The Singapore Sling, the Crabapple Connection, and the Return of the Kidd
This week: The Handshake That Shook Up the World — with Chas Freeman, Jeanne Guilleman, James Carroll, and Richard Rhodes. Listen today at 2pm on WBUR or anytime on our website.
Mary McGrath: Fire and Fury have given way to a “terrific” relationship with better news to come, maybe, to take the world away from the nuclear brink. Still, the liberal media had a meltdown over the Singapore Summit. A victory for a dictator, a bust for the U.S. went the headlines. One can’t help asking, is it because Trump did it?
Branko Marcetic has a good round-up in this piece, “The North Korea Summit Through the Looking Glass.”
Turns out the South Koreans saw a different movie — the one that played after the Destiny Pictures trailer, and they liked it. The dems and the moderate press seemed to walk out before it was over.
We wondered all week what the reaction would be if Obama had been in Singapore with Kim Jong Un this week, and what if Donald Trump had signed the Iran deal? We weren’t going to get the real story from the New York Times or anyone else in the beltway bubble that simply can’t cover this president, so we called our favorite fopo sage, Chas Freeman. Watch Kim and South Korean president Moon, he said, not Trump and Kim. De-nuclearization is contingent on a rapprochement between North and South Korea. The “blob” is against Trump — the “suffocating unanimity of the national security state” and the media followed that line.
Among Freeman’s hypotheses was one you might call “what happens in Singapore, stays in Singapore”—that is until the midterm elections. What if Kim gave Trump an October surprise of a kind to reveal in November — maybe some of the assurances that were missing from the vague statement issued at the end?
Most of our show was a look back in nuclear history with three terrific guests. Novelist Jim Carroll has written a play called “Midnight Ride,” which recalls the post-WWII discussion about containing nuclear weapons. On September 11, 1945 President Truman’s Secretary of War Henry Stimson proposed putting put the atomic bomb under the control of an international body — the newly formed United Nations. Without it, Stimson worried about an international nuclear arms race breaking out. The medical anthropologist and OS godmother Jeanne Guillemin added to the historical picture (her book Hidden Atrocities: Japanese Germ Warfare and American Obstruction of Justice at the Tokyo Trial has been nominated for a Pulitzer prize). Richard Rhodes, author of three books about nuclear weapons, brought an expert’s opinion about the Singapore Sling.
In Case You Missed It: Wakanda Forever
We’re re-running the Black Panther show next week to catch up on some summer projects, so the newsie staff will be hitting the beach next Sunday. There’s still time to call in your BS jobs story. What’s the most pointless job you’ve ever had? We want to know! The number is 617–651–2421. We’ll air the best ones and send you a t-shirt if you email us your address: info@radioopensource.org
Coming Up: Molly Crabapple
The super artist Molly Crabapple stopped by the other day. She was in town to give a reading from her book Brother’s of the Gun: A Memoir of the Syrian War. We talked with Molly and her co-auther Marwan Hisham a couple of months ago. We’ll post our new conversation — and Susan Coyne’s illustration of her fellow illustrator soon.
Read:
Jack Hitt has solved an important literary mystery. We the rogue Joyce scholar John Kidd well from when we interviewed him on The Connection. Speaking of The Connection, people have loved our conversation with Anthony Bourdain. You can find it here if you missed it.
Andrew O’Hagan’s book-length LRB report on the Grenfell fire caught our attention this week. One year after the tragedy, we’re still wrestling with its meaning—both in the post-Brexit UK and in ICE-age America. For more on the anniversary of the fire, check The Conversation UK’s round-up.
Listen:
Our pals at Current Affairs have started a podcast. It’s in that Chapo range, but much better imho and without the snark.
Til next week,
The Open Source Starlets
