The Whole Wide World, with Christopher Lydon - Episodes 3, 4, 5, 6, and 7
(For episodes one and two see here and here respectively.)#
As an addition to my recent stroke of luck, my car was broken into tonight. I didn't have much but they took my stereo and my cassette player/recorder. I'm just bummed that I lost my last FLP tape.#
On the third episode of The Whole Wide World with Christopher Lydon, Peter Sellars was interviewed about a play he was putting on and the situation around the world for refugees.#
(The MP3s might be broken, I can send them to you if so. But there is a transcript available.)
The play he talks about seems like it would be awesome...
PS: The staging of this play is very, very, very simple: you just have to sit there for 90 minutes while nothing happens…and people stand at microphones…and talk…and you have to listen. And it is just a giant exercise in listening and concentration, and it goes very slowly. It is not entertaining; it is maddening for the audience; it breaks every bone in their body and forces it to be reset. And it is unendurable but, you know, like any 12 step program, [it is] eventually liberating…
And he wonders why people aren't listening?
When Chris asks him if there is a modern analogy of the kinship of the play (the play is set in ancient Greece and is about a group of refugees that Athens takes in and protects because they are their kin,) he replies with something that baffles the mind:
PS: Well, when Iolaus says that, you know, "I carried Hercules' shield on the bloody expedition to bring back the Amazon queen's belt, and Hercules, as everybody knows, saved your father from the moated depths of hell," the whole question of what we did so that you people could have something…I think, you know, in a very, very simple way, you know, the White House in Washington, DC, was built by slaves, the US Capitol Building was built…two thirds of the laborers were slaves. Their masters were paid five dollars a day for their labor; they were paid nothing. If you ask, "How did we get here?" ask who picked the strawberry on your strawberry shortcake tonight, ask who made our underwear in Bangladesh or Honduras, ask which Chinese prisoners made the shoes on your feet, just ask who did what they did so you can be who you are and have what you have, and then say can we live in some sense of reciprocal obligation. And right now that is the reality of a globalized, interpenetrated world. And we only want it to go one way, and that is a big mistake, because globalization is two-way, and that means we have to figure out how to share. We have taken a whole lot from everywhere and, at the moment, a lot of people have done extraordinary things so that we can enjoy our prosperity. That prosperity needs to be the world's prosperity, and that's the first step of the kinship of immigration. You know, we're very happy for global capital to move with no borders and, suddenly, we are stopping every human being at every border. And what most societies live with around the world, which is a non-cash economy, where the economy is sustained by giving of gifts, and what people owe each other is based on exchange. One of the things we did was we said, "I'm paying for this, so I don't want to know who made it; I don't want to know what they went through — I just bought it, that's all I need to know is this transaction," but in fact every single thing in our lives has a big chain of transactions behind that transaction and that's the karma that's coming into your life and that you're part of, and you can recognize it or not, but it's a whole lot healthier to recognize it and, again, imagine what it is that we can offer in return. And, I think, as Iolaus says, "In return, what we're asking you is not to be betrayed, not to be given back into the hands of our enemies. We have made these sacrifices so that you can be the most prosperous country on the face of the earth; now we're asking you not to betray us."
I'm very confused by what people like this think globalization (the subject of The Whole Wide World) and trade really are. For example, he seems to think that other countries get nothing from trading with the United States (or "the West") -- but if that were the case why would they do it? They get what ever money or goods were traded at the quantity that they agreed on.
I'm a bit appalled that this guy is seen as insightful. Listen/read the whole thing for many great examples of how he knows what is best for the world and everyone else (particularly those Americans) has no clue, because they don't even think.
On the fourth episode of The Whole Wide World with Christopher Lydon, Chris talks to Yo-Yo Ma about his work and cultural connection. Very good.#
On the fifth episode of The Whole Wide World with Christopher Lydon, Chris talks to a number of scientists and activists about food, from quality to production to consequences.#
Michael Pollen says something very interesting about how cows in factory farms differ so much from others:
MP: Oddly enough, the way we grow a hamburger in this country does involve a lot of fossil fuel. Now how should this be? I was kind of amazed to find that we have this animal that's brilliantly designed by nature to digest grass, that is a terrific kind of solar system. You know the sun feeds the grass, and the grass feeds the cow, and the cow feeds the human. So this system works pretty well, and it's very sustainable. But, it doesn't work fast enough or the capitalist system, which is always trying to make a cow reach its slaughter weight as fast as possible. If you keep a cow on grass, it takes maybe two years to get it up there. But that's not quick enough. So what do you do? Well, to get it down to fourteen months, which is what we have it down to, to bring a cow to slaughter…if you feed them on corn, they will grow a lot more quickly, because it's a more high-energy food; corn is really cheap. Now why is corn so cheap? Well, partly 'cause it's subsidized, partly because we grow it with fertilizer that is made from, mostly from natural gas. It can also be made from fuel, from diesel or anything else, and that's where you get all that fossil fuel going into the cow. It's first fed to the corn. And so we've taken this system that is essentially…was a solar-driven, grass-based system of producing a hamburger, or any other piece of meat, and we've turned it into another gas guzzler [...]
And earlier he talked about the consequences of McDonalds' requirements on potato farmers.
One of the things lying underneath most of the speakers was the issues of biodiversity and water supply.
Guests: Jared Diamond, Kevin Cleaver, Vandana Shiva, E.O. Wilson, Michael Pollan, Bill McKibben, and Sandra Postel
E. O. Wilson is optimistic because, "when all else fails, men turn to reason."
On the sixth episode of The Whole Wide World with Christopher Lydon, Chris interviews a few writers about globalization and what they think about it.#
All these people were incredibly interesting.
Amin Maalouf wants to see group identification disappear, particularly of a religious variety and he says this:
AM: [Spain] was an area where three religions met at one point of history: Christians, Muslims, and Jews built something together. Of course there were tensions; of course it was never paradise on earth. But still they built a worthy civilization together, each one with its own cultural flavor. And for me it's a mythical time. Sometimes many events come at the same moment, and the year 1492 is one of those years, because it's the year of the discovery of America. It's also the year when the Arabs and Jews were expelled together…and I love that idea. And at the same time it was the year — because of those expulsions — the time when the intermingling between those cultures stopped.
And Chris describes part of one his books that sounds amazing:
CL: There's a wonderful close of your book about identity; it brought tears to my eyes the first time I read it. You said most authors finish a book hoping it will be read forever. Your hope was that your grandson — perhaps growing up, and finding it one day by chance on the family bookshelves — would look through the pages, read a passage or two, then put it back in the dusty corner where he found it, shrugging his shoulders, and marveling that, in his grandfather's day, such things still needed to be said.
Azar Nafisi, an Iranian teacher who had a secret reading club in the past, talks about why Lolita was so popular at that time in her group.
AN: They called "Lolita" immoral, but after the Islamists took over Iran, they changed all the laws related to women, and they lowered the age of marriage from 18 to nine (plus the fact that, of course, they reintroduced polygamy and all sorts of good stuff like that). So, for me "Lolita" was confiscation of one individual's life by another. Humbert Humbert is living this illusion about his childhood love, Annabelle, who has died, you know, two decades ago, almost. And he…in "Lolita," he tries to rediscover Annabelle, and he tries to stop Lolita's life and impose his own dream on Lolita, and he destroys her and ultimately himself. This is what totalitarian societies do to their people: they confiscate the reality of their life; they want them to become the object of their dreams. And Lolita became for us very relevant.
Amitav Ghosh is an Indian who speaks a great deal about the evils of Empire. (I wonder if he will come up in the next episode with Niall Ferguson.) One of the things that he expresses a great amount is the complete dominance of Europe in the world:
Imagine yourself to be a historian from Mars, you know, who arrives on the planet Earth, you know, and looks at the history of planet Earth. How would you read its history? What…500 years ago, a small group of people from a small island began to expand outwards. Today, in effect, they control really three continents. And it's an extraordinary thing this, I mean, this amazing sort of global Diaspora, and there's no word for it. So, you know, if you look at this phenomenon, which is perfectly self-evident to people everywhere in the world, you know, that this group of Anglophone countries really has in some sense shouldered the responsibility for running the world.
He says that the idea of Empire is that is recreates the whole wide world in a particular kind of vision. One of the most persuasive arguments I've heard, he doesn't go for common shortcuts that makes others look ridiculous.
His comparison of Osama bin Laden, Pol Pot, and self-hatred is amazing.
The fifth episode of The Whole Wide World with Christopher Lydon was a live episode where Chris moderated between Amy Chua and Niall Ferguson, along with a few callers.#
Hearing Niall, whom I've only read, was very nice and the two of them really go at each other in a nice way. There's no transcript though, so you'll have to listen and it's tough to quote.
One of the interesting things that Niall brings up is about Halliburton. He says that if they are benefiting so much from the war in Iraq or George Bush's presidency than their stock price does not reflect this. At the beginning of 2002, it was the lowest it had been since 1994 ($15) and it is barely creeping back (only at $30) to its ten year high ($60) that occurred in 1998--during the Clinton years. (These numbers should be taken with inflationary salt.)