Author: Christopher Lydon Offered: Weekly

Subscribe to this: (Click the above links to open this Podcast in the listed podcast sites.)

Click Stars to Rate: Review this title

Open Source Podcast by Christopher Lydon

About Podcasting:
For those of you new to podcasting, Click Here to read our "Introduction to Podcasting" Article.

Be the First to Review Open Source Podcast

Podcast Feed URL:

(Copy the above URL into your Podcast Application. Click Here to learn more.)

Amitav Ghosh and his Sea of Poppies

Author: Christopher Lydon
Fri, Nov 21, 2008

Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Amitav Ghosh. (67 minutes, 31 mb mp3) Amitav Ghosh: on addiction and amnesia The Indian novelist Amitav Ghosh brings the British Empire to life again — the other side of the story, so to speak, from the other side of the world. If we’d had his wondrous new novel, [...]

Download File - 0.0 MB
Listen To This Podcast (Streaming Audio)

Click to listen to Chris's conversation with Doug Fitch, Christin-Marie Hill and Erik Nielsen here (27 minutes, 12 MB MP3)

Erik Nielsen, conductor; Christin-Marie Hill, mezzo; and Doug Fitch, stage director at the Tanglewood Music Center.

Bertholt Brecht and Kurt Weill

Opera is a funny world. One of the reasons "Mahagonny" is such a great thing to do is that it's an opera at war with opera. It comes out of this Cabaret - dark, dark, dark side of burlesque... and what is opera? Opera is the polo of the culture world. It's elite, it's extremely expensive, you never make money on it, it's really fun to do. And people get hurt!

Stage Director Doug Fitch in conversation with Chris Lydon, at the Tanglewood Music Center, August 1, 2008

For every age and part of the world, there is a place about which fantasies are written. In Mozart's time it was Turkey. For Shakespeare, it was Italy. For us in Germany, it was always America. You have no idea how little we knew about America. We had read Jack London and we knew absolutely all about your Chicago gangsters, and that was the end. So of course when we did a fantasy, it was about America.

Kurt Weill, in The New Yorker: June 10, 1944

[In "Mahagonny" and our own world] ...the word that comes to my mind is insatiability. It's a constant need... For me, this opera is about the insatiable feeding of desire. It is never going to go away. And the way it's set up... there's no way you ever can find satisfaction or be pleased... You know, it's called "The Rise and Fall of Mahagonny." It doesn't sound like it's going to end well from the very get-go. What seems so powerful about this piece is that nobody inside the opera knows what's going on with them; they're all trying to do their best. Jack, who eats himself to death, is doing this not even because he wants to eat. He's feeling: "Have I done well enough yet?" and his friend says, "Don't do things by half. Go all the way. Just do it," like the Nike commercial, a major motto of our time. "Just do it." Weill and Brecht imagined this.

Stage Director Doug Fitch in conversation with Chris Lydon, at the Tanglewood Music Center, August 1, 2008

Click to listen to Chris's conversation with Ted Widmer (38 minutes, 17 mb p3)

Ted Widmer

The world has become a lot more like us. We are more like the world and the world is more like us. Democracy is successful on every continent, immigration exists everywhere, most countries have constitutions and very few monarchies are left on earth. One hundred years ago, it was still a relatively rare thing to have a self-sustaining democracy with its own constitution. So our model has won. We won in a million ways in the 20th century and other countries are like us. I'm hopeful that if [Obama] is elected, it will lead to the latest American renaissance and that it will inspire people again in our capacity to lead. I think that was badly damaged, but I now object to a lot of books by liberals, even though I am a democrat. There's this huge wave of pessimism crashing over the marketplace and you can't walk into a bookstore without seeing 20 books about how we blew it...

Ted Widmer in conversation with Chris Lydon at Brown University, July, 2008.

We used to believe... that we were of a different clay from other nations, that there was something deep in the American heart that answered to our happy birth, free from that hereditary burden which the nations of Europe bear, and which obliges them to grow by preying on their neighbors. Idle dream! pure Fourth of July fancy, scattered in five minutes by the first temptation. In every national soul there lie potentialities of the most barefaced piracy, and our own American soul is no exception to the rule. Angelic impulses and predatory lusts divide our heart exactly as they divide the hearts of other countries. It is good to rid ourselves of cant and humbug, and to know the truth about ourselves. Political virtue does not follow geographical divisions. It follows the eternal division inside of each country between the tory and the liberal tendencies, the jingoism and animal instinct that would run things by main force and brute possession, and the critical conscience that believes in educational methods and in rational rules of right.

William James, "Address on the Philippine Question" in William James: Writings 1902 - 1910, Library of America.

Mark Twain was very angry about the Philippines. America's most beloved writer in many ways, and yet he had a most acute political conscience… He might have had to explain to a judge in 2008 why he was writing the anti-governmental things that he was writing around the time of the Philippines insurrection, which was the ugly aftermath to the Spanish American War. Those guys are brilliant and, I think, with William James you get something closer to what the Puritans would have said, which I find a more honest message, and it's what Lincoln was saying too, which is that if you believe that God is favoring you more highly, then you also have further to fall and you have a higher accountability. It seems to me that we're lacking the accountability. We're trying to take the good part of this and we're rejecting the other part that comes with it. Lincoln, many of the Puritans and William James all felt that if we're failing to live up to our incredible, special position in the world - we're so lucky, we live far from all these other wars, we have so many natural resources, we have this great system of government - if we're screwing it up, God's going to be very angry at us. And that I just find a more honest way of looking at it. There's a dark side of exceptionalism as well as a light side.

Ted Widmer in conversation with Chris Lydon at Brown University, July, 2008.

Click to listen to the conversation with John Maeda and Chris Lydon (49 minutes, 22 mb mp3)

Click to listen to Chris's conversation with George Lakoff (50 minutes, 23 mb mp3)

George Lakoff: this is your mind on politics

You have to understand what Obama is up against. First, he's up against a mode of thought that is very common, what's called "optimism bias" in behavioral economics. That is, when you make a plan, you are more likely to think that it will work than that it won't... There's a set of biases that give hawks a better chance in debate, with lines like, "the surge is going to work." Or "it will be a cakewalk," you know, "they'll be throwing roses in front of us," and so on... You also have a cultural narrative -- basically on the hero-villain structure. The villain in this is Ahmadinejad who is inherently evil... It's a dangerous world out there, so the conservatives will say. So the question is, 'What do you do?' and the answer, in the hero/villain plot structure, is the hero has to fight the villain... The assumption is that we're moral and anything we do to fight this villain is going to be moral, and that could be utterly ridiculous. We could create utter catastrophe over there, but the story is what matters in the public mind... and if we stick to it, and we're virtuous, and we're strong, we'll win. That narrative shows up all the time on TV shows, in movies and in political campaigns, and it showed up in the first Gulf War and the Iraq War, and it is being played again. So you've got to undercut it. That is a very tricky thing to do. If you try to undercut it simply with military facts, you've got a problem. That is, you say, 'We can't fight wars on three fronts, we can't even do it on two fronts. We're losing in Afghanistan.' That doesn't make us look very heroic. That doesn't fit with the U.S. as the strong super power, so you've got to fight that idea. What you need is a different idea, and what Obama has done has been very interesting so far... In discussing foreign policy -- for example, in the American Prospect article called the "The Obama Doctrine" -- Obama's idea is not just based on the national interest and being the strongest super power, etc., but also on the idea that we want a just world, that the most difficult problems in the world are not at the level of the state, but at the level of the person: that poverty, hunger, disease, women's rights and so on, are major issues in the world, as well as global warming, and that we have to take a different view of the world, we have to be the world's greatest moral force. I think that's the story that you're going to get from Obama: We have to be the world's greatest moral force again, and we've lost it. We've lost it because we've used our military badly and we've had bad judgment. That's the story and the question is, 'Will it go?' 'Will it fly?'

George Lakoff of Berkeley and The Political Mind in conversation with Chris Lydon, July 10, 2008.

Roger Williams