February 12:
the darkness at the center of town
This week’s show — about the non-democratic parts of American government — was podcast-only, since we were pre-empted by the Democratic debate. Our guests were Michael J. Glennon and Leslie Gelb.
Have you noticed our capital city’s new look?
No longer the West Wing parade-ground of the people’s choice, in House of Cards, Homeland, and The Unknown Known, we see time-lapse photography of the great features of the Washington mall as the sun goes down, complete with scratchy, austere music — less marbled (like Rome!) than bleached (like a skeleton).
And in the photography of artist-activists Laura Poitras and Trevor Paglen, we see the out-of-town office buildings in Langley (CIA) and Fort Meade (NSA, above) as cold opaque boxes where the people who authorized the torture and tapped our cell phones still go to work.
Our guest, Michael Glennon of Tufts, might say that the cataclysmic theater of Campaign 2016 has these images on its underside. The increasingly free hand of the national-security state corresponds with the creeping alienation of the populace grown up over the Bush years and confirmed by the strange continuities of the Obama administration.
1 in 5 Americans trust their government “all or most of the time.” Hence Bernie; hence Trump? Hence the complaint that Henry Kissinger is still considered an indispensable expert?
Michael Glennon’s new book is another caution that voting isn’t enough for a healthy democracy. So long as the average American is apathetic and terrified, they’ll be governed from the back-room, the office hallway, and the drone control room. Even “change candidates” like Barack Obama will say, as their last word, “the CIA gets what it wants.”
In the final segment of the show we hear from Leslie Gelb, journalist, analyst, and bureaucrat, who at 78 speaks with clarity — and some regret — about his participation in Vietnam, Iraq, and the imprisoning ideologies of “toughness,” “anti-Communism,” and “anti-terrorism” that hover over Washington like a storm system.
When I was in government in the Vietnam war years, I was a principal draftsman of Robert McNamara’s memo, the defense secretary’s memo to the president. I had read one book about Vietnam: Bernard Fall’s The Two Vietnams. That’s about all anybody read. That’s what we knew about the place, that we were about to invest 550,000 men in arms, and lose 50,000 men… It was a square on the strategic chessboard to the United States, to the foreign-policy establishment. It wasn’t a country with a history and a culture.
coming soon:
money, cash, votes?
We may have to dive into the legacy and vacancy left by Antonin Scalia next week on the show.
But soon, Chris will speak to investigative journalist Jane Mayer’s journey into the clutches of what she calls the Koch-topus.
The billionaire brothers Koch — Charles and David, extraction magnates and leading donors — may not be determining the Republican primary right now. (The man said to be their candidate, Scott Walker, dropped out in the summer.)
But in her new book, Dark Money, Mayer makes the case that the Kochs have already won, by their creation of avertically-integrated influence machine, stretching from universities and state environmental boards to climate-skeptic meetings and think tanks in the nation’s capital. Always and everywhere, the argument for deregulation of industry, decarceration and low taxes in the name of “economic freedom.”
Mayer was a would-be Koch victim — it would appear that they tried to destroy her credibility with spurious allegations of plagiarism shortly after she began covering their covert funding of the Tea Party.
We want to find out just whether and how people like the Kochs shape our world with campaign spending and other machinations, when politics watchers like Dylan Matthews complain that election spending actually doesn’t explain that much.
Right now, the big money might be working for the vulgar Trump, of all people: if it weren’t for their million-dollar donations, maybe Marco Rubio or Jeb Bush would have dropped out by now.
to watch: Nino, no more
The late justice Antonin Scalia won lots of tributes — to his influence and intellect — and anti-tributes — from people whose hopes he crushed from the bench — yesterday.
I will always remember Scalia for being one of the few people still laughing 13 minutes in to Stephen Colbert’s scathing 2006 performance at a late-Bush White House Correspondents Dinner.
It was a dark moment, but there was, at least, a sense of consistency in Scalia, who — enamored of Italy, where his parents met, where he was conceived — brought with him a European preference for a more raucous, less decorous, and even a crueler democracy.
Scalia passed away at a Texas hunting lodge; his friend and colleague Clarence Thomas observed that Nino “love[d] killing unarmed animals.” So he died doing what he loved.
Now the grisly fight for his seat begins.
to read: V-day edition
It’s Valentine’s Day and I haven’t even mentioned it. (Best to you and your loved ones!)
Here’s a cartoonist’s illustration of her mom’s teenage guide to kissing.
Read George Saunders’s “Mother’s Day,” a succinct little story about mis-parenting and broken romantic love. He’s turning into Flannery O’Connor — a death-artist, watching his creatures like an Old Testament God — before our very eyes!
The love affair between African-American voters and the Clintons will be put to the test on February 27 in South Carolina: scholar/lawyer Michelle Alexander urges a break-up, with a bracing kicker:
After decades of getting played, the sleeping giant just might wake up, stretch its limbs, and tell both parties: Game over. Move aside. It’s time to reshuffle this deck.
Poet Charles Simic is a lover, not a fighter. But he got weird, Bosnian, metaphysical feelings up in New Hampshire this month.
(And parents, remind yourselves, your teenage kids are, unprecedentedly, all right!)
Finally: We want to do a radio show considering Elena Ferrante’s four blockbuster Neapolitan novels. Let me know if you’ve read them, and what you’d like to hear. I’ll call and interview you about your thoughts (if you’re willin’)!
Thanks for reading, and see you next week,
Max.
