Christopher Lydon

Howard French on Africa in a Chinese Century (AUDIO)

2011-01-24T09:26:07-05:00

Fifty years almost to the day after the catastrophic assassination of Patrice Lumumba in the Congo -- a Cold War murder by Belgium with help from our CIA -- the journalist Howard French is sketching an alternative path ahead for African development today. China is the big investor in 21st Century Africa. China sees Africa as yet another "natural-resource play" but also as a partner in growth -- not a basket-case but a billion customers who'll be two billion by mid-century. With the West and Japan deep in a post-industrial funk, China is keeping its focus on manufacturing, exports and markets, "and we'll have them largely to ourselves," China calculates, "because the West doesn't make the stuff middle-class Africans are buying -- cars and houses and shopping malls and airports and all the things associated with a rise to affluence. Those are the things that China makes."

For the New York Times Howard French covered Africa and then China, where he learned Mandarin. He returns to Africa now on a book project, observing and overhearing Chinese migrants to places like Ethiopia, Mozambique, South Africa, Namibia and Liberia.

Listen to our conversation:

HF: I was struck every time I got on a plane: the Westerners tend to be rich American tourists on their way to seeing lions and giraffes; or aid workers and NGO people -- coming with a mission to minister to Africans about capacity-building or democracy and what my father used to do: public health. I say none of this with scorn, but the Chinese have a very different mission. The Chinese that I saw on the planes -- and by the way, ten years ago I saw no Chinese; now they're maybe a fifth of all the passengers -- are all, almost to a person, business people. They've pulled up their stakes wherever they lived -- in Szechuan province or Hunan province -- and they have come to make it in Africa. And they're not leaving until they do. Whatever it takes for them to make a breakthrough in farming or in small industry, they're going to work 20 hours a day till they make it. They see Africa as a place of extraordinary growth opportunity, a place to make a fortune, to throw down some roots. These are not people who're there for a couple of years. They're thinking about building new lives for themselves in Africa. So you have this totally different perspective between the Westerners and the newcomers. One sees Africa as a patient essentially, to be lectured to, to be ministered to, to be cared for. The other sees Africa and Africans as a place of doing business and as partners. There's no looking down one's nose or pretending to superiority. It's all how I can make something work here.

CL: I just wonder: among those development geniuses who argue about Trade vs. Aid as America's next gift to Africa, in the face of all the Chinese activity buying forests, or building railroads, or planning the sale of billions of cellphones, what is the West's better bet? Do we have one, or are we still asleep?

HF: I think we're still asleep.

Yes, Howard French observes a Chinese style of racism in Africa, both familiar and different. "There's a certain discourse about Africans being lazy or lacking in intelligence or unready, variations on a theme. One guy said to me just last week in Liberia essentially: 'there's a thousand-year gap between them and us,' meaning... culturally, educationally, just sort of temperamentally; the ability to save, to sacrifice, to commit to a long-term project. But there's an important distinction to be made. Western racism was instrumentalized to justify the sale of black people and their enslavement across the ocean to work as animals of labor on other continents. Chinese racism is, comparatively speaking up until this point, a largely rhetorical phenomenon..."

And what are Africa's chances of doing well in the new Chinese "deal"? Howard French sees "an incredible opportunity for Africa," but no guarantees. States with a vigorous civil society, strong elites and an informed view of "how people's daily and longer-term interests will be served" stand to get good results. "In states that are stuck in the kleptocratic authoritarian mode, the Chinese will pay cash on the barrel for whatever they want and all of the contracts will go through the state house and none of the money or very little of it will enter the public budget. Twenty years from now, China will say: it's not our fault if the money is frittered away on Mercedes and villas in France and Swiss bank accounts. We paid you exactly the amount we said we were going to pay you. Don't blame us if you have twice as many people and all of your iron ore is finished."

Lydia Davis: Miniatures from a Mind on Fire (AUDIO)

2011-01-21T09:37:09-05:00

Theo Cote photo

Lydia Davis keeps popping up in conversation as a favorite writer of our favorite writers -- Rae Armantrout, the Pulitzer poet, among them, and the novelist Robert Coover. Dan Chiasson makes her Collected Stories "one of the great books in recent literature, equal parts horse sense and heartache." David Shields' demand in Reality Hunger for aphorism, personal urgency, and "an explosion on every page," is always satisfied in a Lydia Davis story, whether it's short or very short or just a sentence or two. So finally, we are hearing Ms. Davis beautifully honed prose in her own voice, and engaging with her on how she writes it: suddenly sometimes, but also waiting patiently a year or two for the shape (and punctuation) of a last line, as in "Head, Heart," in its entirety here:

Head, Heart

Heart weeps.
Head tries to help heart.
Head tells heart how it is, again:
You will lose the ones you love. They will all go. But even the earth will go, someday.
Heart feels better, then.
But the words of head do not remain long in the ears of heart.
Heart is so new to this.
I want them back, says heart.
Head is all heart has.
Help, head. Help heart.

As Paul Harding, of Tinkers fame, was formed in part by the drum patterns of Elvin Jones, Lydia Davis seems to have been influenced by the sleek wit of pianist Glenn Gould and the architecture of Johann Sebastian Bach. Ms. Davis -- often hard to distinguish from the narrative voice in her stories -- grew up idolizing Glenn Gould and "working as hard at the piano as any professional, partly to avoid doing other things that were harder, but partly for the pleasure of it."

Listen to our conversation:

The narrator that's so intriguing in many of these nearly 200 Collected Stories is, like the author, a professor whose father was a professor. She's a bookish New York woman who thinks of herself (we don't) as "prim." She is in and out of the City -- to lonely weekend places, to France for long stays -- without ever having to tell you what city. She's been married, and she's brought up a son. "My husband" in these stories is a man now married to someone else. Our narrator is a woman who "always needed to have a love even if it was a complicated love." She fantasizes about marrying a cowboy -- "I imagined that maybe a cowboy would help me stop thinking so much." But she goes on writing endlessly about her own mental process. She is not a great housekeeper in town or country. She drinks a bit, and sees a shrink. But always she is pursuing her own non-stop line of questions and answers on her own: what can she learn, for example, about giving her son something like the care she devotes to her century-old dictionary? "... I consider its age. I treat it with respect. I stop and think before I use it. I know its limitations... I leave it alone a good deal of the time." She wonders if memories, to be happy, must be recalled happily by the other people in the picture.

I blurt out unwisely that I read these stories asking: "is this the way chicks' minds work?" But it's not chicks, of course. It's writers with minds on fire and a gift for sentences that go off like little rockets. Lydia Davis writes in the company that includes Montaigne, Emerson, Proust, Beckett, Flannery O'Connor and Dorothy Parker. She also reads wonderfully.

Mohammed Hanif's AfPak: A Case of Exploding Absurdities (AUDIO)

2011-01-13T15:47:28-05:00

Somebody said: if you're an intelligent Islamic militant and you had a choice: to take over either Afghanistan or Pakistan, what would you do? You would take over Pakistan, obviously.

Ghaith Abdul Ahad photo

Mohammed Hanif, the Pakistani novelist, is observing from Karachi that "even the believers" don't believe in the war in Afghanistan anymore. No statement of purpose passes the "you've got to be kidding" test -- not the US professions about stabilizing the region, not the Pakistani Army's mission to defend its country. Pakistan's tribal areas that were peaceful before the war have been devastated. The future is disappearing. Certain dark absurdities underlying Pakistan's situation, underlying Mohammed Hanif's "insanely brilliant" novel, A Case of Exploding Mangoes, are chasing their own tails.

On January 4 this year Salmaan Taseer, the rich, connected governor of Pakistan's Punjab province, was assassinated in broad daylight in a public market in Islamabad. The shooting eerily prefigured by four days our made-in-America madness in Tucson, but it was more horrifying by many measures. Taseer took 26 rounds of sub-machinegun fire from one of his own guards before the rest of his security detail intervened. Prominent mullahs in Pakistan have celebrated the murder and promised vengeance on Taseer's funeral goers. At issue, so to speak, was Taseer's enthusiasm for repealing an Anti-Blasphemy law -- an old statute that in today's fervor has enabled religious prosecutions and deadly personal fatwas on farcical grounds. (You can be charged with blasphemy in Pakistan for discarding a salesman's business card -- if the salesman, like so many of his countrymen, bears the name Mohammed.)

Listen to our conversation:

MH: I think the basic kind of crisis that we are going through is that somehow a large majority of people are convinced that their faith is under attack. Now, how can their faith be under attack if 98 percent of people who live in this country are faithful? What has happened is that this environment, these perpetual wars that we've been involved with, have somehow convinced our people...

We've never even begun to deal with the reasons for which this country was created, which was that there should be some kind of economic and social justice for the Muslim minority in these parts. That's what this was supposed to be about. But yesterday I was at this big religious gathering where all the kind of hot-shots of Pakistan's religious parties were there. And they were saying that Pakistan was actually created to protect the honor of Prophet Mohammed. Now I've lived here all my life. I haven't grown up in some kind of sheltered community. But I haven't heard that kind of discourse ever in my life...

CL: How does the Af-Pak war, ongoing, affect the day-to-day outlook of Pakistanis?

MH: Well, I think it has radicalized a section of Pakistani society. It has made a lot of people cynical and anti-American... I think this is probably the first time in the history of the world that a so-called friendly country, the United States, is using robots to kill the citizens of its partner in war. Now whatever logic you might apply, that doesn't come out nice. It's never, ever going to sound good to anyone.

There's an Urdu saying that when your neighbor's house is on fire, the chances are that fire will get to you as well, [especially] if you as a nation, as a country, have been stoking that fire for 30 years. If you've had this attitude towards your neighbor, if you've never considered Afghans as human beings, if you only speak of them in military terms, as targets or allies or collateral damage... then Pakistan is going the same route. You can't create a monster, you can't create a jihadi group, as the military has in the past, that will exclusively go and kill Indian soldiers in Kashmir, and not do anything else. You can't create a faction of Taliban whose sole duty it is to go into Afghanistan and fight the Americans. They will do it for a while. They've done it for a while. But after that, they will come back and they'll find other targets. The jihadi groups that initially were supposed to fight in Afghanistan, and then fight in Kashmir and then go and liberate Sweden or whatever country, they've finally turned their guns on Pakistanis, sometimes on the Pakistani establishment...

CL: What is it about Pakistan -- a dangerous place, a dangerous state of mind -- that seems to invite broad satire? I'm thinking of your own Exploding Mangoes and also Salman Rushdie's Shame and even the Tom Hanks movie, "Charlie Wilson's War." People seem to forget the unfunny truths here.

MH: I grew up in a small city in Punjab, and the traditional form of entertainment there was standing on a street corner, making jokes about current affairs, about political leaders, about the village elder, about the mullah in the mosque - anybody who carried, or thought that he carried, any authority. And it was quite accepted in our culture. So for me, the first insight into how the world is run, how a city is run, how a family works together, I got from the comedy clubs. But I don't have it in me to be a standup comic. I'm a sit-down comic. I'll sit down and struggle with myself and maybe compose a joke, or come up with a character that can reflect some of those absurdities...

Pakistan has lots of TV news stations, and suddenly I've seen that every single channel has got a political satire show, and those are the shows that are doing really well. Things are so bad that nobody actually wants any more analysis. Nobody wants any more pundits telling them the future because they know it is all downhill. So we might as well sit here and laugh at ourselves.
Mohammed Hanif in Karachi, in conversation with Chris Lydon in Providence, January 11, 2010

The Iraq and Af-Pak Wars, at the Receiving End with War Correspondent Nir Rosen (AUDIO)

2011-01-07T10:26:58-05:00

Ghaith Abdul Ahad photo

Nir Rosen is the rare war reporter (not unlike Anthony Shadid) who covers Iraq and Afghanistan as if there are articulate people in pain on the ground -- in families and villages caught between the wrecking ball of American military force and the junk-yard dogs of warlords who end up owning so much of the wreckage. Aftermath is Nir Rosen's door-stop of a new book, nearly 600 pages of person-to-person reporting "following the bloodshed of America's Wars in the Muslim World." Reading it all, Nir Rosen, I keep thinking: on some great Judgment Day, Americans are going to have to account for what they knew of this horror show, and if not, why not?

Nir Rosen is strikingly cast for this job of telling us. He is an American born in New York, with a bouncer's build and a Jewish name, but with Iranian blood, too, deep olive skin and a huge Middle Eastern mustache that let him go native. Back in 2003, he writes, an American soldier saw him and exclaimed: "That's the biggest fuckin' Iraqi [pronounced 'eye-raki'] I ever saw." He's also had the mettle to hit the street in Iraq and Lebanon and Egypt and Afghanistan -- always a freelance and a solo act, not embedded and not with a New York Times or CNN credential -- to report what you or I might see.

Listen to our conversation:

I am wondering how "fixed" Baghdad would look to us in 2011.

NR: ... There has been a relative decline in violence since the peak of the civil war period, 2005 to 2007 or 08. You no longer see militias controlling the streets and checkpoints in neighborhoods. You no longer see Americans conducting patrols or arrests. But Iraq is destroyed and broken and dirty and decaying and sick. Thomas Friedman talked about "a million acts of kindness" [as the US contribution]. I think for any Iraqi that would be outrageous, and they would remember a million explosions, a million assassinations and killings and deaths and displacements and arrests. And they would blame the US for this, because all this followed the American occupation and the chaos we created and the sectarian structures we imposed on the country. So a million acts of occupation and brutality may be more correct from an Iraqi point of view.

Over the course of a long war, Nir Rosen is observing, we Americans have learned to euphemize our own brutalities, at the same time we have adopted and embellished the enemy's bluster about the stakes.

NR: It's ironic that we've adopted Al-Qaeda view of the world. Al-Qaeda believes there's some kind of global battlefield, a global war against Jews and Crusaders and infidels, that countries don't matter. And Obama has continued all the pathologies of the Bush administration: it's a global war against a sort of undefined enemy, an idea, a movement, a symbol, not a nation-state -- Al-Qaeda or Islamic extremism. But ironically, as a result of our wars, Al-Qaeda has gone from being a marginal, insignificant phenomenon to a much more important one throughout the Muslim world. You had 200 guys who belonged to Al-Qaeda, more or less, at the time of 9-11. And they got lucky in 9-11 and were able to murder 3,000 people. But as a result of that we went to war in Iraq and Afghanistan, we bombed Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia, and conducted operations in other countries as well, and we spent trillions of dollars on this war without end. All for a couple hundred relatively unsophisticated extremists who, in the grand scheme of things, were able to conduct only a pinprick on the great American empire, which didn't cause that much damage. The damage was caused by our overreaction to September 11, internally and externally.

CL: ... You remind me of Samuel Huntington's Clash of Civilizations notion. I said to Sam Huntington once on the radio: 'it seems to me that you've developed methadone for Cold War addicts, that you've invented a clash of cultural significance and worldwide scope that could go on forever, partly out of nostalgia for this enormous, long Cold War confrontation with Russian Communism.'

NR: Yes, it was as if we got rid of one enemy [in Russian Communism] and now we need to find another one to justify our massive military expenditure and our militaristic approach to dominating the world. For now, Muslims are a good candidate. But Al-Qaeda is such a marginal phenomenon in the Middle East, in the Muslim world, it just doesn't make any sense. ... They've become more important thanks to us, thanks to our approach, but it's not a threat. It's a nuisance really. And we treat them as if Al-Qaeda threatens to take over and dominate the Muslim world, when it's just a joke. There's no war of ideas here, and no threat militarily. If you visit the Arab world nobody cares about them.
Nir Rosen of Aftermath in conversation with Chris Lydon, January 5, 2011

David Bromwich on the "Disappointment in Obama" (AUDIO)

2010-12-23T14:48:52-05:00

David Bromwich, the Sterling Professor of English at Yale, reads Barack Obama like a book -- as if he were a book, that is. With the novelist Zadie Smith, he often seems to me the only commentator worth reading on Obama, precisely because they bring literary tools and imagination to a man who's himself an almost literary invention. Professor Bromwich takes the study of our president, in effect, out of the White House press room, out of "political science," whatever that is, into English class. The first premise is that language -- scripted and impromtu -- reveals the man. "Close reading" suggests further that something about his language is at the core of the low-lying invasive fog of "disappointment in Obama." In the Bromwich reading, President Obama is "an unusually forceful politician, especially from a distance," who underestimated the difficulty of his task and "characteristically overrates the potency of words, his words," to get the job done.

"What he did in the first few months of his presidency, Professor Bromwich is observing in conversation, "was lay down any number of pledges -- what the British call 'earnests' -- of his good intentions about Guantanamo, about Israel and Palestine, about nuclear proliferation, about the environment... It was a wonderful list, and he made pretty good but very general speeches on all of them. I believe he supposed -- semi-magically -- that from the inspiring force of his speeches, a groundswell of support would arise from the bottom that made him do it. There something fantastic, something delusive, and something unreal about that idea of his role."

Listen to our conversation:

DB: In an improvised moment in this latest campaign, October 2010, Obama talked about taxes and tried to be very understanding toward the Tea Partiers and other anti-tax fanatics and said something like, "That's in our DNA, right? I mean, we came in because folks on the other side of the Atlantic had been oppressing folks without giving them representation..." Folks? ... What was he trying to say? He was trying talk about George III, the tyranny of Britain in the colonial days and Taxation Without Representation. Those are specific names and references every literate American would have recognized, but Obama doesn't descend into them, or rather doesn't ascend to them, even though it's ascending to an ordinary middle level. It was as if he were talking to rather primitive and silly and uninformed people. He has another register which is rather technocratic.
On the Health Care Bill he could talk about the need to "prioritize" and "incentivize" and "watch the trend lines" and so on. So these are two very different idioms. I think the technocratic one is Obama's natural speaking manner most of the time, most of the day in his presidency, because those are the people he's around. He learned to talk in the surroundings of the legal academy, corporate life and around bankers and technocrats, and on an honest day he's one of them.

CL: You caught my attention in the London Review of Books many months ago just with the observation that he can sound like the president of the Ford Foundation, or something. It's the sound of a vaguely anonymous board room voice, an intelligent mind among a lot of intelligent minds, representing some kind of anonymous consensus of the good people.

DB: Yeah. That's sort of the good and competent elite who are meant to run things. I call him a Fabian non-socialist for that reason. The Fabians - H. G. Wells and George Bernard Shaw among them - believed in the reform of society by a group of technocrats, from above, in the direction of equality, but not with much consultation of the populace. And there's nothing at all low about Obama, nothing the least bit vulgar or ill-bred. In fact, if he had just a dash of vulgarity it might increase the democratic quality of his charm.

He has said the Health Care Bill was a piece of "signature legislation." That phrase caught my ear. It's the sort of phrase that would be put into a write-up on the recipient of an honorary degree in a law school or university. And in fact, of course the Health Care Bill was anything but a signature piece of legislation; it worked through many committees, got delayed by Max Baucus and that search for bipartisan consensus, for months delayed by Obama's personal wait for Olympia Snowe who never came across, and so on. If he had a signature, we don't know what it looked like... And yet I think for him it was just one more exertion of this neutral, rather impersonal vocabulary that he's very used to and that you read on the blurbs of semi-thoughtful best sellers.

What can any of us tell about a man's character, talents, intentions from his words?

David Bromwich is finding the president more detached, perhaps dissociated, than the man he voted for and roots for; a man who's elegant but not warm; who's theoretically humble but practically haughty; a gifted writer and speaker who has a hard time naming the thing he's talking about by its name; a man still hungering for approval and even legitimacy; a politician who does not enjoy the basic friction of politics. John F. Kennedy's famous news conferences, Bromwich observes on listening again, were "full of human moods and quirks." JFK spoke rapidly, "as we all do when we're concerned to say what we really think." President Obama, by contrast, very rarely ad-libs and speaks "very slowly, deliberately, often even brokenly -- not for lack of linguistic skill but for lack of contact between him and what he really wants people to be able to hear of him."

How strange, if Professor Bromwich is right, that a president who saw himself early, and successfully, as an author, who is still celebrated for his eloquence, is stumbling now on his own use of words.

Economist Mark Blyth: 2011 Will Be Worse... and Life Will Go On (AUDIO)

2010-12-22T09:46:05-05:00

Mark Blyth is in the pub tonight, played by Sean Connery, as usual, and demonstrating again how far a man can go in political economy just by talking fast and infallibly with a strong Scots' accent.

The Democrats in Washington have taken up again their modern mission: cleaning up a Republican mess in America, for which they will get no thanks in 2011 or 2012, says our corridor mate at the Watson Institute. The Tea Party rebellion demonstrates anew that American voters are crazy but not necessarily stupid: when they see debt and deficits skyrocketing and unemployment still climbing, the Republican campaign writes itself, and wins. "You don't get any credit for putting an emergency floor in the building when the roof is still falling into the basement. That's what the Democrats have done for the last two years, and will keep doing."

Listen to our conversation:

Mark Blyth is a man of rough opinions, as you've gathered, on top of learning and experience. The civilized expert world has decided, he notes, that "austerity" is to be the bad idea that governs economic policy in 2011. "If it's not hurting, it's not working," is the rule. It won't work, Blyth says. It won't even be sustained, because democracies (like Ireland, maybe even the US) have discovered that they're paying twice for the meltdown: first through the bank bailout, second through service cuts on the altar of the austere. Sooner or later, he says, the holders of sovereign debt will "take a haircut" but that day of reckoning could yet be years away.

Photo from Mark Blyth's Austerity video

At the end of the day, he is telling us, the American economy has staying power that a lot of nervous Americans forget. This sounds like the Mark Blyth version of the line attributed to Bismarck, that "God has a special providence for fools, drunks, and the United States of America." Is not the empire at risk, I am asking...

MB: It depends on what you mean by "empire," right? This is the funny thing about American Empire. As an immigrant to the United States, along with hundreds of millions who have done it over the past hundred years, it's this funny empire that people keep wanting to join. It's a really weird thing. The Italians are the best at this, they got six US military bases on their soil that fly unimpeded missions to Afghanistan and God knows where else, whatever the Americans want to do, and then they come over here, probably flying Business Class to get here, and then moan about the American Empire. It's a strange creature, this one.

CL: Some of them come here to get out of range of American foreign policy.

MB: When the British had an empire you knew where you stood. You had no rights, you had only responsibilities. We owned the stuff and you got shat on. When the French had an empire it was even clearer. This is a very odd empire where you get preferential trading agreements, better access to markets, technology transfers, and then all the sort of benefits that go along with hanging around in the dollar club. Oh, and then we'll also do this thing called NATO where basically we'll bankroll your militaries for 35 years and we'll keep it going 20 years after the Cold War because it's just a good idea. If you had to design an empire from scratch and you could do whatever you want, this would not be it. This is a seriously funny empire.

One example of this. So let's go into Iraq for oil, right? Okay... But if you went out in 2002 and went on the spot market, and basically bought oil future contracts at about $36 a barrel, you could have bought the entire Iraqi oil stock for one quarter of what we spent on the war. This is the stupidest empire the world has ever seen. If there really was an empire, it should have fallen years ago.

Mark Blyth: On Ireland, the Circle Will Not Be Squared (AUDIO)

2010-12-02T11:53:24-05:00

Mark Blyth, of Austerity fame and the Watson Institute, has a Scot's vernacular gift for clarifying economics. Is the situation explosive? "You've got 300 million Americans and 500 million handguns. And 72 percent of Americans that live paycheck to paycheck. Do the math!"

We're talking in particular about the Euro crisis spreading out of Ireland. Short form: tiny country, continental meltdown in the offing.

It was never a "Celtic Tiger," in the first place, in the Blyth telling. "It was a small ocelot with a roar." A population the size of Brooklyn, NY, producing about 2 percent of the European GDP. And now, in deep pain of cuts in education and health services, it's having an utterly illusory shouting match, not so unlike ours in the US of A.

People want to say: look at those profligate governments, spending all that money. We've got to restore fiscal sanity. But it wasn't fiscal insanity that got us here. It was private-sector leverage and the insanity of banking that brought us to this point. So the bankers put it on the state, and the state turned around it put it on the taxpayer. It's the biggest bait-and-switch in human history."

As the Euro bankers try to transfer risk and responsibility for their crisis back and forth from private to "sovereign" public debt, I'm asking Mark Blyth -- using Ireland as a manageably small example -- to find the point where justice could be said to meet necessity. It turns out, he says, that there's no such point. Not in sight yet, anyway.

The just thing is that the banks should pay. No question. You made the mess. Clean it up. It's a pretty simple rule. But the basic line is this: if you let the banks fail, there's nothing coming back. So if you're Ireland, the Celtic Tiger, and over 10 percent of your GDP is in the financial sector, that's where you make a lot of money, bankers' salaries and all that. So let's say you decide to blow up 10 percent of the economy. What's your next trick? We can try to reflate it. We can hope that it comes back. We can hope to raise the patient from the dead basically. In order to do that you need to have a growing economy. So obviously hacking away at austerity politics is not going to bring back the bankers' balance sheets. But on the other hand, it's not clear what else you do with them. They don't have any money to pay back, unless you bring the corpse back to life.

Now the only way you can do that is by having growth-enhancing policies, and that's why austerity is not one of them. But there's another short-run way you can do this. If you had to take all the debt off the banks and put it on the public balance sheet, thereby making the bondholders of sovereign bonds concerned about the value of their holdings, those sovereign bondholders are going to go to the EU and Germany, and remind the bankers in those countries about all the different bonds they're holding in all these peripheral and non-peripheral countries, and say: do you want a bank run on this?

Because here's the deal: if the Irish decide that they're going to put it on the banks, and the banks can't pay it -- if they say: Screw it, we're not going to take austerity politics anymore. Hell with it, we're not going to do this! -- okay, what's your next trick, Ireland? Well, we're going to default, we're going to back out of the Euro! Oh, really? The minute I know that, I'm going to dump every Irish bond I can, and the minute I do that I'm going to look at my holdings in bonds and I'm going to say: there's other guys out there. They can default, too, and probably the Spanish are going to go as well. So then I start dumping the Spanish and then the Portugese. And then everybody's dumping all these bonds together. You've got a massive run that wipes out not just 2 percent of Europe's GDP, Ireland. It basically takes out the European banking system.

So from the point of view of Europe and the Germans in particular, they're saying to the Irish: You're not going anywhere, Ireland. And you're taking this austerity, and you're going to like it! The only problem is: they're not going to. There's a democracy in Ireland. They're going to vote the rascals out. And when they vote them out they're going to get a government that says: maybe the banks should pay for this. And then you're back to your problem: the banks don't have any money left. So how are you going to do it? You can't square a circle!
Mark Blyth with Chris Lydon at the Watson Institute, Brown University, November 30, 2010

Listen to our conversation:

Dennis Lehane: Between Dorchester Ave and Sunset Boulevard (VIDEO)

2010-11-22T10:19:04-05:00

Dennis Lehane so rules the neighborhood of Noir ("Nwaaah," as we say in Boston) that he gets street credit for work he didn't write, like "The Departed" and "The Town." But does the author of "Mystic River," "Gone Baby Gone" and the new Moonlight Mile get credit enough for a body of artistic work now far beyond private-eye or "genre" of any kind -- way beyond his gift for Boston-accented dialog?

Our conversation is about the murkier depths of his Gothic novel and movie "Shutter Island," with Leonardo diCaprio as a U.S. Marshall apparently trapped in a Boston Harbor lock-up for the criminally insane in the 1950s. I think it's Lehane's version of the War on Terror. He says it's more nearly his answer to the Patriot Act, his reliving of the Cold War and the repressions it licensed in America. "All past is prologue," he remarks. "Noir is without a doubt the ultimate genre of 'you cannot outrun the past'... That's 'Mystic River': you cannot outrun your nature. You cannot escape the past." "Shutter Island" in that sense turns out to be Dennis Lehane's recapitulation of McCarthyism (an American Stalinism): those good old days when the CIA experimented with LSD and other psychotropic drugs on Federal prisoners and other unsuspecting guinea pigs. It was a time, he's saying, that foreshadowed the suspension of habeas corpus and the tortures of Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib in the George Bush years.

Dennis Lehane with Chris Lydon at Mother Anna's restaurant in Boston's North End.

We are testing a favorite Open Source premise that the most observant anthropologists and historians of our own time may be novelists. In his hometown he is riveted on "how this new Gilded Age is going to fall out. People are being priced out of Charlestown... out of Southie... It's kind of horrifying... There seem to be only a few people who are worried that we're selling out the entire country -- that everything's gone; that the America we knew growing up is just vanishing... Isn't anybody paying attention? There's no unions left; they destroyed them. They went after the unions and then outsourced everything. So now there's no jobs left, and they've got the people that have lost their jobs, lost their houses, lost everything, believing that the reason they've lost it is everything but the real reasons. And everybody just seems to say: fine, as long as I can get this for three bucks a can at Walmart, I'm okay. I think we're just watching America fiddle as it burns."

Dennis Lehane is a writer who keeps expanding into new themes and new media, from his original cop stories to historical fiction, The Given Day ("Shades of Doctorow and Dreiser...," Janet Maslin wrote in the Times), then long-form television in "The Wire," and back to social realism and the adventures of PIs Patrick Kenzie and Angie Gennaro in Moonlight Mile. He's been well served along the way by three tough self-inflicted rules. First, take no job that could divert him from his writing ambition; so he's been a security guard and he's parked cars, but was never tempted by law school or teaching. Second, sell the work to artists, never to corporations; so he finally yielded the movie rights to "Mystic River" to Clint Eastwood; and "Shutter Island" to Martin Scorsese. And third: undertake only those new projects that "on some level scare the hell out of me. It's got to be something I'm afraid I can't do."

Listen to our long conversation over dinner the other night:

Pakistan 3.0: The "CIA Jihad" and the Whirlwind Today (AUDIO)

2010-11-10T10:48:22-05:00

It is well known that the term 'Pakistan', an acronym, was originally thought up in England by a group of Muslim intellectuals. P for the Punjabis, A for the Afghans, K for the Kashmiris, S for Sind and the 'tan', they say, for Baluchistan... So it was a word born in exile which then went East, was borne-across or trans-lated, and imposed itself on history; a returning migrant, settling down on partitioned land, forming a palimpsest on the past. A palimpsest obscures what lies beneath. To build Pakistan it was necessary to cover up Indian history, to deny that Indian centuries lay just beneath the surface of Pakistani Standard Time. The past was rewritten; there was nothing else to be done.
Salman Rushdie, in Shame, his "modern fairytale" of Pakistan. (1983)

Pervez Hoodbhoy is among the eminent cosmopolitan Pakistanis who press two urgent points about today: (1) that the clear and present danger at home is truly scary; that nuclear-tipped Pakistan (not Stone-Age Afghanistan, nor youthful, half-modern Iran) is the epicenter of Islamic extremism; that as Salman Rushdie said in closing a talk at Brown last Spring, "if Pakistan goes down, we're all f**ked." And (2) that it might help if Americans and their government understood what most Pakistanis observe: that it was a "CIA jihad" in the late '70s and '80s that implanted the virus of killer-force fundamentalism in Pakistan and Afghanistan, in the last battle of the Cold War.

Listen to my conversation with Pervez Hoodbhoy:

Physicist, film-maker and leading public citizen in Pakistan, Pervez Hoodboy is recounting how Pakistanis, "across the board," came to hate intrusive America long before today's drone missiles. 1979 was a turning point when the Soviets invaded Afghanistan and then American arms and Saudi money constructed a counterforce in Pakistan:

You had the CIA bringing in the strongest and most ideologically charged of fighters from across the globe. It was billions and billions of dollars that got pumped into the creation of the mujahedeen, celebrated by Ronald Reagan and Charlie Wilson. You had the CIA distributing millions of Korans in the madrasas of Pakistan and Afghanistan. It was this monster that grew so big that it was out of control. It ate up its master, the United States and now Pakistan... Osama bin Laden and Al-Zawahiri and all these people who are being sought after so eagerly by the United States -- these were creations of the CIA.

And now the whirlwind:

PH: I'm tremendously worried about how Pakistani culture is being morphed into something that looks suspiciously like Saudi culture. We used to be taught about the world; we used to be taught about history, geography. Now ... everything is regarded through the prism of religion--and a particular variant of the religion. And that is the Saudi, Wahhabi way of looking at things. It's infiltrated our language. We used to say while parting, Khuda Hafiz, that is, God be with you. Now we say Allah Hafiz. Now there is a subtle difference over here. The Persian God, Khoda, has been replaced by the Arabic God, Allah... There are now burkas everywhere. So, when I teach my class in the University, physics classes, I cannot see half the faces of my women students.

CL: You have seen this face of Islamism that most Americans haven't. What makes it so powerful, so threatening?

PH: I'm threatened because Islamism threatens to drag us back to the 7th century... After the 2005 earthquake, which affected many areas of Pakistan, there were the mullahs who came out and said: this happened because you were watching television. And so there were thousands of televisions that were broken. After I returned from those areas and went back to my class -- I was teaching Atomic Physics and Statistical Mechanics -- I said to my students: "You know I have been over there, seen this terrible devastation and we have two duties. One, as Pakistani citizens, is to help our brethren. The other is, as students of science, we have got to tell these people that is was not the wrath of god. It wasn't that people were sinful that the earthquake happened. It happened because tectonic plates were moving on a fluid surface of the earth and this is how mountains grow... And there was outrage in the class, against me. They said: but Professor, don't you know that it is written in the Koran that this is how God punishes doers of bad. At the next class, I got exactly the same response. A few students later on came to me and said to me: Professor, we are really sorry; we thought you were right, but we couldn't speak up.
Pervez Hoodbhoy with Chris Lydon in Cambridge, Massachusetts, October 2010

Reading Obama's Mind: Pragmatism and Its Perils (AUDIO)

2010-11-05T13:23:25-04:00

If there is a problem with Barack Obama's thinking, his "intellectual biographer" James Kloppenberg is saying on the morning after Obama's mid-term "humbling," it's not what he thinks, deep in the Democratic mainstream. Neither is Obama over-thinking his confoundingly broad assignment. Rather it may be the way he thinks, never so meticulously delineated as in Prof. Kloppenberg's Reading Obama: Dreams, Hope and the American Political Tradition.

The teachers that critically shaped Barack Obama's habits of mind -- especially in the cauldron of social theory 20 years ago when Obama was editing the Harvard Law Review -- come typically out of philosophical Pragmatism, the tradition of the American master mind, Williams James (1842 - 1910). Of James it's been said that his first impulse on spotting an unlabeled fluid in a chem-lab beaker was to taste it -- and see what happened! Pragmatism at this level is not deal-making opportunism. It is James' spirit of experimentalism and his insistence on judging ideas, good and bad, by their results -- by fruits, not roots. It is the spirit that William James' friend in the Metaphysical Club, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. brought to the immortal line: "The life of the law has not been logic. It has been experience."

Listen to my conversation with James Kloppenberg:

The leading figures in James Kloppenberg's catalog of Obama's mentors all share in that heritage of Pragmatism: notably his devoted law professor Laurence Tribe who preaches the Constitution not as fixed revelation but as an organic document -- "a conversation," as Barack Obama used to say in law school. The real source of that view, Kloppenberg observes, was James Madison who came out of the Constitutional Convention saying, in effect: nobody got the Constitution he wanted; what happened was that we all learned to think differently as a result of the process of having to confront each others' ideas. "I think," Kloppenberg says, "that is how Barack Obama sees the democratic process." John Rawls was another huge influence in the near background of Obama's Harvard education -- as Rawls' masterpiece, A Theory of Justice, evolved into an understanding that a pluralist democracy is built not on unchanging principles but on "an overlapping consensus" around conflicting doctrines. In a different dimension but not far removed, Obama's Chicago pastor, now eclipsed, Rev. Jeremiah Wright showed Obama a non-dogmatic Christianity: a transcendent God and a zeal for this-worldly activism, but not a direct answer to every political question.

Dominant threads in the skein of Obama's thinking, in the Kloppenberg reading, are experimentalism, the rejection of dogma and ideology, Christian humility ahead of Christian militancy, skepticism and the embrace of philosophical uncertainty. It seems fair to ask if Jim Kloppenberg is describing the ideal attributes of a judicial mind but not of a political captain in howling storm. Has Barack Obama become Robert Frost's caricature liberal, "too broadminded to take his own side in a quarrel"? Jim Kloppenberg would turn it into questions about us citizens: can American politics deal with more than a short litany of selected slogans out of our past? Are we capable of embracing a modern man with a modern mind?

Humility is not a virtue we associate that much with the Christians who call themselves Christian most loudly in 21st century America. So I think we have difficulty understanding him because he doesn't have the same confidence that he's got the answer that many Americans expect their politicians to voice, perhaps even to believe. And it seems to me a mark of his maturity -- his self-consciousness, his sophistication as a thinker -- to know that these are issues about which reasonable people may disagree. Now, that may not serve him very well in the era of Fox News, when what the people who attract attention like to do is simply shout louder than the other person and declaim, with ever more self-rightousness, that they are the only ones who have the answers...

When people treat Obama's discourses on the importance of equality as somehow un-American or socialist, they're betraying what I see as a really frightening ignorance of what was striking to contemporaries in the late 18th century about American politics. When European observers came to the United States, what struck them more than anything else was that outside the slave South, there was very little difference between the most prosperous and the least prosperous Americans. Compared to European nations, this was the nation of economic equality. When Thomas Jefferson goes back to Virginia after writing the Declaration of Independence, the first thing he does is to file legislation in the Virginia House of Burgesses ending primogeniture and entail, which were the tools by which European aristocrats kept intact their fortunes, so that they passed down to the first born son. Jefferson, Adams and Madison understood that, unless there were rough economic equality in the United States, a democratic form of government would not survive...
Harvard History Chairman James Kloppenberg with Chris Lydon, November 3, 2010

Noam Chomsky: the American Socrates on an Upbeat (AUDIO)

2010-10-29T10:20:55-04:00

Noam Chomsky, after all these years, retains the power to shock -- in the bright title of his new collection, Hopes and Prospects, and with what sounds like good news in this conversation.

It's Professor Chomsky's cheerful conviction, drawing on his own trials in the Vietnam War resistance, that anti-war understanding and feeling run much deeper and stronger today in a freer, more humane America. It's because of that popular war opposition today -- inarticulate and ill-led, perhaps, but nonetheless verifiable -- that the US assaults on Iraq and Afghanistan have not incuded the saturation bombing and chemical warfare that were standard fare in Vietnam and Cambodia.

Listen to my conversation with Noam Chomsky in his MIT office:

Chantal Berman photo

He is sure that the anti-incumbent rage reported in the Tea Party overlaps substantially with his own chronic dismay at elite manipulations and moral corruption in our politics. The larger part of the Tea Party, he says, is built on real grievances in longer hours, shorter pay, ever-rising job insecurity.

In short, there's a vast pool of discontent out there to be organized by the Left, he says, if the United States had a functioning Left even as it did in the 1930s. As we say, "If we had ham, we could have ham and eggs -- if we had eggs."

Noam Chomsky does not pine idly, as I do, for the Anti-Imperialist League of a century ago -- when Mark Twain, the biggest rock star in the land, declared: "I am an anti-imperialist. I am opposed to having the eagle puts its talons on any other land;" and the impeccable William James, father of philosophical Pragmatism, fulminated Jeremiah-Wright-style: "God damn the U.S. for its vile conduct" in the Philippines, as James put it in 1903. Nor is Chomsky compelled, as I often am, to reach back to the Transcendentalist purity of the great Thoreau, who withheld his taxes and went to jail during the war with Mexico and roared in protest, in the Tea Party spirit, "Why the United States Government never performed an act of justice in its life!"

No, Professor Chomsky is inclined to believe there is more and stronger anti-imperialist sentiment today than in Concord, Massachusetts in 1846, when Thoreau spent his night in jail, or even in 1967, when thousands of young men decided to leave their country rather than be drafted, and Chomsky himself risked a long prison sentence for counselling them.

We live in the gravest of emergencies -- nuclear and environmental. Our country is led by a president that Noam Chomsky never much celebrated. And still he observes that "general consciousness has changed" in his time, fundamentally for the better.

General consciousness has changed on all sorts of issues. There are lots of things that were considered perfectly legitimate in the early 1960s that are almost out of the question now.

Women's rights, environmental concerns, gay rights, civil rights for blacks... a lot of things have changed in the country. It's gotten a lot more civilized. And one part of that is anti-imperialism. Take a look at polls now. The majority for some time has been in favor of withdrawing from Afghanistan. Now that didn't happen in the case of Vietnam till it was way beyond the level of any fighting now. So it's important, it's real. The Anti-Imperialist League was an important pocket of American intellectual history. It did not succeed in impeding the war effort [in the Philippines]... In the case of the Iraq War, it's probably the first time in the history of imperialism, the only time I can think of, when there was massive popular opposition to the war. My students here, for example, insisted on calling off classes and joining a big demonstration in Boston, and it happened all over. This was before the war started, before the war officially began. There was massive protest, and that's one of the reasons why, awful as it was, it was somewhat constrained, certainly as compared with Indo-China. Well, these are signs of anti-imperialism. You're perfectly right that they're not organized, but we shouldn't romanticize Thoreau and Mark Twain. They were important. It's good that they did what they did, but it was nothing like the scale that we take for granted now.

Professor Noam Chomsky with Chris Lydon in his MIT office, October 19, 2010

Noam Chomsky is the closest thing we have to Socrates in the American public square: a scathing questioner of virtually every common premise about who we Americans are and what we're up to in the world. We've never heard him as mellow as this -- ever wary of a hemlock ending, but good-humored about that, too.

V. S. Naipaul's "Gloomy Clarity" About Africa and Himself (AUDIO)

2010-10-26T13:57:10-04:00

V. S. Naipaul, in the winter of his long writing life, doesn't disguise his melancholy or his frailty. Still, his inquisitorial eye and his magic with a prose sentence have not abandoned him, nor the organ tones of his mesmerizing voice. In conversation he relishes my suggestion of magic -- his new book on Africa is full of it. But when I cite some favorite examples of his inspired sentence-making, he recalls only hard labor in the cause of "gloomy clarity," his signature effect. "I wrote that very carefully," he intones. Of his non-fiction process -- combining reading, field observation and interviewing -- he says: "I see what is to be done, and I do it." At a public reading the night before we spoke, the question came: what was the happiest moment of your writing career? "I suppose it would have occurred when one was very young. Because, you know, there are no happy moments now. When you are young the future is a great big ball, and anything is possible. So if you do a good review for The New Statesman and you feel good, it can make you quite happy, although it is a petty business... I know the future is small and eternally shrinking around me."

Listen to my conversation with V.S. Naipaul:

Naipaul's new book is called The Masque of Africa: it's an inquiry not into politics or progress but into religion broadly: the magical systems of belief in Old Africa. "The new religions, Islam and Christianity, are just on the top," says a classic Naipaul informant, a lawyer and former university dean in Gabon; his punchline is a perfect short Naipaulian thematic sentence: "Inside us is the forest." Africa might well be better off today, Naipaul supposes, had its "forest beliefs" been spared foreign intrusions. Africa is a "wounded civilization," he reflects, applying the phrase he used in one of several books on his ancestral India. But there is no going back, and perhaps no recovery from the loss of self and sovereignty. Naipaul was not at all impressed with my own "fantasy" that in both India and Africa it may be time, for some anyway, to rediscover the village possibilities, the chance that "Things Come Together." Naipaul himself, of course, fled the colony (Trinidad) for the capital (London) long ago. His verdict is final: "the village is an awful place."

On his best behavior, V. S. Naipaul knows how to be entertainingly grumpy. He does not forgive the English literary establishment for cold-shouldering him these many years, for snubbing even his Nobel Prize in 2001. He remembers one official personage sniffing: "It isn't as though it's the Booker Prize." He is proud to have marked Tony Blair as a "pirate," long before the Iraq War. "A calamity," he judged. Wouldn't he care, I asked, to offend somebody before we were done? "No, no, no, no," insisted. "That is not part of my job."

Jill Lepore: Tea Party Time... and the Death of Compassion (AUDIO)

2010-10-15T11:01:25-04:00

There's more religion than politics in the 2010 Tea Party, Jill Lepore is saying. There's less of 1776 about it than of 1976 -- that dyspeptic post-Vietnam, post-Watergate bicentennial moment remembered for Gerald Ford and school busing fights in Boston elsewhere. 1976 marks a time when we discovered that the story of the American revolution is that "there is no story," as the Common Ground journalist Anthony Lukas put it. "What there is is a political free-for-all about the story."

"That's where we are today," Jill Lepore observes. "The whole question: 'what would the founding fathers do?' comes out of evangelical Chistianity, as in 'what would Jesus do?' ... Glenn Beck talks about having had a conversion experience... The Tea Party movement presents the Constitution as a revealed religion."

Listen to my conversation with Jill Lepore in her Harvard office:

Jill Lepore is one of those historians who draws gladly on "the archives of the feet," in Simon Schama's phrase. For her sprightly New Yorker Magazine pieces and now for The Whites of Their Eyes, her hard-cover take on the Tea Party movement, she has been out among the tri-corner hat crowd at the Green Dragon Tavern facing Faneuil Hall. She was with Sarah Palin on Boston Common. She extends civic respect to the pitchfork patriots, but her judgment is unsparing: the tea partiers are misled by heritage tourism and pop biographies of the 18th Century revolutionists into supposing "I'm just like them," or that "I'm in touch with them 'cause I'm wearing one of their hats." Their founding favorites draw on celebrity culture, not history: there's too little in their heads about the crucial anti-religious Thomas Paine of "The Age of Reason," and too much Paul Revere (not much known for the Midnight Ride before Longfellow wrote the poem in 1861, a Union rallying myth during the Civil War). So what are they, and this moment, really about?

JL: These are people who want to have a dream. And what they have is a nightmare. Instead of looking at the now -- which you were suggesting is an intolerable present; think about the moral complicity of our foreign interventions, the economic woes, these present day problems riven with strife; everything's kind of a mess, it's a very yucky present in many ways... What people want is a dream that is forward-looking, and what the Tea Party is is a dream about the past. I don't think a historian can offer a different dream about the past. That's not our job. It is the job of politicians to offer a dream about the future. Wasn't that what Obama's Dreams of My Father meant -- it's about the dreaminess of America. You've got to keep talking the dream.

CL: In the rise and fall, or rise-again kinds of trajectories that are always pretty clear a thousand years later, two thousand years later, whose job is it to tell anxious people what our direction might actually be?

JL: Well it's clear that right now who's doing it is Glenn Beck. And that is what's so appealing for people who want that. It's clear that Obama is not doing it. And people expected that he in fact would... This animating, forward-looking, reform-minded compassion that he was attempting to offer is not something that is coming out daily from the White House. I talked yesterday to a bunch of retired people, and one woman asked: 'are we looking at the death of compassion?' And I thought that's a great question. That's as good an interpretation of the current political moment as I can think of. It's a very thoughtful remark.
Jill Lepore with Chris Lydon in her Harvard office, October 7, 2010

Daniel Kehlmann's Fame: The Self in the Cyber Century (AUDIO)

2010-09-23T09:45:29-04:00

Daniel Kehlmann is a very funny, very philosophical young fictionist from Germany who will make you want more like him -- and more playfully engaging books like his Fame, a novel in nine linked short stories, or "episodes." A number of reviewers who seem not to have read the book suggest that Fame is all about celebrity, which it's not at all. It's an imaginative probe into the YouTube universe and the always-online feel of our emergent cyber-humanity -- into cell-phone effects on our self-hood, or Facebook effects on our fantasies. It is also a storyteller's bright-eyed rumination on what the digital range and speed of our lives have made possible, or impossible, in stories themselves. The new taken-for-granted info tech has realized the yearning in endless fairy tales, for example, for telepathy: if only I could whisper a word to the lost beloved... It has enabled double-lives and resurrections that used to happen only in dreams. At the same time, the ways we connect now have collapsed, among other things, the "big goodbye" scene in prose or on the movie screen. How could we summon a surge of tears nowadays hearing Ilsa tells Rick, "We'll always have Paris...," when we know that two minutes later, in today's world, would come the first text message?

Listen to our ranging conversation the other night in the Harvard Bookstore:

Flickering in the Kehlmann background are deeper, more delightful riddles. One of the central stories in Fame introduces Rosalie, an older woman with terminal cancer, making her way to an assisted-suicide clinic in Zurich. En route she rebukes the author of her story and pleads with him to save her: "Is there no chance, she asks me. It's all in your hands. Let me live." To which the author replies: "This isn't a life-affirming story. If anything, it's a theological one."

Kehlmann's theology, in our conversation, is richer than what we've often heard about authors playing God with their characters:

Any story puts me, as the writer of the story, into the godlike position of creating people to make their life difficult, to make them suffer because I have a plan for them. The plan is just to get the story as good as possible. There is a kind of teleology in getting the story right, because all the things happening to a character, causing pain to the character, ruining the life of this character, they are there for the greater good of getting a good story. And so this is exactly the same position in classical theology where the theologian tries to justify god: we are told that yes, you are suffering, but you are suffering because there is a plan. You might not understand this plan, maybe you never will, but you should trust that there is such a plan and that's why you should accept your suffering.

When I made Rosalie protest against this, and tell the writer "don't do this to me. I don't care about your plan," it wasn't just a metafictional game. It was a very real point that in the face of basic human suffering the whole idea of a bigger plan justifying all that seems ridiculous. To me this was a very serious theologically, philosophically charged story which also had a very personal twist because Rosalie is also telling the writer "one day all this will happen to you, you will be in pain, you will be dying, you will hope that somebody, against the plan, will just save you and it will not happen." It's true, and she was not just talking to some abstract writer, at this moment she was talking about me and the fact that it will happen to me too.

... Even when I started the story, I had always intended the ending that the writer interferes and ruins the story and saves the character. Then the writer also says "I hope someday somebody will do the same for me." I think, well, as you say in English, "fat chance!"
Daniel Kehlmann with Chris Lydon at the Harvard Bookstore, Cambridge, September 20, 2010

Andrew Bacevich: how war without end became the rule (VIDEO)

2010-09-20T10:46:04-04:00

Andrew Bacevich is the soldier turned writer who's still unlearning and puncturing the Washington Rules of national security. The rules have turned into doctrines, he's telling us, of global war forever. He is talking about the scales that have fallen from the eyes of a slow learner, as he calls himself -- a dutiful, conformist Army officer who woke up at the end of the Cold War twenty years ago to the thought that the orthodoxy he'd accepted was a sham.

Andrew Bacevich's military career ran from West Point to Vietnam to the first Gulf War in 1991. The short form of the story he's been writing for a decade now is: how unexamined failure in Vietnam became by today a sort of repetition compulsion in Iraq and Afghanistan. Washington Rules is Andrew Bacevich's fourth book in a project to unmask American empire, militarism, over-reach and what sustains them.

Check out a video excerpt of my conversation with Andrew Bacevich. | Click here to listen to the whole thing.

Christopher Lydon

Howard French on Africa in a Chinese Century (AUDIO)

Lydia Davis: Miniatures from a Mind on Fire (AUDIO)

Mohammed Hanif's AfPak: A Case of Exploding Absurdities (AUDIO)

Mohammed Hanif in Karachi, in conversation with Chris Lydon in Providence, January 11, 2010

The Iraq and Af-Pak Wars, at the Receiving End with War Correspondent Nir Rosen (AUDIO)

Nir Rosen of Aftermath in conversation with Chris Lydon, January 5, 2011

David Bromwich on the "Disappointment in Obama" (AUDIO)

Economist Mark Blyth: 2011 Will Be Worse... and Life Will Go On (AUDIO)

Mark Blyth: On Ireland, the Circle Will Not Be Squared (AUDIO)

Mark Blyth with Chris Lydon at the Watson Institute, Brown University, November 30, 2010

Dennis Lehane: Between Dorchester Ave and Sunset Boulevard (VIDEO)

Dennis Lehane with Chris Lydon at Mother Anna's restaurant in Boston's North End.

Pakistan 3.0: The "CIA Jihad" and the Whirlwind Today (AUDIO)

Salman Rushdie, in Shame, his "modern fairytale" of Pakistan. (1983)

Pervez Hoodbhoy with Chris Lydon in Cambridge, Massachusetts, October 2010

Reading Obama's Mind: Pragmatism and Its Perils (AUDIO)

Harvard History Chairman James Kloppenberg with Chris Lydon, November 3, 2010

Noam Chomsky: the American Socrates on an Upbeat (AUDIO)

Professor Noam Chomsky with Chris Lydon in his MIT office, October 19, 2010

V. S. Naipaul's "Gloomy Clarity" About Africa and Himself (AUDIO)

Jill Lepore: Tea Party Time... and the Death of Compassion (AUDIO)

Jill Lepore with Chris Lydon in her Harvard office, October 7, 2010

Daniel Kehlmann's Fame: The Self in the Cyber Century (AUDIO)

Daniel Kehlmann with Chris Lydon at the Harvard Bookstore, Cambridge, September 20, 2010

Andrew Bacevich: how war without end became the rule (VIDEO)