America

Description: We are raising a generation of historically illiterate Americans, McCullough says.

Transcript: Well sad to say we are raising and have been raising for about 25 years one generation after another of young Americans who are by and large historically illiterate. Now it isn’t their faults we can’t blame young people in high school or college for not knowing what they haven't been taught. It’s the fault of their parents follow lot of us, teachers-parents and the culture. History is of the utmost importance, I think its probably more important than any other one single subject because its about the human experience, its about life and consequences of ones actions and its about the role of personality of character in events passed, and we can learn from it, we can learn infinite number of lessons from history and we can also take strength from it, we could be guided by in our own performance, in our own contributions, by the examples of those who went before us and the founders alas have been rather forgotten in part I think because they appear in no photographs. We have no photographs of them, we have no film clips of them, we have no recordings of their voices, we have no television out takes. All we had is what they wrote and some paintings and a last two the close they were make them seem like characters in the costume pageant which they want, and they were not they weren’t walking around seeing themselves as living in the past, that Jefferson Adams they didn’t say isn’t this fascinating looming the past, we picture asking her we had close they are living in the present and they had no more idea of how was going to turn out than we do, and they were extraordinary people, brilliant people and how it happened nobody could explain it completely, that a small population, we are only 2 million 500 thousand people. Philadelphia in 1776 the largest city in the country had only 30,000 people, now that would be a little town of no consequence to us, but out of that small population came these talented, brilliant, committed people who were willing as they said to put their lives, their fortunes, their sacred honor on the line, if you signed the declaration of independence of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin you are putting your head in the nudes, because you are saying I am a traitor and if they have been caught, they would have been hanged, and they were doing it for the future of the country. They were not doing it for themselves to get richer and to be powerful. They were doing it because they believed to the marrow of their bones in what they call the glorious cause of the America and we cannot know enough about them, we cannot know enough about what happened and what cost and what suffering, we cannot know about the injustices that had to be cured in this scholar of life, that had to be eliminated if possible. The contradictions, the hypocrisies, all men are created equal written by a man who owned slaves, who held men, women and children in bondage. So it wasn’t just they where imperfect, but what they had created was imperfect and they knew it, what they were doing for us was to create a plan, an adjective a start and steer by that we must strive for each generation successively to live up to the idea and that’s our strength, it would all been handled to us in perfect order, perfect running machine, it doesn’t need any attention, it’s all oil run in perpetuity, sit back and enjoyed everybody we wouldn’t be there in the country we are where the country we are because each of us has to take the torch and try and carry us a little bit closer to the ideal.

Recorded on: 3/3/08

Description: A million people voted for Andrew Jackson in 1828.

Transcript: Well I think individually, if we believe in the notion of democracy, as I do hope and trust citizens of this country do, I think what we must do is be well informed and engaged in the deliberative process that gives us the policies, and the practices, and the habits that we will all adopt going forward. And they’ll either be adopted with our participation, or without. And I have to believe that the policy . . . At the end of the day that we’re going to do better the more people are well informed, and the more engaged we all are. So to live in a country that is the historic home of mass participatory democracy – that is the United States – we invented the institutions, and the practices, and the values of democracy practice on the scale of millions of voters. More than a million people voted for Andrew Jackson in 1828 at a time when other societies that called themselves democratic – like Britain and France – had fewer than 100,000 voters in countries that were then quite a bit larger than we were. So we invented this thing called modern democracy; and yet in this society, only about half the people who are eligible actually exercise their right to vote. There’s something fundamentally, pathologically wrong about that. So that’s one place to start, is to get more people engaged in the delivery processes from their most local – school board, sewer district, irrigation district – that go right up to the federal level in the making of decisions that will affect us all

Recorded on: 7/4/07

Description: The media squashed voices of opposition, says Williams, and those voices are still attempting to be heard.

Question: How did it come to this?

Transcript:  We’ll never really know what drove them to have that war. All the reasons that were given we know are lies. There were no weapons of mass destruction. There was no terrorist connection between Hussein and terrorism. I think in some ways it was sheer arrogance. It was a sheer belief that if you have power you have to express it where you can express it and I think that that came out pretty clearly. We are the most powerful, we can do whatever we want, this is the next thing we’re going to do, and if Iraq had worked out there would have been a next thing, probably Iran, which they still might try to get away with. So I think there have been everything from psychoanalyzing Bush and his relationship with his father, which, sure, that may have had something to do with it, to Cheney’s--  Cheney obviously just had a sheer thirst, a ravishing-- ravous-- ravenous thirst for the expression of power. He still does. His great illuminating moment a few weeks ago was when someone said, “What about the fact that the American people are so against the war now?”  And he said, “So?”  That’s really the expression of power. It means I have so much power I don’t have to listen to even the American people. So I think that’s where the war started.

Question: Why did the voices of opposition go unheard?

Transcript:  The media takes a lot of the blame. The New York Times takes a lot of the blame as the journal of record as it’s called or Judith Miller takes a lot of the blame, but basically it was the media following. Someone did a commercial recently or a documentary showing how the Republican party would say something about what was the justification for the war and then you’d hear members of the House and Senate using precisely the same words, and between the government controlling the House and the Senate at the time and the media being so malleable and gullible and not doing its proper work there just wasn’t enough force in the opposition.

I’ll read the poem relating to what we were just speaking of, relating to the frustration of knowing that before the war started what was going to happen. It’s called Cassandra, Iraq. Cassandra was the Greek prophet at Troy who foresaw what was going to happen, that Troy was going to fall, and when she spoke people couldn’t understand her. They actually thought that she was speaking like a bird, that they heard bird song, and of course she was right, and then at the end after Troy falls she’s carried away by Agamemnon and ends up dying as he dies. Cassandra, Iraq:  “She’s magnificent, as we imagine women must be who foresee and foretell and are right and disdained. This is the difference between us who are like her in having been right and disdained, and us as we are. Because we, in our foreseeings, our having been right, are repulsive to ourselves, fat and immobile, like toads. Not toads in the garden, who after all are what they are, but toads in the tale of death in the desert of sludge. In this tale of lies, of treachery, of superfluous dead, were there ever so many who were right and disdained? With no notion what to do next? If we were true seers, as prescient as she, as frenzied, we’d know what to do next. We’d twitter, as she did, like birds; we’d warble, we’d trill. But what would it be really, to twitter, to warble, to trill? Is it ee-ee-ee, like having a child? Is it uh-uh-uh, like a wound? Or is it inside, like a blow, silent to everyone but yourself? Yes, inside, I remember, oh-oh-oh: it’s where grief is just about to be spoken, but all at once can’t be: oh. When you no longer can “think” of what things like lies, like superfluous dead, so many, might mean: oh. Cassandra will be abducted at the end of her tale, and die. Even she can’t predict how. Stabbed? Shot? Blown to bits? Her abductor dies, too, though, in a gush of gore, in a net. That we know; she foresaw that-- in a gush of gore, in a net.”  Should I reread that place where I bubbled a little? “Cassandra will be abducted at the end of her tale, and die. Even she can’t predict how. Stabbed? Shot? Blown to bits? Her abductor dies, too, though, in a gush of gore, in a net. That we know; she foresaw that-- in a gush of gore, in a net.” 

Question: Is political writing about Iraq being heard?

Transcript:  There’s a huge amount of political writing in our time and there’s a huge amount being heard. Whether that means anything or not is another question. You don’t know. There’s this fusion in history between moments when people can hear just like Cassandra, when people can hear what’s being said and what’s urgent and when they can’t, and you can’t predict, you can’t know when the times are that people will hear what they’re supposed to be hearing or should be hearing.

Recorded on: 7/3/08

Description: Be concerned about the rights you think have nothing to do with you, Strossen says.

Transcript:

Recorded On: 2/14/08

Description: What we have is not democracy, Zinn says. We just have formal institutions.

Transcript:  We don’t have a lot of democracy in America today.  We have these formal institutions.  We have representative government and we have a Bill of Rights.  But the fact is that the representative government doesn’t work very well.  The electoral system is dominated by wealth.  For instance, in the upcoming presidential election, most people I speak to cannot find a candidate that they like.  They have no choice.  The candidates have been selected for them and they have Republican or Democrat and Third Party candidates don’t have a chance.  The political system, therefore, is very limited.  Even freedom of speech and press, which are supposedly guaranteed in the Bill of Rights, they are very severely constricted by the control of the press and the control of all the arenas of free speech by huge corporations that control the major television channels and control the major newspapers.  Sure, we are more democratic than an absolutist and totalitarian state, but we in the United States are still quite a long way from democracy and certainly a long way from economic democracy.  Because of the control of the economy by corporations and the tax structure, which is set up by an unrepresentative Congress and approved by a president, a tax structure which has so far channeled the wealth of the country towards the richest one percent of the population.

Recorded on: 7/5/08

Description: Correcting the Legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King

 What’s wrong with how Americans write their history?

Michael Eric Dyson:  Well, I think America’s tendency to fethishize, iconicize,(sic) elevate, glorify, glamorize figures is because we all have a need to have an unblemished character that reflects the American soul. I may not be perfect but he sure is. I may not be the ideal but she sure is. That’s why we idolize athletes. We look at them and see the feline mystique. We see the masculine physique, the feminine physique. We see the perfection that is embodied in their ideals athletically and we say we want to be them or we project ourselves on to them or because I can’t do well they can do well. So a Kobe Bryant or a Tiger Woods or a Martina Navratilova or one of the Williams sisters, Serina or Venus or some other athlete, Babe Ruth as an icon, Barry Bonds as an athlete--  People see in them extraordinary achievements and possibilities that loom larger than their own physical limitations and their own psychic ones so to speak. So the same thing is done with these enormously courageous figures who are flawed to be sure but the flaws must be erased, the blemishes must be rendered nonexistent, and we got to remove the pimples from the faces of history, and we don’t want to see that. We want to apply some cream to smooth them out so to speak, and so I think that with Martin Luther King Jr. in particular the need to elevate and glorify and glamorize him has to do with the fact that the real Dr. King would be a judgment upon America because the real Dr. King was dismissed by America. For the first time in a decade in 1967 nearly, he did not make Gallup Poll’s ten most admired Americans list. That’s shame on us, not on him. No university really wanted to hear from him at the time of his death and no American publisher wanted to publish a book by him. These are things we conveniently- we forget so by projecting perfection on to him we remove the necessity of examining us under a sharper glass of scrutiny that would point to our failures and flaws as well.

Recorded on: May 16 2008

Description: Democracy precedes voting, Carter says.

Transcript: Democracy can mean a lot of different things; but at minimum to be a democracy, we have to have a system that involves ultimately the judgment of the people; and to make that judgment worthwhile, it has to be a judgment where people actually consult with one another. I think to have a democracy . . . To call something a democracy where people don’t have a respect across their differences for the co-equal people on the other side of issues, I don’t think that’s democracy, whatever else it may be. And I think that whatever form your voting is – whether you have direct representation; whether you have indirect representation; whether you have proportional representation; whether you elect by districts; whether you elect by “winner take all”; whatever it may be, whatever your voting system is, democracy is mainly what proceeds the voting. Democracy is the liberation among citizens. And it involves citizens’ beliefs that what we have to think matters, and should matter to each other; and our ability and our comfort level with sitting, and talking, and also listening, trying to persuade others, but first allowing them to try to persuade us and really allowing the opportunity to really listen to what they have to say instead of dismissing it out of hand. That, to me, is democracy. It’s difficult. It’s rough and tumble. It doesn’t always get quick and efficient answers; but it is the only thing I think we can really do in which people actually participate in governing themselves.

Recorded on: 7/25/07

Description: America is an exercise in optimism.

Transcript: Churchill once said, “Man may believe or disbelieve, but it’s a wicked thing to take away one’s hope.” You can’t explain the United States except as an exercise in optimism – realistic optimism – because it’s fundamentally a deposit of faith in the ultimate republic and our virtue of the people. It is an investment in the idea that we are on a journey that is in fact a linear one. And to use Churchill again, “The road is not always even, but in general the path is upward.” So I think that’s the . . . that’s the engine. Otherwise you have a kind of “Hobbsian”, closed-minded view in which so many possibilities are automatically foreclosed. And so I suppose I would argue that I think the guiding philosophical idea of America has been one of hope and increased, expanded, liberty. And that has been something that we have successfully exported. Sometimes we’ve done it unsuccessfully; but it’s not a bad bet. And given all the other bets its one I would take.

Recorded on: 7/3/07

Description: Tilghman's perspective on America involves the difference between group rights versus individual rights. She feels as though Canada allows group rights to trump individual rights, the opposite of America.

Transcript: I think the biggest difference that I see between Canada and the United States where I currently live is the fundamental difference of whether the group rights are trumped by the individual, or whether the individual’s rights are trumped by the group. I think in Canada it is the former. And I think that has very much influenced who I am as a person.

Recorded on: 8/7/07

Description: Despite its faults, politics still gives Jonathan Haidt reason to hope.

Question: Is the American political system broken?

Transcript:  Yes.  It is very broken right now.  The main break, I believe, is simply the influence of money.  It just astonishes me that when a representative from the National Science Foundation comes down to visit us, we cannot buy her a dinner.  We cannot buy her a cup of coffee, because that might influence her decision.  That’s great, but if I want to give thousands and thousands of dollars to a congressman, no problem.  I can give as much as I want.  Obviously there are limits.  Of course, if I bundle things together, basically $9,000 per couple we can give now.  So from what I hear from politicians and from people who work with politicians, they have to spend most, most of their effort really is fundraising and pleasing donors.  That means it’s broken.  So I think we desperately need to have massive public financing, reduce the cap on donations to something like $200 per person.  There is no reason a person should get access to a politician because they give them money.  That’s broken. 

Question: Can extreme atheists and religious fundamentalists get along?

Transcript:  No.  People who are on the extremes pretty much can’t be changed.  There’s not much hope for them.  The trick is to run a society in which they have as little voice as possible.  And right now, because of the free market that we have in entertainment and television, and I’m not advocating censorship, but because the extremes are more entertaining, we do have Fox News on the one hand, and the religious right also on that side, and we have people like, well, without naming names, we have the angry new atheists who write these slash and burn books.  If you read those books, while they talk as though they’re scientists, they are so focused on using reasoning to reach the conclusion they are committed to.  This I do not think is helpful.  The very nature of our tribalism is such that we, when attacked, we rally the troops and we’re really good at intergroup competition.  So the trick for the future is to find ways to recreate what used to be called the vital center, a place where people find the joy of learning from both sides.  People who are on the extremes, that’s psychologically not possible for them.

Question: Are you optimistic about America’s future?

Transcript:  I am both optimistic and pessimistic. I am pessimistic in that I think some terrible things are almost certain to happen.  I think that we will see a nuclear bomb go off in a city somewhere in the world in the next 20 years.  And then how we react to that could be terrible, as well.  So I think that it’s going to be something of a rollercoaster, and in part that’s because of the diffusion of technology and the ease with which anyone with a grudge can now be very powerful.  So I’m pessimistic in terms of there being likely to be some terrible, terrible things that will happen.  I am optimistic that the effect of the 1960s will soon wear off, that is the moral radicalization of the left and right I think is coming to an end.  I am hopeful that we will begin to understand each other better, to respect each other more, and to create a society that draws on the wisdom of both sides.  I’m also humbled by the fact that it’s almost impossible to predict anything.  So whether I’m optimistic or pessimistic, I kind of console myself with the thought that things will change and we cannot predict what will happen.  I can’t make a prediction.  

Recorded on: 5/9/08