people who, for 10 years, have invaded other countries, toppled the stable regimes that ruled and enforced their rules there. Especially funny to read it if you don’t forget about prisons and torture in Guantánamo. And completely funny when you recall how these people hanged the former president of the country they invaded. Why am I saying this? Because Mr. Putin and his team are evil, of course. And only cattle vote for him. BUT these are OUR problems. And WE will sort them out.” happy_bra

“If it’s a propaganda material, it is very stupid and weak. If it’s a journalist’s text, such journalists have to fired for professional incapacity. It’s better not to translate such a nightmare into Russian. One can only repeat what McCain’s wife said: I am ashamed for The New York Times.” panam

“You’re facing an uphill perception battle. Your article is a piece of investigative journalism; to you — but not to your audience. Most of what’s published in this genre in Russian are thinly veiled, slanted opinion pieces masquerading as reporting. Your work, to a greater or lesser extent, will be read in the same vein.” muphta

“An Article Brings Sharp Response from Russians,”by Clifford J. Levy. New York Times, Monday February 25, 2008, p. A9.

Now a paper with this sort of porosity — this respect for readers and large subjects on which, yes, the readers know more even than Times reporters and editors — could be an altogether webby and worthwhile experience.

Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Anthony Barnett here (28 minutes, 13 MB MP3)

openDemocracy’s Anthony Barnett

In the movie it’s the lean and gorgeous family-minded, brown-eyed man (the scientist Robert Neville, played by Smith) who’s “the last human” in New York and maybe on earth. He’s immune from the virus that has turned the rest of us into zombies, and he’s in a mad dash to share whatever it is that’s protecting him with a colony of survivors. “I can help you,” he shouts in the last self-sacrificing moments of the film. “Let me save you.”

On our polluted political playing field it’s the Hollywood-handsome Senator from Illinois who stands alone — the slim, still mysterious stranger who’s come to rescue us, who said in his Iowa victory speech “in the face of impossible odds, people who love this country can change it.” See Gary Kamiya‘s fine piece today in Salon.

In the film we’re told that the killer virus was a human accident, the work of a dotty, donnish English lady who thought she’d compounded a universal cure for cancer. Anthony Barnett’s distillation of the filmic-political parable is: “In short, the world is saved from Mrs Thatcher by Barack Obama.”

There are church-state resonances here: “God didn’t do this, we did,” says Dr. Neville, in the weedy ruins of Manhattan. And there’s a gender riddle: how is that in both versions the plausible savior is a youngish African-American man, while his fumbling foil is a very smart woman contriving to do good?

Suffice it to say we have one of those delicious convergences or “visual rhymes” to remind us that no event, and surely no trend, stands alone in this mediated world. And further that there are depths and resonances of the Obama boom that haven’t been measured yet. Anthony Barnett’s reading after Iowa and a family night at the movies was: “He is not just a potential president, he alone has the combination of skills to save mankind. Every single seat sold for “I Am Legend” makes Obama more electable and puts Hilary on the wrong side of the great plague.”

I’ll engage Anthony Barnett in conversation tomorrow (Wednesday) not as a film critic and not as an expert particularly on American politics, but as an off-shore wiseman — “a torchlight procession of one,” as a friend describes him — on most of the grander question we care about. I hope we’ll get this chance often again. Anthony Barnett is a model of thinking and doing: writer, editor, reformer and entrepreneurial radical from the Labour Club at Cambridge in the Sixties and the New Left Review in the Eighties, a hold-out from Tony Blair’s New Labor movement in the Nineties, and then founding editor (months before 9.11) of the compendious site openDemocracy. Here’s the bouquet that friends tossed at him on his 65th birthday last November. When I met Anthony Barnett in Greece last July, I noted here that he speaks with that experienced, curious, post-imperial English voice that we waited for and never heard on the way to Iraq.

I want to ask him for the Big Picture — at least a big picture frame — for 2008.

Norman Mailer [Photo: Christina Pabst, Courtesy of Random House]

The most enviable of his many gifts, as Alex Theroux once remarked, was energy — 85 years’ worth, of the peculiarly urgent, male variety, in dimensions sexual and spiritual, literary and political, philosophical and paternal. Norman Mailer was another blessed mama’s boy who grew up with Frank Sinatra’s pugnacious assurance that he could sing any of his rivals off the bandstand. It was a thrill to interview him, or just to be around him. The nonpareil radio producer Mary McGrath — reading her brother Chip’s superb Mailer obit in the Times this morning — recalled our afternoon of Mailer Time in the summer of 2004, drinking his whiskey as the sun went down over Provincetown harbor. She’ll never forget it, and neither will I.

Mailer was the answer, really, to the question that posed itself last summer when I was so besotted with Victor Hugo and his Les Misérables. Who in our American setting made it the novelist’s assignment to chronicle the Waterloos of our own time and the Paris uprisings — to speak comprehensively and critically of our nation and its culture, in peace and war, in cinema and the boxing ring, and to run for Mayor of New York? Thank you, Norman Mailer.

Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3)

This show was recorded on Friday, March 9, 2007.

Norman Mailer in conversation is formal, playful, learned, cordial, intensely civilized, energetic from start to finish. We sat in the living room of his year-round house facing south onto Provincetown Harbor. The panoramic “long view” Mailer has always liked for writing (and talking) was one of many reminders of Steven Marcus’ wonderful Paris Review interview with Mailer 40-some years ago, in the novelist’s Brooklyn Heights apartment overlooking New York Harbor. “In general,” as Marcus observed then, “he conducts himself without affectation as a kind of secular prince. The interviewer was repeatedly struck during the course of a long afternoon’s work by Mailer’s manners, which were exquisite. The role of novelist-being-interviewed suits him very well.”

The peculiar pleasure of interviewing Norman Mailer comes in this notion he encourages — that we are, each and all of us, engaged in the composition of a panoramic Proustian novel of our time. It’s in his almost absurdly generous and challenging extension of the fantasy that his eye and his writerly craft over the last 60-some years are part of a web “nearly all of us have created in our own minds; each book vastly different yet still related by the web of history, the style of our lives, and the river of becoming that we refer to by the most intimate and indefinable of words, the most mysterious word of them all — time. Time!”

The occasion of our resuming the conversation, so to speak, was Mailer’s new novel, The Castle in the Forest. As you’ve heard, it is a fictional treatment of history and rumor about the mutiply-incestuous conception of Adolf Hitler. It’s a book about fleshly and philosophical evil — about 20th Century history and a few players in the Nazi Reich, like Heinrich Himmler, that fascinate Mailer particularly. It’s also about bees, a subject Mailer has studied almost as E. O. Wilson has studied ants. But more fundamentally The Castle in the Forest seems to me an exercise in theology, a confirmation, finally, that there’s a believer inside Norman Mailer — original, but recognizably sprung from the Jewish and Christian traditions, and almost systematic. The narrator of the novel is a devil, an agent of the luciferian “Maestro,” who takes the historical form of a Nazi security agent. He explains himself early on:

Given the present authority of the scientific world, most well-educated people are ready to bridle at the notion of such an entity as the Devil. They have even less readiness to accept the cosmic drama of an ongoing conflict between Satan and the Lord. The modern tendency is to believe that such speculation is a medieval nonsense happily extirpated centuries ago by the Enlightenment. The existence of God may still be acceptable to a minority of intellectuals, but not the belief that there is an opposed entity equal to God or nearly so. One Mystery might be allowed, but two, never! That is fodder for the ignorant.

Norman Mailer, The Castle in the Forest, page 71.

And then there’s this modern and Mailerian twist on human agency in a zone of struggle between God and Satan:

… there are three aspects to reality — the divine, the satanic, the human — in effect, three separate armies, three kingdoms, not two. God and His angelic cohort work upon men, women, and children to bring them under His Influence. Our Maestro, and we, his representatives, look to possess the souls of many of these same humans. Until the Middle Ages, human beings could not bring much of an active role to the contest. Often, they were pawns. Hence the notion of the Two Kingdoms. By now, however, we are obliged to take the individual man or woman into account. I will even say that many, if not most, humans, are at present doing their best to be beholden neither to God nor to the Maestro. They seek to be free. They often remark (and most sententiously), “I want to discover who I am.” … Humans have become so vain (through technology) that more than a number expect by now to become independent of God and the Devil.

Norman Mailer, The Castle in the Forest, page 76.

Chris visiting Norman Mailer, 2004 [Mary McGrath]

Mailer’s theories of God get the conversation started. He has suggested elsewhere that his edge in the competitive struggle with the secular storytellers of his generation is precisely this taste for metaphysics and theology. But in his 85th year, or with me anyway, he is generous with old rivals like Updike and Roth, and content with the line that there are perhaps 20 American writers who think they’re near the top of the heap, and he’s one of them.

And then we digress.. onto his love of Proust — brilliantly apotheosized; and his own conditioning in Existentialism… Hilariously onto John McCain, then Donald Rumsfeld, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama… onto the grip of Stupidity on the Age of Bush; and the multiplicity of wrong motives behind the War in Iraq… onto the nine Mailer grandchildren to whom this very patriarchal character dedicated The Castle in the Forest.

I wish I were asking for questions to put to the man, but the interview is done. I’d still be fascinated to hear what people consider to be the essential Mailer.
What if it was his movie role as ringside commentator in “When We Were Kings,” in which I and many others say he damn near stole the show from Muhammad Ali?

I keep Mailer’s 1300-page collection of a life’s work, titled The Time of Our Time ever close at hand, and there are so many passages to savor. For example:

Bobby Kennedy, that archetype Bobby Kennedy, looked like a West Point cadet, or, better, one of those unreconstructed Irishmen from Kirkland House one always used to have to face in the line in Harvard house football games. “Hello,” you would say to the ones who looked like him as you lined up for the scrimmage after the kick-off, and his type would nod and look away, one rock glint of recognition your due for living across the hall from one another all through Freshman year, and then bang, as the ball was passed back, you’d get a bony king-hell knee in the crotch. He was the kind of man never to put on the gloves with if you wanted to do some social boxing, because after two minutes it would be a war, and ego-bastards last long in a war.

Norman Mailer, “Superman Comes to the Supermarket,” on the Kennedy convention at Los Angeles, 1960, in The Time of Our Time, page 350.

I have a proposal. Address an open letter in your name to Ernest Hemingway. Many would say — I am one of them — that he has been our greatest writer. It is certain he created my generation — he told us to be brave in a bad world and to be ready to die alone… Show the world that you will let a Nobel Prize writer who speaks the language of the country travel anywhere in your territory, unmolested, unobstructed, unindoctrinated. Let him come, let him get to know you if he wishes, hope that he will write something about Cuba, a paragraph, a line, a poem, a statement — whatever he says cannot be ignored in my country. The world will read what Hemingway has to say, the world will read it critically, because he will be making a history, he may even be preparing a ground on which you and our new president can meet.

Norman Mailer, “An Open Letter to Fidel Castro,” written in November 1960 but not published until after the Bay of Pigs invasion in the Spring of 1961, in The Time of Our Time, page 391.

He kept making encouraging comments, “Hey, you’re doing fine, Norm,” and, a little later, “Say, you’re in good condition,” to which the physical specimen could only grunt for reply — mainly it was the continuing sense of a perfect pace to Ali’s legs that helped the run, as if his own legs were somehow being tuned to pick their own best rate, yes, something easy and uncompetitive came off Ali’s good stride.

“How old are you, Norm?”

He answered in two bursts, “Fifty — one.”

“Say, when I’m fifty-one, I won’t be strong enough to run to the corner,” said Ali. “I’m feeling tired already.”

Norman Mailer, on Muhammad Ali in training for “the rumble in the jungle” with George Foreman in 1974, from The Fight, quoted in The Time of Our Time, page 918.

Mailer is still, at 84, the embodiment of manly energy. He seems to me the fulfillment in our time of what Henry James expected the artist to be — the one “on whom nothing is lost.”

So, friends: who is Norman Mailer to you?

Extra Credit Reading

Mark Singer, Tough Guy, The New Yorker, May 21, 2007: “‘Norman said, “The sounds of punches in movies are all phony,”‘ Shatz recalled. ‘He wanted me to record his own punches. He was a boxer, of course. So we were in my cutting room with a portable digital recorder, and I remember thinking at the time, I’m watching Norman Mailer hit himself and I’m not stopping him. He hit himself at least twenty times—in the face and the chest—until we finally got it right.’”

Boris Kachka, Mr. Tendentious, The New York Magazine, January 15, 2007: “If the reviews for Castle are bad (and the buzz ain’t good), don’t be surprised if the old lion roars yet again. After all, it was only last month in Esquire that he took on one longtime foe, Times critic Michiko Kakutani, saying, ‘What put the hair up her immortal Japanese ass is beyond me.’ Below, a necessarily much-abbreviated dossier, Mailer’s All-Time Enemies List.”

Norman Mailer, interviewed by John Freeman, Critical Outtakes: Norman Mailer on Bush, Iraq and Fascism, Critical Mass, November 21, 2006: “People really do take their cue from how well the leader speaks. FDR was able to turn the nation around because he spoke so beautifully. He had such command of language, such a love of language, such concern for it. The English were able to keep themselves together after losing the Empire because they had Shakespeare and they have a tradition of speaking well. And when you have a leader who speaks in dull slogans you are stupefying the mind of the country.”

Bill Gunlocke, Norman Mailer: The Long Goodbye, An Editor’s Notes, January 29, 2007: “He looked a little stronger than the last time. He looked a little different too. You likely saw the Times photo in the book review a week ago. His hair straighter than you remember it. He looked like Irwin Corey meets Pat Riley. His voice was stronger than you’d think for someone turning 84 any minute. It’s a great voice, unmistakable for 40 years.”

Marshall Payne, Music and writing fiction #1, Marshall Payne’s LiveJournal, May 28, 2007: “I read an interview with Norman Mailer where he said that when he quit smoking he found it impossible to write. He never said if it was the physical act of not having a cigarette in his hand while he wrote, but I imagine it was more the shock of nicotine withdrawal that knocked him out of the creative saddle for a few months. At any rate, he said that he had to teach himself to write all over again. Where before he was a word writer, he became a rhythm writer once he regained his artistry.”

nother, in a comment to Open Source, March 28, 2007: “For me, all of Mailer’s moves coalesce into a lived life of art. Guys like him and Hemingway, and even Muhammad Ali, were all carrying on a tradition of the Aesthetic movement, one of its tenets being to make an art of life. Yet if the coin is the Aesthetic movement and Oscar Wilde is on one side, then our American men of men are certainly on the other. In the same way that Wilde’s homosexual flamboyancy expressed his individualism to those Victorians, our American machos expressed their individualism by flamboyantly displaying their masculinity.”

Kanan Makiya: Cautionary Idealism

Kanan is famous now mainly for telling President Bush, face to face two months before the US invasion, that the American troops “will be greeted with sweets and flowers in the first months…” He had the rhetorical magic in those days to get away with arguing that invading Iraq was the moral choice even if it had only a “five percent” chance of success. Astonishingly, writers like George Packer of The New Yorker and David Brooks of The New York Times made Kanan Makiya’s dream of US power sound like a plausible bet. Kanan wrote in the New Republic in the spring of 2003 that the bomb-bursts in Baghdad rang like “church bells” in his ecstatic ears.

Kanan Makiya’s scripts and interviews, which informed much mainstream war-mongering, read now like the full catalog of illusion, self-delusion and folly.

I’m proud to say we are friends — I want to say brothers, really. Proud of myself, because in many close encounters with Kanan over more than 16 years, I have learned that the best friendships need not have anything to do with agreement on politics.

It’s been said, rightly I think, that Kanan Makiya was the only real idealist in the war camp. He is an immensely thoughtful man and, as you will hear, a completely authentic presence. I am proud also that it was on our old television show, “The Ten O’Clock News” on WGBH in Boston, that Kanan Makiya unveiled himself in 1991 as the real author of “The Republic of Fear,” his originally pseudonymous expose of the Saddam Hussein regime.

So the strange sum of it is this: my friend Kanan Makiya is a scholar, an intellectual, an idealist who stands for me as a warning about the dangerous misfit of idealism and military power. He’s an example, I’m afraid, of what the French call the “trahison des clercs” the treason of the intellectuals. He is a caution to us intellectuals and wannabes against the poison of very bad ideas — like the notion of transformation by conquest and humiliation.

Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Kanan Makiya (30 minutes, 14 MB MP3)

Footnote from the radio believer: don’t the sadness and pain in Kanan’s voice — more powerful than pictures or text — make the case for what the ear alone can absorb?

Shibley Telhami: on the slippery slope

Professor Telhami at the University of Maryland is the only scholar we’ve interviewed in this series who briefed Karl Rove five years ago on the fallout of war on Iraq. Telhami proceeded to sign the prophetic New York Times ad in September, 2002 that spelled out the disaster unfolding then. Rove seemed to be listening for political damage to his boss, and heard nothing of what Telhami was warning about: damage to American standing in the Middle East , in the mirror, everywhere.

Shibley Telhami has a straight-talking individual voice in think-tank circles around Washington. He speaks from a fascinating personal history. He was born into a family of peacemakers and conciliators in an Arab Christian minority in a village near Haifa in 1951, when Israel was 3 years old. In Israeli and private schools, his first degrees were in mathematics and then philosophy before he took up international relations with Kenneth Waltz at Berkeley and more recently: polling in the Mideast.

So he is a social-science theorist with a flood of facts and factoids at his fingertips. Arab opinion, he says, is the flip of what the Bush White House wants to believe. That is: Arab Muslims, in fact, love Americans for our democratic values, (who we are), and hate us for our imperial policies, (what we do). We’re still the land of freedom and opportunity and the place for the ambitious to study and grow; but next to nobody believes the US is about “spreading democracy” or even a “war on terror” in the Middle East. There’s a “pervasive anger with the United States” in the Middle East today, Telhami says, and a 80- to 90-percent consensus that American policy is to “control oil, help Israel, and weaken the Muslim world.”

The US choice on attacking Iraq sounds spookily beyond rational or even political control:

We’re right on a slippery slope toward that war. We’re on a course for war. The objective has already been stated, and our political mainstream has accepted it. It’s not just that the Bush administration has stated it. No one has challenged the basic concept that ‘I will never allow Iran to acquire the knowledge’ — not even to acquire the weapons, but ‘to acquire the knowledge and the capacity to put the weapon together.’ Once you acquiesce in that you’re on the slippery slope toward war — even the Democrats who are saying: ‘let’s try diplomacy first…’ …It’s fascinating about our political system. The most important thing is the assumption at the beginning. If you’re assuming that this is something that has to be done — something you cannot live without doing, that all your strategies are intended to prevent them from having nuclear weapons, that you have to prevent them from having them, at all costs — then in the end you’re going to have war. We don’t pay attention to that assumption at the beginning. It kind of sneaks in. The President could make it in a speech, and no one takes it on. And then it becomes Conventional Wisdom. And then we’re entangled talking about the tactics, and not paying attention to the slippery slope that was begun by the very declaration of the statement of how our interests are defined… My worry is that, if you go to war with Iran and we don’t have an end to the Iraq war, we have structural conditions that are setting in motion a process that — no matter who the President is — they cannot stop. That’s my worry, and that’s how I see Iran in this case.”

Shibley Telhami, in conversation with Chris Lydon, October 26, 2007

Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Shibley Telhami (10 MB MP3)

Is the takeaway message that our war machine is out of all control?

Peter Liberman of CUNY: Optimistic Realist

Among the signers (five years ago!) of the prescient New York Times ad arguing that “WAR WITH IRAQ IS NOT IN AMERICA’S NATIONAL INTEREST,” Peter Liberman of Queens College at the City University in New York was a relative youngster, ten years out of the Ph.D. program at MIT, but a prolific student even then of the psychology as well as the strategies of war, occupation, conquest and resistance. Signing the ad in September, 2002, he recalls “was really a no-brainer.”

Among the unconventional points in our conversation: Never, in Peter Liberman’s view, should an assault on Iraq, or Iran, have been justified by — or confused with — the Israeli security dimension. “I think of Israel as being quite secure from both Iraq and Iran,” he said. “Israel has probably a few hundred nuclear weapons… and any Iraqi or Iranian government would be crazy to try to attack Israel. They never had any real strategic incentive, or anything more than a PR incentive, to condemn Israel, or attack Israel. And condemning is a lot cheaper than attacking.” Israel, he wanted to remind us, has an absolute regional monopoly on the ultimate weapon. An overt attack by a neighboring nation on Israel, he said, “is not plausible.”

Unlike his main mentor Barry Posen, Peter Liberman sees the great unarticulated middle of American opinion “much closer” to a more restrained, more reflective, more “realist” foreign policy. He senses a “new-found skepticism” in the public and caution in the media after the siege of “collective insanity” in which so many swallowed the Iraq war rationale “hook, line and sinker.” He argues it would take another attack on American soil — something like a full 9.11 sequel — to build anything like the political foundation for war-making against Iran.

Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Peter Liberman (7 MB MP3)

The touchstone of Peter Liberman’s “realism,” he noted, is Carl von Clausewitz and the understanding of war as an instrument of political interest — not of revenge or abstract principle. Nothing plays more havoc with politics than the warfare of counter-insurgency, or of nation-building, as he said in our conversation. And thus the quicksand of Iraq.

While the Bushies did fall prey to the victory-for-its-own-sake syndrome, a few like Wolfowitz claimed to have far-reaching political objectives–even if hopelessly unrealistic ones, like the political transformation of the Middle East.

Where they really failed miserably was in not looking systematically at past occupations and regime change efforts, or taken the advice of those who had (like the Rand Corp, the CIA, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Center for Strategic and International Studies, etc.). Had the Bushies done so, they might have awoken to the fact that they were about to step into a booby trap. Wolfowitz had a Political Science PhD from Chicago, and [Condoleeza] Rice from Denver, which goes to show either that the owner of a PhD can forget their social science training, or that a lot of international relations PhDs–especially up through the 1970s–did not get rigorous training in the first place.

Peter Liberman of Queens College, CUNY, by email to Chris Lydon.

Stephen Van Evera of MIT

Informed guesswork: “They can wreck our whole project in Iraq,” Van Evera says, if they are willing to live with the wreckage of a failed state next door. “They have capable terrorists” in the Western hemisphere as well as the Middle East. “They could interrupt the world’s oil traffic, they could attack Israel, they could have Hezbollah attack Israel.”

Why are we playing with this fire? Mainly, Van Evera argues, because the neo-conservative cult in the Bush-Cheney White House — “isolated… cloistered… the wrong crowd to run anything” — has not been broken. And it hasn’t been broken mainly because the “intimidated” Washington press has barely covered the “vast imperial program” in the fantasies and the published texts of principals like David Wurmser, who should be a household name but isn’t. Paul Wolfowitz and John Bolton are out of office and out of the news, but their dreams have not died in the Vice President’s office.

Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Steve Van Evera (9 MB MP3)

In conversation with them I am trying to learn why this is happening, how the “party of war” insulated itself from correction, why we citizens, we media, and the chatter along the 2008 campaign trail all sound so helpless, so oblivious about the extended catastrophe.

Five years ago Posen and Van Evera were both among the brave band of 33 academics who wrote and paid for the prophetic New York Times ad that fascinates me so: a crystal vision of the almost exit-proof killer-swamp of American troops, money and reputation. Today Posen and Van Evera say independently that the many bad consequences of attacking Iran could be graver than what we’ve seen so far — from a much bigger, more modern, more cohesive nation than Iraq.

Barry Posen of MIT: an era of restraint?

“There will probably be a series of air raids,” Barry Posen begins, that will leave the mullahs’ regime standing but lethally enraged, and will thicken the air of a universal American confrontation with Islam. And then…?

The missed opportunity will have been to contain and deter Iran (nuclear or not) — as we might have contained Saddam Hussein — with the vastly greater force of American and Israeli arms. “All nuclear war can give [Iran],” Posen says, “is ashes and tragedy,” and even mullahs can understand that. In any imaginable nuclear war, Posen continues, “Iran is going to be no more. This is not rocket science to figure out. It just took me three minutes to explain it.”

As always, Posen is ebullient, accessible, informed; but there sounds like a dark turn in his wider view. “It’s going to take an accumulation of costly mistakes to turn the elite in this country toward a policy of realism and a policy of restraint,” he said to me.

Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Barry Posen (6 MB MP3)

Barry Posen has put himself at the center of a stunning review of our general direction in an article that became a forum in The American Interest. “Foreign Policy After George W. Bush” should be required reading, and the debate that comes with it, with the likes of Niall Ferguson , Ruth Wedgwood, John Ikenberry and Francis Fukuyama. The gauntlet from Posen goes down like this…

Since the end of the Cold War, the American foreign policy establishment has gradually converged on a grand strategy for the United States. Republican and Democratic foreign policy experts now disagree little about the threats the United States faces and the remedies it should pursue. Despite the present consensus and the very great power of the United States, which mutes the consequences of even Iraq-scale blunders, a reconsideration of U.S. grand strategy seems inevitable as the costs of the current consensus mount—which they will. The current consensus strategy is unsustainable.

If we understand properly the current foreign policy consensus and review the four key forces affecting U.S. grand strategy, the contours of an alternative strategy will emerge. The alternative, a grand strategy of “restraint”, recommends policies dramatically different from those to which we have grown accustomed not just since the end of the Cold War, but since its beginning. The United States needs to be more reticent about the use of military force; more modest about the scope for political transformation within and among countries; and more distant politically and militarily from traditional allies. We thus face a choice between habit and sentiment on the one side, realism and rationality on the other…

Barry R. Posen, “The Case for Restraint”, in The American Interest Online,

Jebediah Reed at Radar Online has done a scorecard on four commentators “getting rich by being wrong” on Iraq: David Brooks and Tom Friedman of the New York Times, Fareed Zakaria of Newsweek and Peter Beinart, who has graduated from The New Republic to hard covers. “At the pundits’ table,” in Reed’s subhead, “the losing bet still takes the pot.”

But let’s be constructive. The thread through my string of interviews here is that some people got it certifiably right — 33 foreign policy scholars who signed and paid for a New York Times ad in September 2002 that argued concisely that “WAR WITH IRAQ IS NOT IN AMERICA’S NATIONAL INTEREST.” What were they thinking? How did they know?

Michael Desch of Texas A & M

Michael Desch, then at the University of Kentucky, observed just as the US invasion of Iraq began, that the Ominous Precedent and in a sense the strategic model for the Bush warriors was Israel’s war on Lebanon, led by Ariel Sharon in 1982 and ended 18 years later by Ehud Barak’s withdrawal from Southern Lebanon.

Israel’s Lebanon war and the U.S. war in Iraq are alike in at least four respects. Proponents of both wars regarded them as parts of larger plans to change fundamentally the strategic landscape in the Middle East. Advocates of each took liberties with the truth in making their cases for war. Both the Israelis and the Americans made some questionable alliances in the course of their wars. And finally, both sought to implement major political transformations in deeply divided societies.

Michael Desch, “Ominous Precedent” in The American Conservative, May 5, 2003

As chance would have it, Michael Desch now holds a Texas A & M professorship named for the Defense Secretary Robert Gates, in the school of public policy named for the President of the United States. He remains, in our conversation, unflinchingly critical of “the party of war” and the thinking that took us to Iraq. At the top of the chattering pyramid, Desch is struck (as I am) by “how few have paid any price for being wrong.” We have a political system, and it seems a public conversation, that are “completely unaccountable.”

Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Michael Desch (11 MB MP3)

In the works: conversations with New York Times ad signers Barry Posen and Steve Van Evera of MIT, Peter Liberman of Queens College, Steven Miller of Harvard and Shibley Telhami of the University of Maryland and others.

Robert J. Art of Brandeis University

Commentary around the Iraq war — and the prospect of a sequel in Iran — is full now of confessions of past error — most of them partial and opaque confessions, well short of the full “mea maxima culpa.”

See, for example, from the original “war blogger” Andrew Sullivan’s Time column, “What I Got Wrong about the War.” His grievous analytical errors may all be erased in time, Sullivan concludes cheerfully: “it is far too soon to know the ultimate outcome of our gamble.”

Or see Michael Ignatieff’s gentle slapping of his own wrist in the New York Times Magazine in August for Getting Iraq Wrong and presumably for proclaiming “The American Empire: Get Used to It” in the same magazine back in January, 2003, just before the war began. His contrition is hedged by the sense he was “right to be wrong,” as Tony Judt noted in the Times, about “the worst foreign policy error in American history.” From the not quite chastened war enthusiasts the insinuation is that “wrong for the right reasons” beats “right for the wrong reasons.”

But let it not be forgotten that there were serious, smart professionals who, in timely fashion, were simply, sweepingly right about the Iraq catastrophe that’s still metastasizing. It wasn’t guesswork, and it wasn’t secret.

On my office wall I keep posted a quarter-page New York Times ad ad from September 26, 2002 — paid for by the signatories because the Times wouldn’t accept it as an op-ed — in which 33 scholars of international relations spelled out the reasons why “WAR WITH IRAQ IS NOT IN AMERICA’S NATIONAL INTEREST.”

If they had been stock-pickers applying the same diligence, foresight and clarity to the market that they applied to Iraq five years ago, by now they’d be managing big portfolios. They might be hedge-fund trillionaires. But in the curious marketplace of foreign-policy ideas, the signers here are today mostly obscure, unthanked scholars, whose advice hasn’t yet been heard by the general public.

Their thinking sounds conservative today, prudent in the style of the “realist” school of foreign policy. Many of their arguments against the war seem clairvoyant, almost miraculous now, the moreso because we’ve been conditioned to accept that the evidence on Iraq and the judgment on war was all foggy. Their main points, on the contrary, were pretty simple:

(1) Saddam Hussein, murderous despot though he was, had not been credibly linked to Al Qaeda or 9.11 (2) Even if he had nuclear weapons he couldn’t use them without massive retaliation from the US or Israel. (3) As the first Bush administration understood after routing Iraqi forces from Kuwait, conquering Baghdad and changing the regime could spread instability in the Middle East, threatening US interests. (4) The United States would win a war with Iraq, but Iraq could make it ugly, perhaps with chemical and biological weapons, perhaps with urban warfare. (5) “Even if we win easily, we have no plausible exit strategy. Iraq is a deeply divided society that the Unites States would have to occupy and police for many years to create a viable state.” And (6) Al Qaeda was the greater threat than Iraq. War on Iraq would divert the more urgent campaign, and take down the American reputation in the process.

Robert J. Art of Brandeis University outside Boston was first alphabetically among the signers of the Times ad, and first in our series of interviews this week. He was looking forward toward Iran as well has in the rearview at Iraq:

If I thought that Iran, armed with nuclear weapons under the current or some like leadership, would actually use them, or be emboldened to go out and attack various countries like, for example, Israel or Saudi Arabia, I would say: let’s go! But Israel has nuclear weapons. The Cold War demonstrates that extended deterrence does work. The American nuclear umbrella can work, has worked, is working at present. Iran’s conventional forces are quite weak.

You have to take the long-term view, and the long-term view is you’ve got a country where something like 60 percent of the population is under 25. The worst possible thing would be to launch a military strike. First of all it would not be small. It’s not ‘surgical.’ You don’t just go and bomb sites. You have to bomb the air defense sites. You have to bomb the missiles they can retaliate with. You bomb the Revolutionary Guards. You do a lot of bombing. This is not a 24-hour operation. You’re talking about days or up to a week. And there will be lots of casualties. The political fallout in the rest of the world will be terrible. We’ve lost so much legitimacy. But the consequences in Iran for Iranian-American relations, I think, would be disastrous. All you do is embolden the hard-liners. They just turn around and say: see, we told you so. And here we’ve got a potential base of millions of young Iranians who like the United States and love American culture. I can’t think of anything stupider than to engage in a military strike.

Professor Robert J. Art of Brandeis, in conversation with Chris Lydon, October 15, 2007.

Robert Art calls himself “a realist with a heart.” Colleagues respect him as the textbook type of strategic analyst, often consulted by the Pentagon and the CIA and well connected in the network of academic think tanks. His most recent of many books casts a rueful, independent eye on the modern US record of Coercive Diplomacy, meaning the use of military force or threats to change behavior, from Haiti to North Korea.

Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Robert Art(16 MB MP3)

Next up: Michael Desch at Texas A & M, then Barry Posen and Steve Van Evera at MIT.

Lincoln Chafee at Watson

His corridor chatter at the Watson Institute at Brown University (where we’re both visiting fellows) is unfailingly cheerful and correct, virtually Senatorial, but often the last word has a spur in it. “Did you see the Senate resolution to put a ‘terrorist’ target on Iran’s Revolutionary Guards,” he asked me the other day. “And did you see who voted in the majority for it?” Chafee had a rollcall list in hand. Rhode Island’s two Democratic Senators, and Hillary Clinton, were among the 76 votes for threatening Tehran. Sound familiar? “It’s almost a declaration of war on Iran,” Chafee said, starting to fume.

In the longer conversation recorded here, it comes clear that, boyish and buoyant though he always appears, Lincoln Chafee has suffered more for being studious, independent and foresighted — in short, for getting Iraq “right” back in October 2002 — than the Senate majority that got it “wrong.”

Chafee takes a hard line here that you haven’t heard on the campaign trail or read in a newspaper editorial: that Senators who voted to authorize the Iraq war should be disqualified for the presidency. On grounds of judgment, I ask him, or honesty?

“On grounds of ability,” he almost roars. “These individuals rendered a grossly wrong decision. It was important. Post 9.11 we needed to keep our heads. We’ve attained this pinnacle of worldwide, global supremacy. How are we going to use it? And the first thing we do is use it irresponsibly. It’s a disqualifier for me.”

Lincoln Chafee, in conversation with Chris Lydon, October 9, 2007 at the Watson Institute for International Studies, Brown University

Anguish and incredulity rise in Chafee’s voice around the drumbeat for a US attack on Iran, which he believes could come without warning or debate: “anything’s possible with this administration.” It’s the final irony, the last of many twisted knives, that the Democrat who beat him for reelection last year, Sheldon Whitehouse, just voted with the 3-to-1 Senate majority for Joseph Lieberman’s resolution to target Iran’s elite force as a terrorist entity — an echo of pretexts for the Iraq war five years ago.

Chafee was the lone Republican among the 23 Senators who voted “nay” on the blank-check authorization of military force against Iraq in the autumn of 2002. Having repudiated George W. Bush and his war, and after announcing in 2004 that he would write-in Bush’s father for president, Chafee was himself run out of office in 2006 as the last obstacle to a Democratic recapture of the Senate.

Listen for yourself and check my judgment that it’s honest dismay, not self-pity, that we’re hearing in Lincoln Chafee’s voice. He seems to say that Rhode Island voters made a shrewd and effective judgment in 2006, against Bush, not against himself. He disaffiliated from the Republican Party last month. He’s a lower-case republican citizen now, uneasy about the steroid level in our politics and culture, about the imperviousness of official thinking in the face of catastrophic evidence from Iraq. The American discourse, he says, has turned “Clash-ist.” Rhymes with Fascist.

“This isn’t America,” he says, not uncheerfully, spirits rising. Born in 1953, coming of age in the Seventies, Lincoln Chafee was shaped, he says, by “the successful end of the Cold War,” that is, by ping-pong with China, by cultural exchanges and a slow thaw with Russia. He was formed still more perhaps by his father, John Chafee, who before he was Rhode Island’s governor and US Senator was a Marine volunteer, in the gruesome fight for Guadalcanal. John Chafee never spoke to his children about war. “The message was: it’s horrible. Avoid it at all costs.”

Our conversation is in two parts. The first is a mini-memoir of the US Senate and the no-win bind that forced him out of it. His biggest disappointment in Washington was the acquiescence of senior, safe-seat Republicans — Richard Lugar of Indiana, the Foreign Relations chairman, and John Warner of Virginia and the Armed Services Committee — who knew better but went along with the war mythology. On his short honor roll: the “absolutely prophetic” Robert Byrd, Democrat of West Virginia, who shouted “Fie upon this Congress” in his almost unreported denunciations of the war; and Carl Levin of Michigan, who gave his fellow Democrats an out that few of them took: an amendment to the war resolution that would have extended the schedule of diplomacy.

Click to listen to part one of Chris’s conversation with Lincoln Chafee, (18 MB MP3)

Lincoln Chafee at Watson

It’s a ban on all the Senators running except Barack Obama, an anti-war voice who hadn’t reached the Senate in 2002. The premise that Saddam Hussein, contained by arms inspectors and no-fly zones, was a threat beyond his borders “was so grossly hollow,” Chafee remembers from his own researches. “Even the Kuwaitis, who’d been invaded by Saddam, were telling us: don’t do it.” It’s Chafee’s guess that some unpredictable reckoning of responsibility for the war is still to come; that the striking feature of the early race for ’08 is the quiet unhappiness with the choices so far. “Americans would rather have a vigorous exchange,” he says. “We need a good tilt.”

Click to listen to part two of Chris’s conversation with Lincoln Chafee(15 MB MP3)

But who is to demand the reckoning? And to pick up the pieces from the fractured front-runners?

“I didn’t know he ever left!,” Roy shot back — all we needed to know, delivered with Haynesian snap, crackle and pop.

Coltrane the Book

In this 40th anniversary autumn after his death, at 40, what lives with Coltrane and his music is the idea of love’s forgiveness, of redemption through suffering, and the excruciating sort of beauty that Dostoevsky thought “will save the world.”

A version of Orpheus, Gandhi, Herman Melville and Malcolm X, among others, Coltrane is the only jazz icon who — asked what he wanted for himself in ten years — actually said: “I would like to be a saint.”

He stands, of course, for innumerable collisions and paradoxes: pursuit of the sublime through screaming dissonance; an evolution from standard to exotic, “global” musical forms; the contradiction of “free jazz,” as his was sometimes called, and his, in fact, “frightfully controlled music — the next thing to geekdom,” as Ben Ratliff writes.

What we discover in this expandable set of conversations is that Coltrane is more than a canonical sound. He feels like a living master — here to stay, to astonish, to ravish and confound, to be attempted again and again. Hear for yourself that no two poets, musicians or listeners feel Coltrane the same way, even if almost everyone acknowledges his transcendence, in work and life.

The New York Times’ pithy, punchy jazz critic, Ben Ratliff has written not fan stuff or a biography but a catalog of ways to think about Coltrane: an athlete of improvisation who pushed forward through “an atmosphere of almost violent incomprehension.” Coltrane was a main builder of the jazz tradition “of not sounding like anybody else,” or like himself six months before. He had as many artistic periods as Picasso, starting with bebop, ballads and blues; but Coltrane’s development fit into just 12 essential years, not Picasso’s nearly 80.

Here are some versions of Coltrane’s story:

There is the coming-of-age of a tremendously gifted but tongue-tied student, learning to speak with assiduous practicing.

Ratliff of the Times

There is the story of an acolyte finding his way out of jazz’s cheap and opportunistic operations — bad record-company dealings, hastily thrown-together sessions resulting in $41 for a day’s work, bumping along week to week as a sideman…

There is the story of a concentrated listener, opening jazz up to influences beyond its periphery, including Asian, African and Spanish music… There is a thoughtful musician’s establishing of a new kind of intellectual seriousness in jazz, one that didn’t need to rely on typically white middle-class or typically black street models of artistic coding and audience response. There is a mystic’s keen sensitivity for the sublime, which runs like a secret river under American culture — the meditative and semierotic aesthetic of endurance, of repetition, of ecstatic religion — which he first broached in 1960 and 1961. And, to judge from his song titles alone, his playing suggested an explorer’s mapping of some sort of terra incognita — meditative inside, astrological outside…

Ben Ratliff, Coltrane: The Story of a Sound, page 118.

Coltrane comes to represent a wholly new icon of the jazz star, “the non-verbal Negro superman”: sobered up, ascetic, prayerful, endlessly studious, earnest, naive. When bandsman Jimmy Heath went on one day about a sensational catch Willy Mays had made, Coltrane looked up and asked, “Who’s Willy Mays, Jim?” And then there’s the story that Coltrane once asked his co-star Miles Davis how to shorten his endless solos; and Miles quipped: “Why don’t you try taking the horn out of your mouth?”

Ratliff’s book reminds you of the misgivings about Coltrane that are faded now but not forgotten. Ratliff himself is reminded of the poet Robert Lowell’s observation that “What one finds wrong with American culture is the monotony of the sublime…” and of D. H. Lawrence’s picture of Melville: “He was a deep, great artist, even if he was rather a sententious man.” The astute old fogey Ralph Ellison worried that Coltrane and other modernists were “fucking up the blues.” Ellison’s pal Albert Murray put Coltrane in “the unswinging avant-garde.” And Murray’s pal Stanley Crouch wrote that “Coltrane jumped off the cliff into hysteria.” Gentle knocks all, compared to Philip Larkin’s dismissal of such “turgid suites” as “A Love Supreme” and the “insolent egotism” of Coltrane’s extension of “My Favorite Things.” And always there were offsetting ecstasies in the writing about Coltrane, as in Bill Mathieu’s Down Beat review of Coltrane’s Ascension, which began: “This is possibly the most powerful human sound ever recorded.”

Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Ben Ratliff(26 MB MP3)

The conversation continues… If you feel a Coltrane sermon coming on, we want to hear it.

Amiri Baraka

The poet Amiri Baraka (then: Leroi Jones) chanced to live over the Five Spot in Manhattan in the summer of 1957 when Coltrane and Thelonius Monk had a five-month learning-by-doing gig on the Bowery. Willem de Kooning and Jack Kerouac were also among the listeners and drinkers at the Five Spot. Baraka says he missed barely a session of the music that culminated in the Monk-Coltrane Carnegie Hall concert in November, 1957 — a Blue Note best-seller only after the Library of Congress unearthed the tapes in 2005. This was early, lyrical Coltrane, at the dawn of the civil-rights era — “the rebellion” in Baraka’s phrasing, then and now — for which Coltrane became a sort of soundtrack. For Baraka, Coltrane’s “My Favorite Things” planted a bomb inside the sentimentality of Richard Rodgers and “The Sound of Music.” The hostility in Baraka’s listening has softened a lot, but Coltrane is still perhaps his highest representation of black art with social traction. Baraka follows Coltrane to the yowling last recordings — Coltrane’s ultimate showdown with self and life — with a shudder of shared pain. But if that is what Coltrane wanted us to hear, serious devotees have no choice. “You have to listen to it.”

Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Amiri Baraka(19 MB MP3)

The conversation continues… If you feel a Coltrane sermon coming on, we want to hear it.

Alain Pacowski

Alain Pacowski is a French-born, French-accented jazz guitarist, who grew up in Biarritz, the son of a professional horn player, hearing jazz as the sound of America. He is, as I’ve said before, the most flattering of distant mirrors on our culture, and an obsessive devote of John Coltrane in particular. His taste is for that broad streak of gorgeousness in Coltrane, starting with “Bye Bye Blackbird” and culminating in his solo recording of “Lush Life.”

Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Alain Pacowski(20 MB MP3)

The conversation continues… If you feel a Coltrane sermon coming on, we want to hear it.

Bill Pierce

Bill Pierce played tenor saxophone for three years in into the early 80s with Art Blakey — before that with Stevie Wonder, and with the drummer Tony Williams into the early 90s. He has the authority of a player who’s also the teaching chairman of the reeds department of the Berklee College of Music in Boston — and co-author of the Berklee Practice Method for tenor and soprano saxophone. The hallways and practice cubicles outside Bill Pierce’s Berklee offices are thick with 19- and 20-year-olds who’ve made a desperate bet that they can approach Coltrane’s sound, and pull some of his phrases together. One of those students, Russ Thallheimer, from Eureka, California, was wearing a Coltrane T-shirt when we passed through Berklee the other day. Smiling, without irony, Russ referred to Coltrane as “Dad.” There are other saxophone inspirations : Russ mentioned Zoot Sims, Paul Desmond and Michael Brecker — “he’s the really cool uncle,” Russ said. “But none of them do what Coltrane did. Nobody can repeat things that he did.”

Bill Pierce helps close the gap. A child of rural Florida who came of age in the early Sixties, Bill Pierce remembers the exemplary and electrifying blackness of John Coltrane. But he speaks now more as one of those rare men who has played and taught all the blur of Coltrane’s notes, and follows the path of the man and his music to the very end.

Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Bill Pierce(15 MB MP3)

The conversation continues… If you feel a Coltrane sermon coming on, we want to hear it.

Michael S. Harper

a love supreme, a love supreme
a love supreme, a love supreme

Sex fingers toes
in the marketplace
near your father’s church
in Hamlet, North Carolina—
witness to this love
in this calm fallow
of these minds,
there is no substitute for pain:
genitals gone or going,
seed burned out,
you tuck the roots in the earth,
turn back, and move
by river through the swamps,
singing: a love supreme, a love supreme;
what does it all mean?
Loss, so great each black
woman expects your failure
in mute change, the seed gone.
You plod up into the electric city—
your song now crystal and
the blues. You pick up the horn
with some will and blow
into the freezing night:
a love supreme, a love supreme—

Michael S. Harper, “Dear John, Dear Coltrane”, 1975

In our conversation — and in his own digressive, virtuosic, dare I say Coltranean style — Michael Harper weaves threads of racial brutality and family memory, black church music and profoundly engrained Christian doctrines of forgiveness in the North Carolina tapestry of Coltrane’s imagination. Harper’s connections with Coltrane are musical and also personal: he has been a friend for many years with Coltrane’s pianist, McCoy Tyner. But above all he is listening to Coltrane as spiritual teacher on tracks like “Alabama,” “Spiritual,” “Dear Lord,” and of course “A Love Supreme.”

Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Michael Harper(27 MB MP3)

Edwidge Danticat

Like her friend from the Dominican east side of Hispaniola Junot Diaz, Edwidge Danticat is writing “global” literature in our midst, for our mainstream, documenting the “permanent floating” migration games and the fascinating creolization of identities in our time.

The definitions of identity are so fluid. Sometimes people in Haiti will say, “well, you’re Haitian if you live here.” That’s one definition. There’s global youth culture. It would be hard to tell a kid from Johannesburg from a kid from Sao Paulo or Rio or Port au Prince if you put three of them together and they didn’t speak.

There are kids in Port au Prince who don’t even speak English but can recite to you an entire 50 Cent song, who can “do” Kanye West with the same accent and tonality…

If you concentrate on young black men of a certain age in all these places I’ve mentioned in the African diaspora, if you think of them as a particular element of the diaspora, and the disuniting of them throughout time and our history — you know, the slave trade and so forth — then I think these things, whether you like them or not, like hip-hop might be the only common culture there is. If might be the one thing in which all these young men from all these different places can see themselves as one.

All this is part of a cosmopolitan culture, which is usually an urban experience of living in crowded places in a kind of outsider status. These are people who are trying to redefine their outsider status and make something that others find appealing, as they young men and women did in the Bronx with Rap, when that began. You see it in the Paris suburbs — young people who know they’re not part of the main culture: they’re lucky if someone thinks they’re French, or unlucky! They know they have this outsider status. A lot of them, taking their cue from Rap, are trying to create a culture of their own. That interests me a great deal! Young immigrant people who are struggling to become part of a culture, or if that doesn’t happen trying to create a culture of their own that they can belong to and that others end up emulating. That’s their inclusion. That’s where they belong. They create their own belonging.

Edwidge Danticat, in conversation with Chris Lydon, Watson Institute, Brown University, September 18, 2007

Edwidge Danticat has just been through her own “year of magical thinking,” encompassing the deaths of the father and uncle who brought her up, and the birth of her own daughter in Miami, all in the space of a few months. Her new non-fiction book, Brother, I’m Dying is a cool, meticulous chronicle of family history, of sudden shock and turmoil, and of her heart, breaking and surging.

The first part of our conversation tells one of those “refugee stories” that could seem someday to typify this era of mass displacement. Danticat’s 81-year-old uncle Joseph was a Baptist minister in Port au Prince. In the autumn of 2004, in fear for his life in a neighborhood beset by gangs, he fled to Miami, en route to his brother’s place in New York. Though he had visited the States many times and had a current tourist visa, he was detained, then shackled by Homeland Security officers who saw him as “another black man trying to get in.” In his “credible fear” asylum interview, Joseph Dantica vomited violently in an apparent seizure, but humanitarian parole was not to be considered, nor the process interrupted. “I think he’s faking,” said the medic on duty. Then suddenly Joseph failed. “His eyes are open and he’s not unconscious,” the medic commented. “I still think he’s faking, but we’ll take him to the clinic.” Then suddenly, at Jackson Memorial Hospital, Joseph Dantica was dead. When Edwidge saw his body, she was struck by the look of anger on her gentle uncle’s face — a look described in Haitian Creole by a word meaning “you were choked by your own blood.”

Click to listen to the first part of Chris’s conversation with Edwidge Danticat (26.2 MB MP3)

In the second part of our conversation, Edwidge Danticat takes a “transnational” view of the “cosmic mobility” in a globalizing economy and culture. She says: “Even before people get here, they’re working for you, making your baseballs and denims.” About Iraq, she says, Haitian memory begins with the US invasion by President Woodrow Wilson in 1915 and the occupation of Haiti until 1934 — “one of the most scarring things that ever happened to us… The Haitian in me sees the circularity in these things… It takes a long time to recover from these interventions and occupations.” I ask her, as I did Junot Diaz, to write us an immigration bill that corresponds with real demography and her own heart’s experience.

Click to listen to the second part of Chris’s conversation with Edwidge Danticat (22.6 MB MP3)

The next round in this series is with Ha Jin, whose new novel A Free Life takes up the saga of Chinese immigrants in America since the crackdown in Tienanmen Square in 1989.

Click to listen to the second part of Chris’s conversation with Edwidge Danticat (22.6 MB MP3)

The next round in this series is with Ha Jin, whose new novel A Free Life takes up the saga of Chinese immigrants in America since the crackdown in Tienanmen Square in 1989.

Richard Holbrooke

Bill Clinton’s peacemaker in the Balkans in the ’90s and last UN Ambassador, Holbrooke will be in the scrum again if any Democrat wins the presidency next year, and a good bet for Secretary of State if Hillary Clinton wins. In the meantime he’ll visit us every month or so at the Watson Institute for International Affairs at Brown University. Holbrooke cut his teeth in journalism and politics at Brown and graduated in 1962 — by chance, the same refulgent Spring when I graduated from Yale, and JFK’s commencement oration teased that he had now “the best of both worlds, a Harvard education and a Yale degree.”

Confident cosmopolitanism in the JFK style is stamped on Dick Holbrooke and still shines through a tough professional education in the field — as an AID officer in Vietnam in the ’60s, Peace Corps director in Morrocco, managing editor of Foreign Policy and assistant Secretary of State for East Asia under Jimmy Carter in the ’70s. Then he was an assistant Secretary of State again, under Clinton, this time for Europe, and of course, the strongarm of the Dayton agreement that ended the war for Bosnia in 1995.

To End a War, his Balkan memoir, ended on what is now an ironic note of anticipation:

“There will be other Bosnias in our lives – areas where early outside involvement can be decisive, and American leadership will be required. The world’s richest nation, one that presumes to great moral authority, cannot simply make worthy appeals to conscience and call on others to carry the burden. The world will look to Washington for more than rhetoric the next time we face a challenge to peace.”

Richard C. Holbrooke,

A decade older and wiser now, Holbrooke is sobered but not exactly chastened by his own misestimation of the odds in Iraq. Not for him Bill Richardson’s line (which might be mine) that “Iraq is a symptom. The disease is arrogance.”

In the Holbrooke view of the US in Iraq, our comeuppance, in any event, is that by now “all the solutions are bad, some are worse than others.”

Chris Lydon

The nominal American expectation of a restored democratic authority in Baghdad is openly at odds with the rise of Kurdish near-sovereignty in the North and Iranian influence over the Shiite South.

“The situation is not amenable to a single central-state solution,” Holbrooke concludes. “It just won’t work,” and perhaps nothing else will until Iraqis have slashed and suffered their way toward an understanding of “the genius of federalism” and the natural reality of decentralized power in their divided land. This happens also to be the lesson of Holbrooke’s experience in the former Yugoslavia.

Our conversation at the Watson Institute this week is here in two segments.

In the first I asked for the earnest professional citizen’s appraisal of the Iraq damage, in the Middle East and beyond. In short: how bad is it out there? Holbrooke spells out his overall judgment that the next president of the United States will have “the worst opening-day hand in foreign policy” in our history: wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, a global climate crisis, African emergencies from Darfur to Zimbabwe — all on a “massive agenda” of repairing alliances and restoring respect.

Click to listen to Part I (29.7 MB MP3)

Listen to the second part, and join the genteel head-butting, please, with a comment. We mean to take up the conversation again in October.

Mischievously I had wondered if the Clinton intervention in the Balkans had helped set the Iraq trap, with the “high” of zero-casualty air warfare, all the headier without United Nations approval. Holbrooke sees the Iraq war as more nearly a fluke: a “hijacking” of the U.S. government in the rage after 9.11 by “a faction of a faction” on the Republican right. “None of us saw this coming,” Holbrooke says, “and for the simplest of reasons” — that the new President Bush was the son of a World War 2 hero, and president, a coalition builder “who overall loved the world scene, and was pro-U.N.!”

The politician Dick Holbrooke is a “100 percent supporter” of Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination on the strength of her White House and Senate experience. I wonder what was the gap in street-tested savvy that let her guard down in the rush to a war authorization in 2002.

Holbrooke defends those Democrats, including himself and senators like John Kerry, Chris Dodd and Joe Biden, who thought they were empowering the president to avoid war. “They weren’t warmongers, they weren’t preemptive warriors,” Holbrooke says. But I ask him why we’re not paying more attention to the politicians and policy types who saw the disaster unfolding and voted against it, who got the Iraq War right.

I am thinking of one former Senator in particular — our fellow visitor at the Watson Institute, Lincoln Chafee of Rhode Island, a Republican who fought the war authorization and was defeated for reelection last year by the backlash against President Bush. Dick Holbrooke was well aware that Lincoln Chafee last weekend disaffiliated himself from the Republican party — one man’s “rite of purification,” as I take it. Should Democrats who enabled the war be going through their own public ceremonies of atonement?

Click to listen to Part II (37.7 MB MP3)

Join the genteel head-butting, please, with a comment. We mean to take up the conversation again in October.

Herbie Hancock

Or perhaps never in Boston has so much jazz talent gathered in our town, this week and next.

This is just to call Open Sorcerers’ attention to another Symphony Hall concert that your grandchildren will want to hear about.

On Friday, September 28, at Boston’s Symphony Hall, these artists are going
to play, separately, and together, in some new ways.

Herbie Hancock, who gave us “Cantaloupe Island” as a radio theme…

The hippest, most musical drummer ever in jazz Roy Haynes…

Roy Haynes

Violinist (a.k.a. “fiddlechick”) Regina Carter…

The first-family tenor saxophonist Branford Marsalis…

Piano modernist (and Herbie Hancock disciple) Geri Allen…

Trumpeter Jon Faddis, whom Dizzy Gillespie called “the best ever, including me!”…

The limitless tenor-man and one-man horn section Joe Lovano…

The gospel-choir graduate of “Dreaming Wide Awake,” Lizz Wright…

Big-band jazz master for 60 years, Toshiko Akiyoshi and her partner on flute and tenor saxophone Lew Tabakin…

The “instrument of wonder,” Claudia Acuna…

The sought-after piano partner of Joe Lovano, and also Toots Thielmans, Kenny Werner…

The Brookline-born bassist with a Stanford MBA Ray Drummond…

The big-band pianist beloved of Branford Marsalis, Claudia Acuna and Joe Lovano Joey Calderazzo…

The Bill Evans of younger jazz guitarists — “everybody loves him” — Howard Alden…

The young bassist and songstress-without-words Esperanza Spalding…

And the immortal hard-bop drummer, and last-surviving contributor to Miles Davis’s “Kind of Blue,” Jimmy Cobb.

The concert has been put together by George Wein, who, as many of you know, founded the Newport Jazz Festival — in fact the very idea of jazz festivals.

It’s called A Celebration of Jazz and Joyce, in honor of the late Joyce Wein, George’s wife. And it’s going to create a scholarship fund at the Berklee College of Music for a very talented, deserving student. You can get tickets from the Symphony Hall box office.

And, in the meantime, there is a remarkable week underway of music and talk about John Coltrane to mark the fortieth birthday since his death, at 40, in 1967.

John Coltrane

Under the ever-vigilant auspices of Northeastern University, this combination of John Coltrane Memorial Concerts on Friday and Saturday mark “the world’s oldest annual performance tribute to the musical and spiritual legacy of the great master.”

Take a good look at the casting of stars here: from the University of Art Blakey, the brilliant Bill Pierce on tenor playing with the universal pianist Mulgrew Miller; and a John Coltrane Memorial Ensemble led by son Ravi Coltrane with a speaking part for the poet and Coltrane celebrant Amiri Baraka.

I will be posting my own conversations on Coltrane with Amiri Baraka, Bill Pierce and the New York Times jazz critic Ben Ratliff, whose new book, Coltrane: The Story of a Sound tackles the most difficult questions with respect. Have you, too, wondered whether Miles Davis might better have hired Sonny Rollins when he first settled on Coltrane in 1955? Did the departure of pianist McCoy Tyner in 1965, then finally of drum partner Elvin Jones in 1966, confirm that Coltrane’s genius left him some time before he died?

But don’t the magnificent scope and speed of Coltrane’s meteoric flight across the sky make him, still, the most compelling mystery in American music?

They say it came first from Africa, carried in the screams of the enslaved; that it was the death bane of the Tainos, uttered just as one world perished and another began; that it was a demon drawn into Creation through the nightmare door that was cracked open in the Antilles. Fuku americanus, or more colloquially, fuku — generally a curse or a doom of some kind; specifically the Curse and Doom of the New World…

No matter what it’s name or provenance, it is believed that the arrival of the Europeans on Hispaniola unleashed the fuku on the world, and we’ve all been in the shit ever since. Santo Domingo might be fuku’s Kilometer Zero, its port of entry, but we are all of us its children, whether we know it or not.

Junot Diaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao