Stone Wall vs. Border Wall
This week: we travel through New Hampshire for primary season and speak with Jeff Sharlet, journalist and professor at Dartmouth College. Listen today at 2 pm or anytime at our website.
The Iowa Caucus left everyone more confused than they were before, and so now we’re looking to New Hampshire for clarity. Good news: the Open Source team actually found that clarity on our trip to New Hampshire. We spoke with folks at campaign events for Amy Klobuchar, Andrew Yang, and Deval Patrick; and we met with Dan Schroth—a builder of traditional New Hampshire stone walls in Pittsfield, New Hampshire—who talked to us with an intense political hopefulness. He sees our present condition as a “storm,” but Bernie Sanders represents to him a new kind of leadership, beyond lying.
“Bernie Beats Trump,” Dan told us, and so did his sign, which he kept propped up by his worksite, the in-process Pittsfield Historical Society.
Then we drove north and west to Hanover, where we met with Jeff Sharlet, the journalist and Dartmouth professor. He described how the traditional, slick, governing narrative of the U.S. no longer seems to hold in an era of widening income inequality, forever wars, and persistent racism. It was a narrative of stability and progress that almost worked for a while, Sharlet tells us, but no longer, not really. At most, it seems that in certain campaigns you might find “only the idea that maybe the brokenness that you feel, maybe others don’t.”
The problem runs deep, in Sharlet’s analysis. You could look back to the end of the Cold War, as we did recently in conversation with Andy Bacevich. Sharlet says,
We’re still figuring out the end of the Cold War . . . That’s why I sort of say the nation is breaking down. You have a nation when you have a great cosmic strong struggle. And you go back to Eisenhower. You go back to the Dulles brothers who really did see it as as a religious battle between good and evil in those terms and the great evil empire. Well, that’s gone.
Dan the stone-wall builder wasn’t the only New Hampshire resident who gave us hope in a new kind of community, a new social organization that might be emerging. Dan introduced us to Kathy Kelley in Pittsfield, who told us how, earlier that day, she made extra spaghetti and welcomed others to eat in her Main Street store. The point is that we met people figuring out a better way to be in New Hampshire, and like everyone else, we’re eager to learn what these people tell us in the primary.
Listen: Anna Thorvaldsdottir
How do we deal with brokenness, artfully if possible? Modernists and their intellectual descendants have been working on this one for a century, from Picasso to Gertrude Stein to T.S. Eliot and beyond. So we have an artistic tradition of inventing out of shards and wreckage. Consider music—pick at random the Icelandic composer Anna Thorvaldsdottir’s “In the Light of Air.”
According to William Robin’s review in the New York Times on Thorvaldsdottir “searching for beauty amid brokenness”:
In the work’s final movement, the percussionist Nathan Davis creates dusty resonances from an installation of metallic ornaments specially designed by Ms. Thorvaldsdottir; the pianist Cory Smythe creates a Debussy-like gauze from a constellation of notes that the composer indicates be played at a pace of the performer’s choosing . . . Ms. Thorvaldsdottir’s music conjures unseen worlds.
This sounds extreme, but maybe it’s possible. Maybe we can make something better from the fragments and generally strange stuff we’re given.
Read: The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
In an election season, you’re asked to make choices between opposing sides, but you might think that these opposing sides—while sometimes wrenchingly opposed to one another, often in seriously, not-to-be-downplayed moral terms—are still breathing the same atmosphere, responding to a similar set of circumstances. The conversation with Jeff Sharlet suggests noisily democratic blurring between opposed movements, a generally shared-by-all-sides encounter with a broken national story.
William Blake, too, critiqued binary oppositions, centuries ago. Look to his “Marriage of Heaven and Hell.” It might jolt you into a new orientation toward oppositions and opposing parties, and a sense of thrill that might overcome all oppositions. Blake describes “the following Errors”:
1. That Man has two real existing principles, viz. a Body and a Soul.
2. That Energy, call’d Evil, is alone from the Body; and that Reason, call’d Good, is alone from the Soul.
3. That God will torment Man in Eternity for following his Energies.
But the following Contraries to these are True: —
1. Man has no Body distinct from his Soul; for that call’d Body is a portion of Soul discern’d by the five Senses, the chief inlets of Soul in this age.
2. Energy is the only life, and is from the Body; and Reason is the bound or outward circumference of Energy.
3. Energy is Eternal Delight.
Watch: Tanner ‘88
Does Tanner ’88, the mini-series about a doomed campaign by Robert Altman and Gary Trudeau, hold up? It might, but it’s now 32 years old, and maybe its take on New Hampshire no longer applies. Still, Robert Altman was a visionary, and primary season seems perfectly suited for his capacious, rambling, journalistic imagination.
See: Sweat
Speaking of broken people, places and things, “Sweat,” which just opened at Boston’s Huntington Theatre has been extended to March 1. The play, written by the Pulitzer-Prize winning playwright Lynn Nottage about union workers at a Reading, PA steel tubing factory, is superb. When it opened on Broadway in 2017, The New Yorker’s Michael Schulman called it “the first theatrical landmark of the Trump era.”
Coming Up: Reflecting on Malcolm X
Prompted by a new play at ArtsEmerson—Detroit Red, written by Will Power—we’re having conversations about Malcolm X, about his life and legacy. There’s also a new documentary on Netflix about the assassination of Malcolm X. And there are other ways to revisit the subject: Spike Lee’s Malcolm X is one, and then there’s the place to start: The Autobiography of Malcolm X, as told to Alex Haley.
See: Jeff Sharlet
You’ve heard the radio show, now go see Jeff Sharlet in conversation with Chris Lydon at WBUR’s Cityspace in Boston on Feburary 24th. They’ll be talking about Sharlet’s grimly glittering new book, This Brilliant Darkness.
Opening: Bernie’s MA Campaign Office
Our pal Zach Goldhammer writes to say he’s helping put together a grand opening event for Bernie’s MA campaign office at 195 Dudley St (Nubian Square) on Thursday, February 13th, 6:30–11pm. He says it should be a fun night with a bunch of local hip-hop / r&b acts + some info about other MA campaigns as well.
This week’s ephemeral library
Find room in your heart for “the optimism of Star Trek: Picard.” But then reflect on what’s ahead with “Trumpism after Trump.” New Details Show How Deeply Iowa Caucus App Developer Was Embedded in Democratic Establishment. Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor: Obama’s Legacy is Hurting Democrats. We love to disagree with the cantankerous Richard Brody, so here’s his Oscar pix. Charles Dickens’ party tips.
That was a tough week, folks, but it’s behind us now. Chris Lydon would say Onward, quoting the great sage of Concord, Ralph Waldo Emerson. Go up to New Hampshire and knock on some doors and then have a wallbanger on us!
Til next week! Love, like, share, subscribe and donate to the hardest working team in radio and podcast land!
