Blaming Boomers, Revisiting Risen, Talking Ta-Nehisi
This Week — Take the Money and Run! — with Brown University political economist Mark Blyth. Listen today at 2 pm on WBUR or anytime on our website.
Mary McGrath: Happy New Year, Open Sorcerers! On this chilly start to 2018 we warmed up in the Glascow pub with the people’s political economist, Scotsman Mark Blyth, a perpetual favorite of OS fans. We love Mark’s take on almost everything; he’s witty, smart and sees what the rest of us tend to miss. And not least — he has a killer accent and voice for radio! We also have a transcript of this one.
The conversation ranged over a full hour, and there’s plenty of one liners and anec-data for the Blyth freaks. Call it a kind of state of the union report, beginning with Mark’s explanation for the giant disconnect between the sky high Dow Jones economy and a historically unpopular (and nutzoid) president and Congress. Answer: the recession is over, big time, and politics doesn’t matter.
Mark’s views on inequality and populism are refreshing, coming from a guy with working class roots in Scotland, from the same background as all the people in the world who are pissed off, he’ll remind you.
I get tribalism. I get local identities, and I get football identities. I grew up with some of the worst ones in the world. I get: don’t try and step out of your zone — and the little things that people do to protect themselves and the very limited access that they have. And if you’re constantly talked down to by sort of the upper middle class elites who know everything, who are so good and they understand everything and then basically you get Afghanistan you get Iraq — oh don’t worry it will pay for itself; you get the global financial crisis. You get liberal humanitarian interventionism that gives us the Arab Spring and like a whole new civil war in Syria and a new branch of dictators. All of these guys have been shown up; basically they’re no more clever than anybody else. That’s why we don’t have faith in them anymore, and I understand why ordinary people kind of get that. The notion that they’re all poisoned by Fox News is truly insulting. Look at your own record. Figure out how smart you really are. And then tell everyone they should believe in you. Maybe that explains why it is that people don’t. And why it is that we don’t have that many politicians coming forward in the mainstream saying I’ve got it figured out. Because deep down inside they know they’re bullshitting too.
The Blyth take is a healthy antidote to the psycho news cycle (he told us over lunch he doesn’t waste his time on it; his news diet consists of the BBC, the FT and a subscription to Euro Intelligence). The sober view isn’t as amusing as the Trump follies, but listen up: Nothing has changed.
Has politics fundamentally changed because of Trump? No. Politics fundamentally changed because the people in charge basically ignored millions of Americans and what was happening to their standard of living their communities what was happening to the life chances and opportunities. [The people in charge] basically lived on the coasts and said to each other, “Gee isn’t everything swell?” And they got a really big surprise when about 40 million of them said actually no we don’t like what you’re doing. … meanwhile, our “elites” — whether it’s Tony Blair, whether it’s the Clintons, or whoever has the means thinks “everything’s great, the new global economy! We’re all doing fabulous!” But you’re only doing fabulous because you only talk to each other. You only live in half a dozen places and you all have tons of cash so if you travel internationally everybody’s like you. You’re not a nationalist, you don’t have a national or local identity, you’re rich enough to be a global cosmopolitan and you can enjoy all of the fruits of globalization, but not everybody else can. Put that all that together and it’s self-explanatory.
Listen through to the end. Blame the boomers; the Clintons will be back (because they’re boomers); it’s up to the millennials to show up and save the day, and if they don’t — blame the boomers.
Here’s what a prosciutto factory looks like, by the way.
Read: James Risen — “My Life as a New York Times Reporter in the Shadow of the War on Terror”
Zach Goldhammer: The hottest media gossip this week came from Michael Wolff and the backstabbing, scandal-laden excerpts from his forthcoming book, Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House. Yet for those who aren’t so interested in Ivanka’s opinions on her father’s combover or the on-again-off-again narrative of Bannon’s presidential bromance, Wolff’s report left something to be desired: serious reporting on who’s really wielding power in this administration.
Under the last two presidencies, James Risen was one of a handful of journalists who worked hard to deliver those kind of stories—and paid the price for it. In The Intercept this week, the former NYT national security reporter writes about the trials and tribulations he faced during the War on Terror era. Risen’s stories were suppressed by both the Obama and Bush administrations as well by Times editors who had become too fearful of foreign terror and too comfortable with domestic power. Risen’s biggest scoop—discovering the NSA’s domestic spying program Stellar Wind nearly a decade before the Snowden leaks—was suppressed by Times editors in October 2004, during the run-up to Bush’s re-election. Risen believed he had found “the story of a lifetime,” but the New York Times’ then executive editor, Bill Keller, disagreed:
I told Keller I thought this was the kind of story that had helped make the New York Times great in the 1970s, when Seymour Hersh had uncovered a series of intelligence abuses. Keller seemed unimpressed; as I recall, he called the comparison between the NSA story and Hersh’s earlier work “facile.” (I don’t think my comment was facile, but it was probably arrogant.) […]
Keller now also says that the overall climate in the country in 2004 provides important context for his decision not to run the story. In a 2013 interview with then-Times Public Editor Margaret Sullivan, he expanded on that, saying that “three years after 9/11, we, as a country, were still under the influence of that trauma, and we, as a newspaper, were not immune. It was not a kind of patriotic rapture. It was an acute sense that the world was a dangerous place.”
Corey Robin—who wrote his own book-length critique of the politics of fear—describes on his facebook page why Risen’s story is so important today:
First, Risen reports in amazing depth on how the Bush and Obama administrations used everything from prosecution, censorship, threats of prosecution, spying, intimidation and browbeating to get the press to back down on vital stories of national concern. And they were successful. Through the power of their office, and the cravenness of publishers and editors, both administrations were able to force the media not to report on key stories for years, and sometimes to quash stories altogether. I don’t care how much ink you want to spill on Trump’s tweets, there is simply no comparison to what Risen as a journalist faced, in a courtroom, with a federal judge and a federal prosecutor, with a pro-bono attorney b/c the Times and his publisher (Simon and Schuster) would no longer pay the legal bills, facing real time in jail if he didn’t capitulate to the government. And as Risen shows, his case was but a microcosm of the massive exercise of state power during the first decade of the war on terror.
Second, as Risen also shows, it was through his and similar types of confrontation with the government that the media slowly regained its independence. By the end of the second term of the Obama administration, the media had broken considerably free of the shackles that had been placed upon it, and that it had placed upon itself, after 9/11. Not completely, by any stretch. But again, there’s no comparison to the first decade after 9/11. The press became much more independent on a lot of vital issues, even before Trump’s election, and now, under Trump, they’re even less compliant with government demands.
[It’s], an amazing piece that shows us what real state power and intimidation look like — as opposed to the dictator Trump plays on TV — and how, even when it seems especially potent, there is room and space to fight it. And beat it.
Additionally, Risen’s new story sheds fresh light on who’s really at fault for the NYT’s misleading reporting on Iraq in 2003. In particular, Risen’s defense of his former colleague and friend Judith Miller has an added resonance in the #MeToo era:
We’ve reached out to Risen for a possible interview next week. Let us know what you’d like to hear from the veteran national security reporter, or potentially from other guest discussing the state of political media today.
Listen: Ta-Nehisi Coates on Marc Maron’s WTF podcast
ZG: Another media blow-up that happened while we were off the air over Christmas was Cornel West’s dressing down of Ta-Nehisi Coates as the “neoliberal face of the black freedom struggle.” We’re not going to weigh-in on that debate—though we appreciate all the comments on twitter from folks asking us to host a conversation with Coates and West. If you’re interested, you can check out Robin Kelley’s thoughtful and even-handed assessment of both writers in the Boston Review.
Even if you don’t care about intellectual feuds, you should still listen to Coates’ appearance this week on Marc Maron’s WTF podcast. The interview—which was recorded weeks before the Cornel controversy— reveals that Coates is clearly uncomfortable with the hyped-up “public intellectual” position he’s been put in. He says he’s eager to go back to being the kind of journalist who’s asking the questions, not the one who’s being asked to speak for others. As is typical with the best of of Maron’s interview, Marc is able to open up a more human side of his celebrity guest through a shared connection—in this case, the book editor Chris Jackson.
Jackon, who was recently profiled in New York Magazine as one of the founders of a new “black literary movement,” edited Maron’s memoir Attempting Normal as well as all three of Coates’ books. Coates not only expresses deep appreciation for his editor’s work, but also makes clear how much of his writing really is a collaborative effort. It’s a point that the poet and essayist Kiese Laymon also notes, in a recent critical appreciation of Coates’s work which begins with the first time he met Coates and Jackson:
I picked up Ta-Nehisi Coates and his editor Chris Jackson from the train station in Poughkeepsie, New York one damp November night in 2011. After reading every word Ta-Nehisi had publicly written and every book Chris edited, I invited them up for a public conversation on “Autobiography and the Fictive Possibilities of Black American Nonfiction Writing.”
I don’t remember many details of the night, but I do remember Ta-Nehisi and Chris being extremely generous with my students and colleagues. I also remember both of them looking at me like I had a purple confederate flag flying out of my forehead when I asked what, if anything, they would change about Ellison’s Invisible Man.
I want to say I had no idea three years later, that Ta-Nehisi would obliterate the game with a lean percussive book called Between the World and Me. But that would be a lie. I knew the nation’s backlash against Barack Obama and black folks would intensify. I knew Barack Obama’s backlash against black folks making loving critiques of him would also intensify […]
Though I’ve learned a lot about how to synthesize heavy political claims into satisfying prose from Ta-Nehisi, I have never been drawn to his takes on American politics, his lack of faith in black folks, the breezy attention paid to what black men bodies do to the bodies of black women, or his inclination to engage with woeful wack white writers not anywhere near as talented or evocative as he is. I was and will always be drawn to how he uses prose to actually pose questions that matter. Many of us spent years watching, hearing and seeing Ta-Nehisi write brilliantly and curiously through what he learned about The Civil War, jogging, presidential power, emceeing, white folks insatiable desire to plunder and white folks’ music. I don’t know that there is another American writer who more effectively models writing as learning and discovery than Ta-Nehisi Coates..
In his interview with Maron, Coates makes it painfully clear that he would like to go back to being a public scholar rather than a public intellectual. I share many of the same critiques of Coates’s politics that West (as well as Laymon) lays out, but also think it’s incredibly frustrating that thinkers like TNC are no longer given a place to learn and ask open-ended questions. The circular firing squad on left-liberal twitter (among other factors) has made this kind of open-ended, earnest questioning style increasingly difficult to pull off online. And the ambient ill-will felt in Trump’s America makes any kind of civil questioning increasingly difficult. Coates’s conversation with Maron, which goes deep on Coates’ life as a father and the values his own parents instilled in him, should at least make us want to treat each other with a little more kindness, empathy, and genuine respect in the new year.
Listen: This is Your Life, Amanda Palmer
MM: We’ve posted Chris’ conversation with Amanda Palmer on our Patreon page. For now, it’s exclusive to our community of Patreon donors. Join up! We’ll be posting special content there and invitations to special events (Zadie Smith with Chris in Boston this March!), and we have terrific new rewards — Henry David Thoreua t-shirts, postcards and original illustrations from the uber talented Susan Coyne. Susan is also working up an OS tote bag. Get in with the cool crowd!
Lots in store for 2018, folks. Stay tuned, and stay warm in the new year!
