Borderline Disorders, Speculative Writers, & Celebrating Podcasters
This Week: Borderline Hysteria — with Matt Cameron, Atossa Araxia Abrahamian, and Rana Das Gupta. Listen today at 2pm on WBUR or anytime on our website.
MM: We hit the mean streets of East Boston this week to take the pulse of the immigration story. Eastie is at the rim of Boston Harbor, where the Kennedy’s came ashore from Ireland and the Italians from Abruzzo and now the Central Americans of today. We met Patricia Montes who came from Honduras a decade ago; she told us that immigrants in her neighborhood fear ICE more than they do gentrifying landlords: “People in the U.S. think people from Central America are regular migrants looking for better economic opportunity. The reality is that people are not necessarily coming for the ‘American Dream, ‘ they are coming because they are trying to save their lives. There is a long history and connection between the crisis in Central America with the long history of US economic, political, and military intervention. This crisis is a result of that connection.”
Our guests say this immigration crisis is manufactured, and surely the fake news is hard to sort through. Rana Dagupta gave us a broader, historical view. We’d read his piece in The Guardian “The Demise of the Nation State”; it’s a solid explanation for how global capital (and you could toss in global climate and global media) are making borders disappear for the rich and restricting movement for the poor.
The full story of the revolution that has happened since the 1980s beginning in Britain and America has not really been written but it is a stupendous thing that has happened in our own lifetime. A group of rather brilliant elites have engineered a financial revolution which has reasserted the supremacy of capital over nation states and established a massive global system of offshore deposits as well as completely fluid movement that has transformed political systems in all the countries of the world. All political systems have been re engineered to ensure that the mobility of capital is uppermost and that taxation and all those kinds of things will fall into line with international norms. But many countries which have rather little to offer in terms of the exceptional nature of their workforce will be driven down in quite brutal ways. Which is why indebtedness is such a huge issue of poor countries. The ideology of a lot of the people who have spearheaded this revolution is is explicitly anti state. They are deliberately trying to undermine state systems, not only taxation systems but they want other kinds of legal privilege too. Many of them are to the greatest extent possible living outside nation state systems….what’s happening right now is that the nudity of the Emperor is beginning to show both to the Emperor himself and to everybody else. And I think the the kind of terror of what might be revealed on the other side of that kind of transition is gripping lots of people. It’s not just that leaders are trying to grab back the authority that they had in the 1960s by big shows of strength. It’s also the populations are desperate for that authority to exist again. And that’s why they too are voting for a kind of strange nostalgic fantasy of past and present all rolled up into one.
RIP: Harlan Ellison
But whatever you do, don’t call him a science fiction writer.! “Call me a science fiction writer,” Mr. Ellison said on the Sci-Fi Channel (now SyFy) in the 1990s. “I’ll come to your house and I’ll nail your pet’s head to a coffee table. I’ll hit you so hard your ancestors will die.”
It’s radio legend now; Harlan Ellison was on The Connection back in the 90’s. Don’t call me a science fiction writer he told us before the show—Ellison preferred the term “speculative fiction” writer. And Chris was careful not to, until he re-intro’d the show after a break. “Harlan Ellison is our guest this hour, a prolific sc$#% f#iction writer….” It was an honest mistake or a slip in a live radio moment, but the next thing we knew, he was gone. I chased him to the elevator and onto the street. Nothing doing. But our callers came to the rescue and saved the day. And in the department of clarification, Nina Simone didn’t walk out; she was 30 minutes late. John Kerry was almost that late once. And yes, the Dali Lama left halfway through the show, a bit more gracefully, because he had to catch a NASA space launch.
Next Week: Bill Banfield and the Imagine Orchestra
A special holiday music show featuring Bill Banfield—director of Africana Studies at Berklee College of Music and leader of the Imagine Orchestra, a jazz chamber ensemble / “a contemporary urbane orchestra”. You can check out their music here.
Watch: Hannah Godsby’s Nanette
ZG: The critics are saying that Hannah Godsby’s one-hour comedy special Nanette could radically reshape the way we think about joke-telling on stage. The less you read about the performance, the better: just watch it.
And speaking of radical political comedy, shout out to Desus and Mero. The Bronx duo just wrapped the final season of their Viceland program and will soon be heading to Showtime. Read Jazmine Hughes’ NYT essay on the show which could mark a turning point in late-night television:
In a landscape in which black people dominate the culture but have few recognized channels to respond to it, the show, which stars two American black men, provides a venue for black authority in the mainstream. Their rapport has proved so popular that more-established networks have taken notice.Unlike their late-night peers, the pair don’t have an impeccably plotted approach to the show: They just talk, a geyser of whip-smart running commentary, seamlessly building off each other’s jokes, able to anticipate and carry each other like dancers or jazz musicians […] rely on a conversational comedy that comes naturally to them.
It’s been a good year for the Bronx:
Etc.
John Lanchester’s LRB piece looking back ten years to the financial crisis is a must read. Way to go Failing New York Times. Jill Abramson’s right on this one and about that long piece about Ali Watkins too. It was totally bizarre.
Hey podcast! Happy almost 15th birthday.
Dave Winer, Chris Lydon’s podcast co-creator, figures the Marconi moment was July 9th 2003. Zach has been posting some of that early pioneering audio to our Patreon patrons. Send a birthday gift and join the coolest podcast club around.
Til next week,
The OS Crew
