Robert Mann on the Campbell Conversations
Mar 09, 2024
Robert Mann(Mark Lavonier / lsu.edu)
On this week's episode of the Campbell Conversations, Grant Reeher speaks with Robert Mann, a professor who holds the Manship Chair in Journalism at the Manship School of Mass Communication at Louisiana State University. Prior to joining the Manship School in 2006, he served as communications director to Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco. He's also the author of, "Becoming Ronald Reagan: The Rise of a Conservative Icon".
Tim Palmer on the Campbell Conversations
Mar 02, 2024
Tim Palmer
On this week's episode of the Campbell Conversations, Grant Reeher speaks with Tim Palmer. A prolific nature writer and photographer, Palmer has won awards from the National Wildlife Federation, the Sierra Club and American Rivers. They discuss his new book, "Seek Higher Ground: The Natural Solution to Our Urgent Flooding Crisis".
Mary Jumbelic on the Campbell Conversations
Feb 24, 2024
Mary Jumbelic(Marc Safran)
On this week's episode of the Campbell Conversations, Grant Reeher speaks with Mary Jumbelic. She is a forensic pathologist, serving as Onondaga County's Chief Medical Examiner from 1998 - 2009. She's recently published the memoir, "Here, Where Death Delights: A Literary Memoir".
Melissa DeRosa on the Campbell Conversations
Feb 17, 2024
(Mark Lavonier)
Program transcript:
Grant Reeher: Welcome to the Campbell Conversations. I'm Grant Reeher. My guest today is Melissa DeRosa. Ms. DeRosa served as secretary to New York Governor Andrew Cuomo during the COVID pandemic. That office is the highest non-elected position in state government. She left the office when the governor resigned and has now published a memoir titled, “What's Left Unsaid: My Life at the Center of Power, Politics and Crisis”. Ms. DeRosa, welcome to the program.
Melissa DeRosa: Thank you so much for having me. Great to be here.
GR: Well, we appreciate you making the time. So, let me just start with a really basic question about the book. What were you trying to accomplish in the writing of it and the publication of it?
MD: You know, I decided I was going to write the book within 24 hours of me being out of office. And it was because I wasn't going to allow the first draft of history to stand. And the first draft of history is written by reporters in real time based on non-primary sources, people who aren't in the room when it comes to politics and government, the people feeding them information have a whole host of different motivations. And I lived it, I was there, I was on the phone with Jared Kushner, I was on the phone with Donald Trump, I was in the Oval Office, I was in the room with Bill de Blasio, I was in the room with the health professionals, I was there when we shut down the state of New York. And so I felt a responsibility both to the public, because this was a once in a lifetime pandemic to really understand what was going on when the cameras weren't rolling during those famous briefings, to my administration, who I felt was really unfairly treated in that last year of the administration and to myself and my family to tell the truth as I lived it and sort of lift the veil and let everybody else in.
GR: And I wanted to ask you, you kind of segued into that at the end of your answer, but I wanted to ask you also a more personal question about the writing of it. Was it therapeutic to write this? Was it reliving a trauma, was it a mix of both? What was that like?
MD: You know, when I started the writing process after we resigned, I was almost, it was almost like journaling, which for your listeners, you know, who I don't know if they know what that means, but it's almost like a form of you’re writing to process a trauma or get through something, relive it for yourself to understand it. And so it was incredibly therapeutic. It was also incredibly re-traumatizing at some points. You know, I would literally sit there and close my eyes and bring myself back to the moment of calling the families of the health care workers who passed away and remembering those moments and what that emotion was. And I would cry while I was writing. And so it was, you know, it was therapeutic, it was cathartic, it was also traumatizing in a lot of ways.
GR: Well, I did want to ask you some questions about your experiences during the pandemic that are in your book. But I wanted to ask you a broader question about Governor Andrew Cuomo and his sort of his overall political slant. And I was thinking of this as I was reading the book, when Andrew Cuomo first ran for governor, I remember it, he ran more as a centrist. It was someone who recognized the state's spending issues, the outmigration problem, unfriendly business climate, spoke about all those things. But when he was in office, I think it's fair to say he tacked more to the left. And at one point in the later time of his administration, I think he had some famous phrase about like, I am progressivism in New York, or, but he was very, very strongly saying he was a progressive. I wanted to know how you would characterize the overall policy direction, the overall policy goals of Cuomo's governorship.
MD: I think you hit the nail on the head. You know, when he ran for office in 2010 originally, and disclaimer, I was working for President Obama at that time, but obviously I have a unique perspective into all of this. When he was running for office in 2010, the state was in a massive deficit, he inherited I believe it was a $14 billion deficit that he then turned around. And so, you know I remember when he was running and he would say I'm a progressive who's broke. And he was all about trying to retain and attract businesses. You know, he came in and he brought in a bunch of a bipartisan coalition on a tax committee that included people like George Pataki, who was his predecessor and some other big name Republicans. And, you know, he took a whack at the tax code. We did things like, we lowered the estate tax, which traditionally Democrats don't really go near, we lowered corporate taxes, we lowered small business taxes. And then I think as the administration went on and the party shifted left, he did, you know, wrap his arms around and sort of lead the way on a number of really big progressive issues, like the $15 minimum wage, paid family leave. But, you know, I think his progressive bonafides were always there, he's Mario Cuomo’s son. You know, he did marriage equality in his first year in office and famously, you know, was able to wrangle the entire Democratic conference, as well as four Republicans to vote for that bill and was really ahead of its time. So socially, I think it's fair to say he was always progressive. I think fiscally he was always very moderate. And then as time went on, I think that he did tack more to the left on certain fiscal issues.
GR: Okay. And you alluded to this when you talked about first draft of history that you wanted to counter. But obviously, Andrew Cuomo and his administration, you know, and you have been subject to a lot of criticisms since he stepped down and resigned. Very briefly, because I know you could speak for a very long time on it, but very briefly, why do you think those criticisms are misguided?
MD: Well, it depends on the criticism, right? But I do think that particularly in politics of today, where everything has become so weaponized and the selective outrage is so real, you know, where you can see on what you can, and I write this in the book, you can almost draw a straight line from someone's call for resignation, not to their principles, but to their political interests. And Andrew Cuomo had been in power for so long, by the time he resigned, he had been there for nearly 11 years. He had been attorney general for four years, before that, he had served as HUD secretary in the Clinton administration. He ran his father's first campaign when he was 20 years old. And there were a lot of people with pitchforks that wanted him out. And I think that when there's an opening, you know, sometimes people take it. And in that instance, people took it.
GR: And so to flip that around, though, what do you think are the legitimate criticisms of his tenure in your view? What were the biggest mistakes that the administration made along the way?
MD: You know, and I write about this in the book too sort of at the end where I look back and reflect on everything that happened. You know, when you're a hammer, everything's a nail. And I think that one of the biggest things that, you know, in looking back, we really became so accustomed to fighting all the time, fighting the legislature, fighting the left, fighting Trump, fighting, you know, this one, fighting that one, that we almost lost calibration. And sometimes you catch more flies with honey. And I think that, you know, we had really thrown our weight around. And the governor would say, Governor Cuomo would say it's because the goals that we were after were so worthy and so important and it was about the people and that was first and foremost. Which I do agree in some instances, but it doesn't have to be that way in all instances. And so I think at the end of the day, we had alienated a base of political support that would have been necessary to get through that period. And had we not always looked at everything as a fight, I don't think that necessarily would have been the case in the spring of 2021.
GR: As an outside observer, that sounds like a good insight to me. You're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher and we're speaking with former secretary to the governor Melissa DeRosa. She's the recent author of, “What's Left Unsaid: My Life at the Center of Power, Politics and Crisis”. So let's talk about the COVID pandemic a little bit. And if you, again, it's similar to the question I just asked you, but if you could do the state's response to COVID again, would you make a different decision along the way? I mean, one big one that comes to my mind is a different decision about putting COVID patients into nursing homes, for example.
MD: You know, I got asked this question on Bill Maher and I said, you know, people ask me, would you do anything differently? I would do everything differently, I would do everything differently. I mean, this was the definition of building the plane while you're flying it. And I get into this in the book and really try to bring people behind the scenes because even though COVID wasn't that long ago, I think almost as sort of a trauma response, we all have collectively really put it away from our minds and it feels much longer ago than it was. And I think it's really easy to forget what it was that we were going through. But, you know, why was it that they closed travel down from Asia but not from Europe? You know, they closed the back door to the country because COVID existed in China, we knew it existed in China. They didn't close the airports to Asia, and that was why New York and New Jersey in the tristate area got hit so hard out of the gate. But in hindsight, how stupid is that? And I mean, these are the smartest people in the world in government, right? Dr. Fauci was helping to make these calls, they had this whole COVID task force at the federal level. Some of this stuff I blame President Trump for, but some of it I don't. You know, they didn't advise him to shut down travel to Europe. But how is it, given that we live in such a global economy, that we didn't think that, of course, a pandemic somewhere is a pandemic everywhere? And those critical weeks between when we knew that COVID existed in China and leaving the door open to Europe and not thinking that it wasn't already in New York and with a subway system like New York’s subway system and the interconnected way in which the tristate area works and lives, that it wasn't everywhere. You know, we wasted so much time that in hindsight, if we had taken steps to shut down earlier and we could have gotten, you know, brought the curve down and, you know, so many decisions were made around trying to keep the hospitals from collapsing which segues into your question on the nursing homes. I mean, people sort of fundamentally misunderstand what happened there, but that was a call that was made at a time when every major, you know, consultant, academic institution was projecting that New York State’s hospital system was going to collapse, that we were getting 120, 130, 140,000 beds, even though the entire system collectively only has 40,000 beds. And that decision was made by health professionals based on health guidance given from Washington to try to say if people are in hospitals that no longer need to be there because they're medically stable and believed not to be contagious, as long as certain steps are taken, they can go back to where they were living. And so, you know, when I look back on all of that there's the scientific and medical hindsight of 2020 of the things I would do differently. And then there are the political things that I would have done differently, looking back in 2020. And whether or not that March 25th health guidance, you know, impacted is still a cause for debate. Some people say yes other reports say no. But if I had known it was going to cause that political firestorm and that it was going to create an opportunity to weaponize real pain of nursing home families to get caught up in the middle of those politics, I would have said do anything but that, you know, whatever we have to do to do anything but that, avoid that of course, because you want to avoid controversy. But, you know, again, and that was part of the reason I wrote the book, because so much of this has gotten lost in the politics and so much of it got lost in the moment that I thought it was important to sort of bring people back into the room as we were living it to understand how and why decisions were being made. You know, both chronologically and also the thought that was going into it.
GR: And one quick follow up on that. You know, you alluded to this, but one of the big political storms that came out of all this had to do with the reporting of COVID deaths in the nursing homes.
MD: Yep.
GR: And I think the general impression is that, you know, those were underreported in some way. Explain that, I know that's a complicated one, but if you could explain it briefly.
MD: I’ll try to do it quickly, and I write about it in the book. When we originally started reporting deaths in March of 2020 it was done for one reason, for simplicity. Anyone, you know, every day, at the end of the day, every hospital in the state reported into state government the number of number of COVID deaths and every nursing home reported in the number of nursing home deaths. And they did it based on their patient population where they were. So the nursing home said, three people in my nursing home died today. The hospital said we had five people in the hospital that died today. And then in the middle of April, end of April of 2020, the press started asking a different question, which was, what if you were a nursing home patient who left the nursing home, went to the hospital and died in the hospital? That person like, how many of those people died? And so then I write in the book, we went back and did this retrospective, we issued up to a dozen surveys to the nursing homes who, by the way, at the time were dealing with COVID and were completely overwhelmed and asked them all these retrospective questions. And then they start reporting in all of these numbers that were clearly wrong. Some nursing homes were reporting deaths going back to December of 2019 before COVID was even here. Some nursing homes were reporting anticipated death dates in the future. Some nursing homes said every single patient that left here, we believe died of COVID, whether we know it or not. And so it was a forensic nightmare, which then and fast forward to August of 2020 we underwent this audit and then ended up releasing the numbers in January. But that was where the controversy came from. And that's another thing we're looking back on it, had we known that that number was going to become a political football, in March of 2020 when we were standing in the war room we would have just said, have nursing homes report the people that leave there and confirm with the hospitals that they died and we can report that subset earlier. But that was another one of those, it almost felt like manufactured controversies, but it took real life pain and sort of weaponized it and it turned into the scandal that spiraled out of control.
GR: You're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher and I'm talking with Melissa DeRosa, former Secretary to Governor Andrew Cuomo. She recently published a memoir titled, “What's Left Unsaid: My Life at the Center of Power, Politics and Crisis” and we've been discussing her book. So I've got a kind of a retrospective hypothetical political question for you about your boss. In 2020, Andrew Cuomo was arguably at his political peak, and certainly the Biden people didn't want him to be running for president, you talked about that in your book. He ultimately cooperated with them, stayed out of the race. Do you think, looking back on it now, he should have run for president then, that was the moment he should have run for president, 2020?
MD: You know, if he had run for president in 2020, I have no doubt in my mind he would have been the Democratic nominee and beaten Biden. But the problem is, Andrew Cuomo was exactly where he needed to be for the state of New York in 2020 and if he were running for president back then in the midst of that pandemic, every decision he made would have been viewed from the onset as a political one. And we only successfully brought down the curve, crushed the curve in New York, beat back COVID because the people of the state of New York I think honestly, watched those press conferences every day he gave them the facts as he knew them, he made an emotional appeal to stay home and everyone sort of fell in line. And not just in New York, but nationwide he stepped into that leadership role. And so I think on the one hand, was that his moment? Yeah, I think politically that was his moment, he would have been the nominee. On the other hand, I think that it was a much higher calling that he be governor of the state of New York during that once in a lifetime pandemic and not be viewed through a political lens, because I think if that had been the case, COVID would have spiraled further out of control here and it would have resulted in many more deaths.
GR: So I asked you earlier about things you might, you wish the administration might have done differently. And if I were making a list of those things, this would be on top of mine, so I wanted to get your sense of it. Did the governor make a mistake putting out that book about COVID?
MD: Yes. Yes, and you know, it was one of those things that, again, I think had we had the foresight to know that it was going to spiral out of control the way that it did, I wish I would have thrown my body in front of it. And there are some things that as staff, you know, you look back and say, oh, I should have done that differently because I had the ear of the principal. And that was one of those things where I should have thrown my body in front of it because it just turned out to be such a political headache, and to what end?
GR: And on that point, I don't mean to be too harsh with you here, but I mean, you're obviously (an) extremely politically intelligent person and you've got a team of people around you that were that way. How did you get that one wrong? Because it seems like the optics to me were just begging...
MD: Obvious? Yeah. (laughter)
GR: (laughter)
MD: No, I mean, and I write about this in the book, it was the end of June of 2020, and we just finished the briefings, the daily briefings which obviously we picked up late. But the 111 day briefings had just finished and we had brought the positivity down below 1% in New York sort of consistently, and it stayed there for three months. And it was like the way Andrew Cuomo's brain works is always like, what's next, what's next, what's next? And it was like the minute we ended those briefings, he sort of was like, we should do this and I'm going to write this book and I'm going to tell the story of what happened and we're going to get it published immediately so that the rest of the country can learn from what we lived through in the first wave, because they're all going to get it in the second wave. And it was really a crash project. You know, it was done over the summer in like a six week time period, and it was published in October. And so, you know, it's interesting to me because some people have tried to, the assembly in their impeachment report said, you know, oh, they were doing this during this critical time, and it was like, well, it was actually during the summer of 2020 when the positivity was below 1% and we were taking sort of a collective breather. And there was no point during that process where his attention was being taken away from COVID. It was like he wrote that book so quickly, a lot of it was done based on voice notes he took in real time. And the, I understood the goal of let's tell the story as it happens to the rest of the country can learn from it. But the, you know, making the money from it in the middle of all of that, you know, obviously was a huge political headache that he, you know, we never should have gone near. And just the timing of it, because I think it would have been different if COVID hadn't come back in the fall and then we were in the middle of a second wave. I think if we just beaten back COVID and that was that, I think it would have been a different proposition. But no, you're right. And I don't know if that was like, COVID brain, I was too tired, I wasn’t seeing straight, but no, I mean, I definitely hold myself responsible for not speaking up more on that one.
GR: If you've just joined us, you're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media and my guest is Melissa DeRosa. So here's my, I guess my $64,000 question and it may seem like a dumb one, but I am still mystified a little bit by this. Why did the governor decide to resign, given the circumstances? I mean, there are other political figures who have weathered arguably much worse, #MeToo types of accusations. No criminal charges have come from any of these and the criticism that the attorney general's report had some political motivation behind it does seem to have some plausibility to it. Why not just stick it out and force the legislatures’ hand? Make them vote?
MD: You know, I write about this in the book extensively. It was such an emotional time and this is the other thing that people sort of forget, I mean, there were a couple of factors. Number one, the legislature said they were going to impeach, they had the votes. Say what you will about Andrew Cuomo, he can count votes better than literally anyone I've ever seen in my life. And there's no due process guaranteed in the New York State Constitution. There's no, you know, high crimes and misdemeanors like there is at a federal level. It is purely in New York, a political process, the impeachment process. And I believed, he believed they were going to do it and they had the votes to do it. So it would have just been a kangaroo court. But secondly, you know, when that report came out and Joe Biden came out and called for the governor's resignation based on pure politics, by the way, and I write this in the book and you know, it was Biden who I, it hurt me so much because I respected the president so much. We had a long relationship with him. I worked for him and Obama, the governor went back with his son, the governor went back with him, Mario Cuomo went back with him. He had been accused of sexual assault far worse than any accusation ever leveled at Andrew Cuomo. And he came out and said, I didn't read the report, but I saw the attorney general's press conference and he has to go. And when that firestorm kicked off and when the President of the United States of your own party goes out and says that, it created this avalanche that it was just impossible to stop, and every single member of Congress came out and the governors in the surrounding states came out. And, you know, the legislature and then on top of it, the press storm was so vicious. And you have to remember, this is after two years of dealing with COVID where essentially nobody slept, we were all processing in real time emotional trauma that I think we didn't even realize we were living through at the time of making life and death decisions and the weight of all of that, and the sleepless nights and the stress and, you know, the isolation of being away from our family, the pressures of being in the national spotlight, all of that sort of combined. And then the press was not just going after him, the press was going after me, the press was going after his brother, the press was going after some of our longtime advisers, every day, relentlessly. And I write in the book about one moment, Maureen Dowd wrote a column where she essentially compared me to Hitler's enabler, and she compared a number of our top advisers to Hitler's enabler. Now, when you look back on it, it's like everyone had lost their collective minds. Andrew Cuomo was accused of, you know, everyone throws a number 11 around. What people don't realize in that number 11 is that, it's a kiss on the cheek, a hand on the waist for a photograph. You know, calling someone sweetheart, saying, “ciao bella” when you walk out of the room, you know, these are not allegations of assault. This is not Harvey Weinstein type behavior. But the media frenzy and the political insanity of sort of #MeToo and the politics of the moment met, and I couldn't take it anymore. And I write about in the book when I went to the governor's mansion to tell him like, I couldn't put my family through it anymore. You know, they were watching me be pilloried in the press, it was killing them. It was killing me. It was hurting his children, it was hurting his brother. And so there was this very human moment where I think he understood the only way it was going to stop for the people around him even more than himself, was to step down. And, you know, looking back on that hindsight 20-20, could he have stayed and fought? I mean, I still go back to the answer of the legislature was going to impeach him. And, you know, you look at recent things the legislature has done, and this is a little weedsy for your listenership, but there was a Justice LaSalle that they put up for the Court of Appeals last year and this is a totally different type of scenario, but completely tarred and feathered the guy, completely distorted his judicial record. This was a public servant for years and years, made him out to be anti-woman, anti-labor, because he was basically making legal calls as a judge. They then gave him the hearing, they all announced their votes before they went into the hearing and it was a kangaroo court. And that's what it would have been, but Andrew Cuomo on steroids, and in the midst of it, we were fighting COVID, we were trying to get vaccines in arms were trying to get the economy back up and running and the emotional toll was too great. So that's a long answer, but it's a hard question.
GR: But it's an important issue and it's an interesting answer. We got about a minute and a half left. I want to try to squeeze two questions in, if I can. So we're going to go into sort of semi-lightning round here. But at the end of your book, you reflect on the value of government and the good things that government can do for people, especially during a crisis like COVID. I just wanted to hear you say a few words about that, about your view about the proper role of government.
MD: You know, look, government, I write that in the book, during COVID, you saw the best and the worst of government. And in that moment in New York State, the government came together. We built field hospitals, we stood up drive through testing sites. We hardened our hospital system, we brought in PPE, we came together and we saved lives. And very rarely can you point to a time in history other than war where you can say we saved lives. And in COVID, I think you saw that great moment.
GR: Yeah. And the final question is, I read an account of a public discussion of this book that you did recently in Albany. And according to that report, you indicated, I'll say, in very strong fashion, that you were interested in planning on going back into politics. Just a couple of seconds left. What form might that new activity take?
MD: You know, we'll see. But what I've learned in the last, you know, year since everything happened is I'm not done yet. I have more left to give and I shoot from the sidelines. And I'm a big believer that if you're going to do that, you better be prepared to get in the ring. So, we'll see, but stay tuned.
GR: Okay, we will. That was Melissa DeRosa. And again, her new book is titled, “What's Left Unsaid: My Life at the Center of Power, Politics and Crisis”. Whether you love Andrew Cuomo or you hate Andrew Cuomo, this book is a very interesting read. Ms. DeRosa, thanks so much for taking the time to talk with me.
MD: Thanks so much for having me.
GR: You’ve been listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media, conversations in the public interest.
Svetlana Slapšak on the Campbell Conversations
Feb 10, 2024
Program transcript:
Grant Reeher: Welcome to the Campbell Conversations, I'm Grant Reeher. Every once in a while on the program, we do something completely different, and that's what we're doing today. My guest is Svetlana Slapšak. She lives in Slovenia and is a specialist in Balkan studies and a historian and a writer. In 1993, she won the American Pen Freedom of Expression Award and in 2005 she was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. She's here with me today to discuss a new book that she coauthored with Noah Charney, titled, “The Slavic Myths”. Charney was a previous guest on the program discussing his book on women in art. But today, it's, “The Slavic Myths” and Ms. Slapšak, welcome to the program.
Svetlana Slapšak: Thank you.
GR: It's great to have you. Well, let me just start with a real basic question for our listeners. Who are the Slavs? How would you define the Slavic people?
SS: Very shortly, I would define Slavs as a huge, very mixed ethnic group. The biggest group in all Europe and in a part of Asia. And at the same time defined by one family of languages, which is Slavic languages. And that would be the shortest definition.
GR: Okay. And some, just to, maybe this is obvious to you, but just so we have a handle on Slavic languages, give us some examples of those languages, what are we talking about?
SS: Russian, Polish, Czech, Slovak, Serbian, Croatian, Montenegrin, recently, Macedonian and so on and so on. So there are many, of course, Baltic groups and Mediterranean groups and Balkan groups and so on and so on. It's a very complicated linguistic image, but it's extremely differentiated and very extremely funny to learn about.
GR: Okay, well, that gives us a much better idea, thanks. So you've written this book about the myths that are part of the tradition of these peoples. Why are their myths important for us to know beyond simply being stories that are passed down over the generations? And that's important, too, but is there a larger importance of these myths, do you think?
SS: Oh, definitely it is. Basically, the Slavic epic tradition and the traditional narratives in the Slavic countries was connected to ancient technique of telling stories in Homer and some others. And in fact, it's in the Balkans where the technique of this epic telling the story was analyzed and in a way discovered. And it was started by two Americans, Milton Parry and Albert Lord. So we have the notion of Singer of Tales, a person who has a treasury of motives and stories, already made stories in his head, and he can produce basically a story on any topic you give him, extempore, immediately. So that's one of the importance of the Slavic epic and oral tradition, basically. And the other thing is that the, let's say, the Slavic myths, some of them are overbearing the rest and this is Russian myths, of course. But the minor Slavic traditions and the narratives and epic traditions are also important. And Balkans among these especially important because it links the Mediterranean myths, the ancient myths, and also the midst of Central Europe and the Nordic myths. And to be different from both of them, it's completely chaotic without real structure and without real hierarchy. And that's what makes it so interesting.
GR: Oh, okay. So, well, you may have just given me a hint of the answer to this next question on what you just said. But if we think of the Slavic myths, and I'll ask you to talk about some of the specific ones in a little bit, but right now, if we think about these Slavic myths as a whole, group, are there any general characteristics of these myths? Are there any sort of ways that they are? You said they’re chaotic, but are they structured in any way, is there a certain type of moral or story they all point to?
SS: Oh, definitely they do. They also mean the tradition between the ancient myths of Europe and the Christianity. And in some ways, this translation or transition, if you want, is so interesting that it really gives new narratives and new meanings to some aspects of Christianity in Europe.
GR: Interesting. And so do they have these myths? Do they have any social or political purposes or messages that you could identify?
SS: They were built on that in the 19th century by intellectuals of all Slavic countries. So, let's say when you start with Slavic myths, you know that they are a lie, a gross lie (laughter) by intellectuals to promote their own nation. But when you clear up a bit, a lot of dust and a lot of state, let's say marmalade that they were dipped in, you'll find in fact many social nuances. Many ideas about slavery, about injustice, about justice winning at the end and so on and so on. They're deeply social, most of these myths. But of course, this estate, if you want, crust, had to be broken, had to be deconstructed to see what is beneath.
GR: And what about any kind of spiritual messages? You mentioned these connect sort of older stories of Christianity and maybe some of the, I heard Nordic in here as well, so, you know, are there any sort of spiritual messages that the Slavic myths are about?
SS: Oh, definitely. They went through Christianity, but they didn't accept the whole. And if we want to see the spiritual line that really unites Slavic mythology, it's shamanism. It's the practices of metempsychosis, of living through the lives of other creatures, not only humans, but also animals. So that's a spiritual line that goes even today that is recognizable in some rituals, even today.
GR: Okay, and when you said one of the social or political messages you mentioned just as winning out in the end and I, you know, I happened to be reading a second book in addition to yours about Poland right now. And I'm just struck by the tragedies over the centuries that that country and those people have been through. I mean, the one that I was obviously most familiar with was World War Two and then the aftermath of World War Two with the Soviet domination. But, my lord, it just goes back and back and back. And I guess my question is, justice winning out in the end, I think that's going to be a hard sell for some of the people in this area of the world, given all of the tragedy that they have lived through over the centuries. Tell me a little bit more about that.
SS: Definitely. There is something that links, if you want, the notion of ancient tragedy and the Slavic myths and in fact, the whole spiritual tradition. And that is the only genre that we certainly know is transferred for antiquity and never stopped. There's no seizure, it's always there. That's a women's lament over dead. From ancient Greece to today in the Balkans and in Greece, it's the same thing. So when you think about this, then you realize, yes, there's a tragedy in history of all these peoples. And when you think about Poland, well, that's a very special case because understanding Poland will make you understand the war between Russia and Ukraine today.
GR: Yes, I'm getting some insight into that. You're listening to The Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher, and I'm speaking with Svetlana Slapšak. She's the author of, “The Slavic Myths”. Okay, so what are some of the myths, specific myths that our listeners are going to be most likely to be familiar with? If they were opening your book they'd say, oh, okay, I know this story. What are some of the big ones there?
SS: Well, the big ones are certainly the vampire and werewolf. In America, the shortened version of vampire gave them, which all Americans know at least from film history. And it's something that really passed immediately into the popular literature in the West. And the American, Bram Stoker make it made it so, so known, so glorious in the whole world. You find it in comics, you find it in videogames. Everywhere there's a vampire, there's somewhere there's a vampire there, a series of them about vampires. And of course, it's an interesting phenomenon with werewolf because they exchange their roles and their names also because of the taboo of the name they are too powerful. And they're both related to one of the oldest and the strongest, the Balkan myths which is the myth of wolf. Wolf might be in some occasions, also the primary deity of the Balkans. So it's an interesting phenomenon which, well, vampire changes color, too. In the Balkans, he's red when they buried him and in the West, he's white (laughter), he sucked all the blood, he is white. So it's an interesting phenomenon which we follow in popular culture, also in some serious poetry. So that's a person that they would recognize immediately.
GR: And you say that the wolf then, a primary deity for the origin of some of these myths.
SS: Yeah.
GR: I'd like to hear a little bit more about that. As a deity, what is the wolf embodying? Is it about love? Is it about justice? Vengeance? What are the things that the wolf does a deity?
SS: Well, in my view, he's sacred because of the extreme structure of the wolf society. That's the thing that really impressed people. The wolf society is a complicated one with hierarchies, with relations, interrelations and so on and so on, so that impressed people. But also his strength, his power and being dangerous. He is revered because he might be good also. He is also a symbol of wisdom, practical wisdom. So he, like, he is something close to the Greek Metis, the practical intelligence, the Odysseus way of thinking, finding tricks to how to get out of trouble and so on and so on. So wolf is extremely multilateral creature and also he is a symbol of masculinity, but a well arranged masculinity which belongs to a certain society which behaves according to the rules and so on.
GR: Interesting, interesting. So those are some of the two big ones people are going to obviously be aware of, werewolves and vampires. What are some of the myths that would be unknown or less known to our listeners that you think are especially interesting?
SS: Well, there's my favorite who was totally unknown, and that's the Saint Friday if I translate her name. She's Saint Paraskevi in Greek because she's the day before Sabbath, the day of preparation, so that's this saint. But also her earlier roots go directly to Demeter (the) Greek goddess and also to Aphrodite. So she is a wise woman who protects women. Basically, women in activities like cleaning, weaving, finding medical plants, medicinal plants and so on and so on. And she was translated from the pagan myths to the Christian myths. And she functions in a very specific way in the Christian world, in the Balkans. She is the saint who sits right next to Saint Elias, who is also elected as a leading saint of the Olympic space of Christian saints in the Balkans. She's extremely powerful and she, exactly like Demeter, has a daughter. The father is not known and is not important at all, but the daughter is. So the story is about daughter and in Balkan and tradition, her daughter is called Sunday. It's Friday and Sunday, and between them is Saturday, which is the day of dead. So you see the whole link, which comes from very early times, goes through Christianity and comes back into the new world as a kind of pagan belief. And she is one of the saints that you will meet in churches in the Balkans, in Greece, in Bosnia, in Serbia, everywhere, Macedonia, everywhere. She has a special altar and special duties around women. She heals women, but not only that. For instance, there's one rule that might be remembered and useful, and that is if you wash your husband's shirt on Thursday evening, he will be sick on Friday (laughter).
GR: (laughter)
SS: So she's protecting women from aggressive, from male violence also, she's extremely important. So when you see the walls covered with votive gifts to Petka as she is named in the Slavic Balkan languages you will be surprised, and also Roma and Muslim women have Saint Petka as protectors. So there's one creature that we didn't know about, and it is extremely important.
GR: You know those connections are just fascinating. You're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher and I'm talking with Balkan studies specialist Svetlana Slapšak about her new book, “The Slavic Myths”. Ms. Slapšak was also nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 2005. Well, tell me how you went about collecting and selecting the myths that go into this book. How did you go about writing this up?
SS: Well, I was very scared of the Russian scientists and the Russian achievements in the domain of Slavic myths. They're certainly the most productive group that ever wrote about Slavic myths and some of the most famous names, we're writing, trying to construct the trials and the hierarchy in Slavic myths. That's exactly what I didn't want to do. I wanted to show their lack of hierarchy and their structures which are completely different. So yes, it is a kind of answer to many ruling ideas about Slavic mythology, but it's also about putting into the first plan, smaller Slavic groups of narratives and oral traditions, that was our ideas. And also to think about myths that we could interpret as cultural myths, founding / foundation myths. And that's why we include, for instance, the famous and legendary Czechish ruler Libuše. And some other ideas we brought in showing how much connections there are between the state ideologies and the interpretation of mythology. And also the main idea of the book was to be a popular book. Not a real scientific achievement, but a popular book which would tell the story and give some basic philological, contextual historical background to better understand these things. And we also put a lot of other myths which would not be included into these notes. So it's worth reading the whole book and not only the good stories. And the other thing is also that the idea was to include some aspects of Slavic myths, which are not usually discussed or researched. And there's a huge area which I absolutely adore, and that could not enter into this book. And this is about plants and the use of plants and magic with plants.
GR: So when you were doing the research in the writing for this book, you're obviously an expert in the field and you're very aware of it. Did you come across anything, though, that completely surprised you that you just had no idea about and it really struck you?
SS: But of course, the thing that struck me was going into detail about the myths which are common to different ethnic groups, not only Slavs at all, like Albanians and Greeks. That I knew about it, but when I gathered the real data and a lot of facts which would not enter the book, of course, that really surprised me. So that's a field of investigation for the Balkan researchers, basically for the Balkan researchers. And it's also a great initiative to make work together people from the West, especially from the West, with the native knowledge bearers from other parts to make these areas more known, more popular, more interesting. Well, also for for cartoons and video games, basically (laughter). They all did it there with, “The Witcher” on Netflix to make this world more known and more amicable and also more bearable.
GR: If you've just joined us, you're listening to The Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media and my guest is Svetlana Slapšak. She's the author of, “The Slavic Myths”. So, when you were finding some of these myths that you weren't aware of previously or even the ones that you were aware of and you looked more deeply into them, is there one particular myth that has stayed with you more than the others, got inside your head, maybe even haunted you?
SS: (laughter) Well, I am haunted by one person from the myths, which also was a profession in everyday life. And this is (unintelligible), the name is unpronounceable, but it comes from the Greek word stoicheion, element, and also element of weather. And these guys, which were Albanians, Montenegrins, Serbians and Bosnians, and also some Italians were able to control the winds and the tempests and so on and so on. And they were walking around through their rituals with the human nerves around their feet and stuff like that. This is really a magic creature, but it's also created from life because we know their names and we know their deeds and what they were doing to do their able to fly. One of them would deal with a tempest in Montenegro and then fly to Budapest, stuff like that (laughter). So, it's a creature that really works in your subconscious and appears in your dreams, I can tell you.
GR: And that's why it's haunting you, because it's shown up in your dreams?
SS: Yeah, absolutely (laughter).
GR: So I have to ask you, as I was looking through the book, one of the things that I thought was most memorable about it, in addition to the stories that you are telling, are the visuals in here. The woodblock prints are really splendid. Where did they come from, how did you how did you arrange those?
SS: Well, we did not that's Thames & Hudson editor’s job. They did it absolutely wonderfully. I was absolutely hypnotized when I was looking at these drawings. They're really, really wonderful. They have this character of wood cutting and at the same time, of course they are not, but they give a hint of primitive traditional, somewhere in time and at the same time, so, so, so impressive. Yeah, that's one of the best solutions for the book I could even dream of.
GR: Yeah. They really, really struck me. Well, so, we've got about five minutes left, and I wanted to switch gears unless there is something important about this book that I have not covered with you and then you can tell me what that is. But I wanted to switch gears and I wanted to ask you to tell me a little bit about the work that led to you being nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize, because that's obviously a big deal. And I wanted to hear more about the activities that you were doing that led people to want to recognize you that way.
SS: Oh, thank you for this question. I wanted to intervene, but I didn't dare not to steal time. I was, in effect, in a group of a thousand women proposed for a Nobel Prize. And it was an internet action and women from all over the world voted for women who they thought were fighters for peace. And we came up with a thousand names. That was a Swiss MP who decided to do this action. And she gathered these thousand names and went with them to the Nobel Committee, that's all. So, yes, I'm one of the thousand, that's all (laughter), let's put it into the real frame. But the other thing is, yes, I was activist for peace all of my life and I'm still is, so, I don't think I should be rewarded for that.
GR: So tell us a little bit about your peace activism then. We've only got about 3 minutes left or so. But what things have you been involved with over your life that that have had that…
SS: I was involved with since the ‘68, Let's face it, that's a crucial year in Europe, the university year of around Europe. But then, of course, the real thing happened by the end of (the) 80’s, the second half of (the) 80’s when the nationalisms started to tear down Yugoslavia. And I was in a party which was exclusively for the conservation of Yugoslavia and for peace. We didn't like it of course, that's obvious. But then I went to Slovenia to live with my husband and I was doing many peace activities there. And then, let's say since the beginning of the 90’s, there were so many occasions to breed for peace that I don't even remember how many wars and how many atrocities happened in that time, not only the Balkans, starting with Rwanda and Asia and so on and so on. So yes, today is especially tragic time when we think about wars and genocide.
GR: Absolutely. So you must have some feelings about the war in Ukraine, I'm guessing. It's not terribly far away from where you are. How have you experienced that?
SS: Well, Ukraine is, was very important for me because it's a country, it's a culture that was transferring some of the Western cultural modes to Russia, like the polyphonic music and stuff like that. And Ukraine is really very special in that sense. And when you think about how many artists, literates, actors, musicians came from Ukraine, your heart really hurts, so that's one thing. And the other thing is that when you think about Ukraine as a mixture of very, very many different ethnic groups and its links with Russia, it's really tragic that this culture, which is so important in the heart of the Slavic cultures at all, is something that has been destructed in front of our eyes. And the other thing is that we learn so much being a family and so much about violence against women, the first thing I think when there's war, there's violence, I think about women and children. So it's really something that makes me very sensitive to any kind of violence, animals too.
GR: Yeah. Well, you've lived through so much of it, and you have seen so many different violent conflicts as I think about the region of the world that you occupy. Do you have any optimism about how this war in Ukraine will ultimately end up?
SS: No, no. There's a disturbing tradition of long term wars in Europe in the past. So I hate to say it, but I'm not optimist at all. Revealing the possibilities of peace and reasonable behaving between the states is something that does not appear as a solution at this moment. So any appealing to rationalities, useless, I'm afraid.
GR: Well, we only have a few seconds left. This may be too much of a bit of a stretch, but thinking about those Slavic myths, thinking about the war in Ukraine, is there any sort of connection if the myths could be talking to the people in the conflict now, is there anything you think they would say?
SS: That would be great. Yeah, what they would say first of all, it would be, the myths would have a sense of humor. These myths are really the most useful and the most pedagogically applicable today. So the myths with humor, the animals, the wise animal could trick the others, the tricksters generally, are the figures that could help at this moment.
GR: Well, I'll keep hoping in that regard.
SS: Me too (laughter).
GR: I'm glad we were able to end that. That was Svetlana Slapšak and again, her new book is titled, “The Slavic Myths”. It's a really beautiful book, I think it's informative and entertaining and I think our listeners would enjoy it. Ms. Slapšak, thanks so much for taking the time to talk with me. It was really wonderful to meet you.
SS: Thank you for inviting me, bye bye.
GR: You've been listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media, conversations and the public interest.
Edward Segal on the Campbell Conversations
Jan 29, 2024
Theodore Roosevelt campaigns from the back of a train in 1905.( Library of Congress, Prints and Photos Division)
Using trains in political campaigns may seem antiquated, but the process is still alive. This week, Grant Reeher talks with Edward Segal, a highly experienced campaign manager and press secretary, and is a student of the political use of trains. Segal is the author of "Whistle-Stop Politics: Campaign Trains and the Reporters Who Covered Them."
Will Barclay and Rachel May on the Campbell Conversations
Jan 20, 2024
Will Barclay / Rachel May
Program transcript:
Grant Reeher: Welcome to the Campbell Conversations. I'm Grant Reeher. Governor Hochul recently delivered her State of the State speech and then subsequently presented her budget. Now the legislature will consider that budget. As we've done in past years, we're going to hear some reactions from both sides of the aisle in the state legislature. But today, we're doing it a bit differently in that we'll hear first from one representative and then the other. And this was done just for scheduling reasons. My guest for the first half of the program is State Senator Rachel May. Senator May, a Democrat, represents the 48th Senate District and is the chair of the Senate Committee on Small and Medium Cities. She's been on the program many times before. Senator May, welcome back and it's good to see you again.
State Senator Rachel May: Thank you, Grant. Always glad to be here.
GR: All right. Well, let me just start with the state of the state. The governor seemed in this speech to pull in her wings a little bit in terms of larger proposed initiatives concerning affordable housing, for instance. Was that your sense, too in listening to it? And what is your view of that?
RM: Yeah, I felt like she tried to put on an optimistic face, but generally, she was pretty small bore in the state of the state. I think that was true. She did lean into the AI issue and some other things that I think are important. But in general, yeah, it was I was sad. I have been sad in general because I'm working very hard on housing. We hear every day from people who are struggling to find affordable housing in our district, and I hope she will be a partner in that as we move forward.
GR: And also, it seemed to my ear that she tacked a bit right on crime and criminal justice. And that's been a big issue in the state in recent years. Was there anything there that you had concerns about or that you liked hearing from her in that regard?
RM: Well, I think that was true in her campaign as well. I think she has been seeing herself as presenting kind of a opposition to the legislature on criminal justice, even though I don't think, in fact, the analysis of what we have done is really true. But yeah, she did some of that as well. I guess I’d agree with that.
GR: And so you mentioned hearing some of those rhetoric in the campaign. Do you think what we saw then in the State of the State and we'll get into the budget a bit but you know, on housing, criminal justice, was this kind of a reaction to the relatively close shave she got in her election campaign do you think?
RM: That could be That could be. I have been a little sad and we've been, I think, pretty good allies of the governor, certainly in the campaign, but also in a lot of our legislation. But she kind of came out swinging at the legislature a little bit, which is, I think, strategically a mistake. We need to work together and I hope we will work together. I certainly want to work together with the governor on a lot of initiatives that I think could really help central New York.
GR: Well, I guess in that sense, thinking back a couple decades and maybe even more, it seems like beating up on the legislature is kind of a standard thing that governors in New York state do right?
RM: Yeah, I guess I had hoped with Hochul that she was a little more. I mean, she has been collaborative with the legislature on a number of things, but rhetorically, she was a little bit more willing to own that because we can do so much if we work together.
GR: So let's let's think about the budget, which is where obviously the big ideas and whatever ideas are being put out there have to manifest themselves in terms of money. She said in her budget address that the state can't keep spending like there's no tomorrow. I think that was her words. And nonetheless, the budget that she proposed does set a new record, I believe. Are we in this budget, do you think, seeing some effort on her part to turn a ship or make a course correction, or are we slowing the acceleration? What's the right metaphor for seeing the big picture here?
RM: Well, I think the big picture actually is that all year long we have been hearing that this budget was going to involve major cuts, that we were going to have an $8 billion deficit and then a $4 billion deficit. And all of a sudden there is no deficit when push comes to shove in this budget, which is a good thing because we don't want to have to be cutting back some of the things that we have worked so hard to put in place. So honestly, it's I think, yes, there will be some slowing down because we're not getting the kind of funding that we were getting from the federal government as pandemic relief in particular. But in general, this budget is essentially holding the line. There are a few things where I know that we will be fighting as a legislature to restore some things that she has cut. For my part, the clean water infrastructure cut in half. I mean, it has been it has been generous in the past, and I don't think anybody thought that would go on forever. But from $500 million down to $250 million, when every single municipality I talked to has issues with their water and sewer infrastructure. And this is expensive. And the more we have global warming and flooding and a lot of the pressures that municipalities are seeing on their water systems, we can't retrench, I don't think, in that area. That's one, for example, where I think we're going to be fighting.
GR: Do you expect problems with the education funding? Because that, I understand, was something that was at least cut back a lot from the previous couple budgets.
RM: So it's not an absolute cut. It’s a, my understanding and I haven't had time to really look through the details of it, is trying to shift the way foundation aid is funded. For a very long time, there was a hold harmless provision in foundation aid where school districts that were already overfunded still got increases year after year because I think it was the politically expedient thing to do, but it wasn't the right thing to do because there were other districts that were severely underfunded and the funding should have gone to those districts. And, you know, there are some Long Island districts that are very wealthy, some of the wealthiest in the country, and were continuing to get large increases under foundation aid for a long time. I'm I don't have a problem with trying to redistribute that. The place where I'm most concerned is with our rural districts and we do as Chair of the Commission on Rural Resources, but also as someone who represents a lot of small rural school districts, many of them are seeing cuts as well. And we've been hearing from them. And some of those cuts are because their enrollments are down, but their costs aren't down. They still have to have classroom teachers, even if there are fewer kids in the class, they still have to have all the services that they have. And so I think we will be looking hard at how she has the rethought foundation aid in some of those situations.
GR: With that belt-tightening, I guess, is one way to put it, when in the or at least, as you say, sort of strategically rethinking how the aid is distributed. When you say wealthier school districts, is that going to percolate down to some of the wealthier suburbs of Syracuse, do you think, in terms of changing what they were getting?
RM: It could, it could. But, you know, as the chair of the committee on our smaller cities, our upstate cities along the thruway corridor perennially rate among the cities in the country with the highest child poverty. Syracuse came in number two in the country this year. And the schools that have to deal with very concentrated poverty, that is extremely costly. They need a lot of staff who are helping kids, who have got learning disabilities, kids who don't speak English, kids who have trauma in their family and neighborhood lives, and or who just aren't getting, you know, dental care or vision care, all of those things. And the costs are very high. And I think it makes sense to invest in making sure that kids everywhere can succeed. So, yes, I think, you know, I will be pushing to make sure that our that those places where poverty has been concentrated get the kind of investments that they deserve.
GR: We've only got about 3 minutes left. I want to try to squeeze another question about the budget and then ask you something about the legislative session more generally. There was another piece of the proposed budget that the media really picked up on, which was the proposal to spend two and a half billion dollars to house and feed new migrants here that have been arriving here, including 500 million from the state reserve allocation. So what what are your reactions to that?
RM: Well, what are our alternatives? Honestly? I mean, these are people who come to New York who, you know, are going through the asylum process right or, you know, they've followed the rules so far they need a place to live. They need to be able to get to the point where they can get a job, make money, support their families. We also need more people in New York state, we've been complaining about the decline in our population for a long time. So what we find with refugees who come to this region, who have been coming for decades to this region, it takes them a little while to get settled. And then they become entrepreneurs, they become community leaders, They become very hardworking citizens or or, you know, permanent residents. And they contribute a lot to our communities. So I think that upfront investment is necessary.
GR: That's interesting, seeing that as an investment. Certainly, I can see what you're talking about in the city of Syracuse, thinking about all the different groups of different kinds of refugees that have been resettled here. Well, let's think about the legislative session. Are there things that you anticipate the legislature pushing, taking the lead on that are contained in the governor's State of the State?
RM: I was disappointed that she completely left out our waste reduction efforts, whether it's the bottle bill that I carry that would expand the bottle bill, increase the deposit, include a lot more beverages in the bottle bill, the extended producer responsibility. We're seeing a moment when Seneca Meadows Landfill is trying to expand in spite of a lot of opposition from people who live in the Finger Lakes, but also people who have trucks just plowing through their communities with trash from New York City. We've got to put a lot of effort, more effort than we are putting into reducing waste. And I'm sad that she didn't put that in. On the housing front. I have a lot. She had some proposals, but they all had to do with New York City. And I have a lot of legislation that I am working on and and really hoping to pass that would make it easier to build affordable housing here in central New York and upstate in general. So those are some areas where we're going to be working really hard.
GR: Well, we'll have to check back in with you as the session winds down to see how you fared and those things, they sound like important initiatives. That was State Senator Rachel May. Senator May, thanks so much again for taking the time to talk with me.
RM: Thank you, Grant.
GR: We're continuing our consideration of Governor Hochul’s State of the State address, and then her subsequently proposed budget, also looking toward the upcoming legislative session. We’ll now hear from Republican Assemblyman and Minority Leader Will Barclay. He represents the 120th Assembly District. Leader Barclay, welcome back to the program. Always good to see you again.
Assemblyman Will Barclay: Well, it’s good to be on the program. As always, I appreciate you giving me the opportunity to be interviewed by you.
GR: Oh great. Well, thanks for making the time. So let me just sort of follow what I did with Senator May in the top half of the program and we'll work our way through the State of the State and the budget. And let me start with the State of the State. The Governor, it seemed to most folks who heard this seemed to pull in her wings a bit in terms of proposed initiatives and the ambition of them, and particularly concerning affordable housing, for instance. Was that your sense of where the governor was going this time? And what's your view of that?
WB: Yeah, I would agree. It was a very staid speech. I don't think there are any kind of revolutionary proposals by the governor. Actually, her State of the State and her budget address were relatively similar. And you may be surprised to hear the script, but I actually was pleased with the message that the governor gave. I think finally a Democrat in Albany has recognized that we had some serious problems, that all New Yorkers were worried about, problems like crime, problems like affordability, problems like outmigration, things that I had been, I've been talking about my conference has been talking about for years. I was pleased the governor has recognized that these are serious problems. I think the question is ultimately, you know, what her solutions are and a recognition of why we got into those problems in the first place.
GR: Yeah, I want to come back to a couple of those things. Well, you mentioned crime. One of the things that I noticed others noticed is she did, seemed to tack a bit to the right on crime and criminal justice. Was there anything in particular there that you liked or that you still have concerns about?
WB: Well, yes. Again, I like the recognition that crime is a problem. Certainly, the shoplifting, smash and grab, as I guess is called now, has been a problem. She mentioned how crime rates are down, and that's true, and I'm happy that crime rates are down. But overall crime is still up, I think something like 33% since 2019. I don't think it's a mystery of why this is happening. We don't hold criminals accountable, unfortunately, anymore. And that's serious crimes that are down, which, again, is great. And I don’t want to deny that that's not good news. Those weren't cashless bail-eligible crimes in the first place. So when I point to the problems that we have with raising age with the bail reform or cashless bail clean slate, you know, these are all the policies we put in place over the last several years. As a result of these policies, we see crime rates have increased. So again, I'm pleased that there's recognition and I'm pleased that she wants to do something about it. And I'll be a willing partner. And I know our conference be a willing partner as long as we're serious about what we're trying to do. And ultimately, I happen to believe that you got to hold criminals accountable. You can't just have a rotating system where people get arrested and put right back on the street. And unfortunately, that's what these, you know, the past policies have caused. And in order to fix that, we're going to pull back on those policies.
GR: Now, let's think about the budget. You mentioned they were very similar, State of the State address and the budget. One of the things the governor said is “The state can't keep spending like there's no tomorrow.” But at the same time, correct me if I'm wrong, the budget did set another record. So is this, what are we seeing here? I'm trying to find the right metaphor for thinking of how to place this. One is – this is the beginning of a course correction. Another one is– we're just letting up on the accelerator pedal, but we're still giving gas to the car. How would we consider this?
WB: I think the cliche that I've been using is ‘spending like drunken sailors,’ but she didn’t go that far. But yeah, again, I'm pleased she’s recognized that we can't continue. Over the last five years, we've increased spending in New York state by $60 billion. And I had some staff in Albany look at this. And I think that's numbers. Something like bigger than two-thirds of all the other states' total budget. So clearly that was not a sustainable course. She did lower spending. I think it's now at 4.4%, which is a step in the right direction. With inflation, I think, you know, we're getting to the right numbers. We just can't continue to spend like we have over the last few years. So I'm glad that there's a recognition of that.
GR: And as part of her budget proposal, she included two and a half billion dollars to house and feed new migrants and added as part of that a $500 million from the state's fiscal reserves. What are your thoughts about that?
WB: Well, it's unfortunate. I don't know, what we have this right to shelter, what we're dealing with, the influx of migrants. You know, she mentioned the numbers that I think they're moving something like 10,000 migrants out of shelters a month. But they're increasing by 13,000 are coming in. So it's clearly a losing battle. And I think it just illustrates that unfortunate New Yorkers have to pay for, you know, the Democrats in Washington, particularly the Biden Administration's failure to secure our borders. I was happy that she said she was going to go to Washington and advocate for federal money, which I do think the federal government should be responsible for these costs. But I also advocate for a more secure border, and I would join her in doing that. And she did try to put some of the blame on the Republicans in Congress and maybe there's some to go there. I do think immigration reform needs a bipartisan solution. But that being said, the administration has control over the southern border and clearly it's not secure because people are coming in by droves.
GR: Senator May had a somewhat different take on this and looked at this in terms of something that you mentioned earlier, which is concerns about the state losing population and sort of saw the migrants as well, this is one way we can do something about this and noted how refugees in the city of Syracuse, for example, have added to both the culture and the economy there. And so she views all this money as kind of an investment in the future. Is that is is that a fair way to live?
WB: I mean, I find that as I would use tongue in cheek, sometimes I think that Governor Abbott's done more to increase New York's population or fix New York's outmigration population than any Democrat in Albany. So that's funny that she's spinning the idea that somehow this is a positive. I'm a pro-immigration Republican. I do believe in immigration, but I feel very strongly it ought to be legal immigration and not illegal immigration. This is a failure, again, by the federal government. If we need more people, let's have an honest policy debate about letting more people into the country through legal means, not through illegal migration.
GR: Well, now part of the budget also has to do with, as it always does, with school funding. And if I understand this correctly, she's proposing a change in school funding to allow the state to not always keep all towns at the same or more level of aid. And so the school districts that were particularly well funded may see less aid, and that's in order to sustain the funding for other schools that are needier. What is your view of the change and the school aid that's in her budget?
WB: I have to look at this closer and see, you know, everything in politics is local. So I want to understand how that's going to affect the school districts in my area. Unfortunately, many of them are low-wealth school districts. So they're the ones that are in desperate need of the aid. So I can't speak directly on how that's going to do it, although I again, here I am. I could be complimentary of a Democrat in the governor. I do think she recognizes that we can't continue school aid spending at the rate we've been spending. Something like we increased a six or $7 billion over the last couple of years. We simply just don't have the means to do that. So the idea that she's looking at ways to make our spending more efficient, that is driving the money where it's most needed, I'm open to that. And I do think, unfortunately, we just can't continue to increase spending the way we've been doing.
GR: So what is the legislature going to do with all of this and what might it also do on its own? Are there things that you would anticipate this year in the upcoming session that the legislature would be pushing and taking the lead on where the governor didn't really say anything or did not push for things?
WB: Well, first of all, I think let's just go back to criminal justice and crime and what she's proposed. I think she's going to have trouble getting any of that through the legislature. Unfortunately, my colleagues don't want to recognize that this is an issue and they don't want to recognize that the fact that some of the proposals, the ones I've mentioned before that they passed are contributing factors to this. So to pull back on any of those or just increase penalties. You know something that we haven’t looked at, say for people that have shoplift multiple times, you can aggregate those crimes so they can be charged with more serious penalties. They haven't shown any willingness to even address that. So I think that's going to be very challenging. In order to get that done, she's going to have to spend a lot of political capital. As seen unfortunately in Albany, what happens sometimes money is used as that political capital, so if we can get some sort of reform on crime, maybe she's going to have to spend more at schools. And that's really where we got into some of these predicaments. We never had any kind of real, you know, slowing down on our spending. And this, again, a little bit off on the spending, too, Grant as you kind of indicated, we're still spending a lot of money. We are. It's 200, I think her proposal is $233 billion, which is massive. But I've always said people often ask me, well, where would you cut? And we don't have to necessarily cut anything. Really, we have to slow the rate of growth of our spending. And we just got to get back down to more realistic terms. I mean, the last two years we're at 10% or 8%, and that's well beyond inflation, well beyond our means to be able to spend. So anyways, who knows? That always happens. A governor usually comes in a bit lower than what the legislature and then through negotiations you'll see increase in spending. Maybe there'll be some trade-off on policy. One thing the Assembly Senate majority has been against is putting any policy in the budget, which I can normally agree with, but generally the policy the Governor wants to put in the budget is something that I can support and she can't get it through otherwise stand alone because of the Democratic majorities in both houses.
GR: Yeah, the budget does act as kind of Christmas tree or however whatever metaphor we want for a lot of different things. We've we've only got about a couple of minutes left. I want to squeeze in a couple more questions if I can, but is your caucus in particular? I get a sense of the kinds of things that your caucus is going to be pushing back against and wants to make sure that are taken seriously regarding budget crime and so on. But is there anything kind of new initiative that your caucus will be trying to push as an idea to get the legislature to take up?
WB: We'll think about it. We'll talk about any new ideas. But usually, you know, I think going back to the three biggest issues that are concerning to New Yorkers is outmigration, affordability and crime. And I think there's things that we can do on affordability that we'll continue to push. You know, some are relatively obvious, like lowering taxes. Well, we've implemented let's take climate change policy in New York that is costing us billions of dollars and the cost benefit of that spending has not been demonstrated by anybody. So we're going to just keep raising those types of issues to show, you know, why are we doing this? Is this a good way to spend our money? And try to point out where we think it's been wasteful and leading to the unaffordability that we have, unfortunately, in New York state.
GR: Well, you've left me with just enough time to squeeze in one question about national politics, so I'm going to do that. You and I are talking before the New Hampshire primaries, after the Iowa caucuses for the Republican Party, at least. Where do you see this at this point? Is the Trump tide unstoppable? Does Nikki Haley have a chance? What's your sense of the terrain right now?
WB: Well, it certainly looks like Trump's going to win it, although I see the numbers in New Hampshire. He's ahead by, you know, a much smaller margin than he was in Iowa. I think whoever it's going to be the Republican nominee, I think there's rich, fertile ground for victories for, whether it's Nikki Haley or whether it's Trump or anyone else, because the President unfortunately for him this so deeply unpopular, so, you know, I'll support whoever the Republican nominee is and looks like it's going to be Trump at this time. I think probably, you know, I don't think long short of it, it looks like Trump's going to win. You know, maybe if Iowa turned out a little differently, someone could say that maybe another candidate has a chance. But, you know, all the polling you know, whatever showed ultimately that victory margin, I suspect, is going to be the same in New Hampshire.
GR: We'll have to leave it there. That was Assembly Minority Leader Will Barclay. Leader Barclay, as always, thanks so much for taking the time to talk with me. I really appreciate it.
WB: Yeah, thank you.
GR: You've been listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media, conversations in the public interest.
Noah Charney on the Campbell Conversations
Jan 13, 2024
Program transcript:
Grant Reeher: Welcome to the Campbell Conversations, I'm Grant Reeher. My guest is Noah Charney, he's an art historian who's written widely on art and history, including art crime. He's also a professor at the University of Ljubljana in Slovenia and he's here with me today because he has recently published a book titled, “Brushed Aside: The Untold Story of Women in Art”. He's also the author of, “The 12-Hour Art Expert: Everything You Need to Know about Art in a Dozen Masterpieces” and, “The Devil in the Gallery: How Scandal, Shock, and Rivalry Shaped the Art World”. Professor Charney, welcome to the program.
Noah Charney: Thanks so much for having me.
GR: Well, it's great to have you on. Let me just start with a departure point for your book. And one of them is a famous essay by the late feminist art historian Linda Nochlin, titled, “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” and your book argues two things about that. First, that there have indeed been a lot of great women artists throughout history, and also that women have had a great influence on the course of art. So I want to unpack those two things a little bit as we talk here today. And first, and maybe this is just an overly obvious question, but why have the contributions of women been overlooked in terms of art history and even overlooked more recently?
NC: Well, why women have been largely overlooked, it comes down to the patriarchal narrative of how history has been written. And you can see this in various different fields, and it's no different from others. The story of art is really one that involved, initially, artists who were part of studios who would be in the charge of a master. A master is someone who was licensed to run an artistic studio to produce art, to be commissioned for projects. And they were inevitably men, and they would fill their studio with assistants and apprentices who were also men or boys from age anywhere from 8 to 18. And it was a sort of locker room style atmosphere. And the board of people usually called the Guild of Saint Luke for painters, because Saint Lucas, the patron saint of painters in various towns in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, would have been run all by men. And so when it comes time for a young artist to submit their masterpiece, which is a term we use now for any great work of art, but originally was the work based on which you would be determined to be ready to be a master on your own, then it was men who were given the primary seat. The only women we had historically who created works of art that we know of were ones who had either a partner or a parent who essentially taught them, informally initially, before the age of academies. And that's really the reason why for the first many thousands of years, most artists with only a handful of exceptions have been men. I should say that probably the very first human artists were women. In fact, most of the cave painting hand imprints from tens of thousands of years ago are female hands.
GR: That's interesting. So I know that we could talk for the entire program just about you naming these people and explaining them. But briefly, if you could, who are some of the greatest women artists? Throw me out some greatest hits there.
NC: Well, there's some examples that are really household names, but almost all of them are contemporary or second half of the 20th century artists. And one of my goals is to highlight people from as many different periods historically, styles and media as I could. So the format I chose was, (the) first half of the book is a history of artistic movements in a very traditional sense in talking about the various “-isms” through history, focusing primarily on European art, but also stepping beyond it. But instead of choosing one of the cliché male artists who are appearing in all of the most famous art history 101 textbooks, I used a female artist as a representative.
GR: Okay.
NC: So there are going to be many that people likely won't have heard of, but there are many that people will have. For instance, Marina Abramović wrote the afterword for the book and is the representative of conceptual art. Frida Kahlo, Georgia O'Keeffe, Camille Claudel, there are lots of them in the second half of the 20th century, really, from the period of Modernism forward and after World War Two in particular, it no longer becomes a surprise or even noteworthy that there's a significant woman artist. But if we look back to historical periods dating back, including thousands of years, then there are a constellation of just a few that we can pick out, often through archival sources. And we don't necessarily have a work that we know is by them. But then later on, when we get particularly to the Renaissance and the early modern period, there are plenty of them who I would qualify as truly great.
GR: And so tell me about some of the ways that women have influenced the course of art over time and reveal some things to me about that.
NC: So one of the things that we have is a bias towards the top let's say 1% most influential and revolutionary artists in history and those are the ones we tend to study over and over. And we forget that that represents, you know, a few hundred big names if we're really casting a large net. But that's not the vast majority of artists. And so those are the ones that tend to be in our headlights, the ones that we tend to remember and the ones that are written up in history books as being turning points. And there are fewer women on that list than one might like, but they're not entirely absent. So one of the things that I tried to do is look at the way women have influenced the course of art from a variety of different angles, artists being only one of them. There are some very good other books about women artists, but mine also touches on women as influencers in terms of being critics and scholars, patrons, professors, there's a whole wide array. In terms of female artists, we can just look through some small examples that I'll pull out, small in terms of the quantity, but not in terms of the influence. If we look to drip painting or all around painting, which is credited to Jackson Pollock with his, “Galaxy” painting in 1947, it was actually invented by a Ukrainian grandmother who was living in Brooklyn named Janet Sobel, that was her Americanized name. In 1945 she created a drip painting in her apartment called, “Milky Way” and Jackson Pollock actually later admitted that he saw that work and was influenced to try drip painting himself. Now this is an example of someone developing a new technique that no one had seen before, and so she needs to get credit for the invention of it. But we also do have to credit Pollock with the promotion of it. He really became the front man because he was everyone's idea of the macho male artist who can't even sit still long enough to paint something naturalistic but is dancing around the canvas and it made for a great story and he's the one who was on the cover of Life magazine. But we have to give credit where it's due and that's just one example. We also have people, I might mention Properzia de’ Rossi who was a very influential sculptor who is described by Giorgio Vasari in his book, “Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects”, which was the bestselling book on art history, the first true book on art history back in 1550. He mentions Properzia among a handful of female artists who are featured in a way that some artists that you might think would be, are not at all. People like Jan van Eyck and Albrecht Dürer get no mention at all, whereas we have a chapter on influential female artists. We have others like Artemisia Gentileschi, who perhaps is another household name, one of the relatively few in this book who started painting in a Caravaggio-esque style, if you're familiar with Caravaggio, very dramatic dynamic chiaroscuro, that's the play of light emerging from darkness. And he has a very famous painting of Judith beheading Holofernes with blood splattering everywhere. And there's a version that, if you ask me, is better, of the same theme by Artemisia, inspired by his, but I think she did him one better. And she became a hugely influential female painter in Naples, primarily at the end of her life during the Baroque period. And yet we tend to gloss over these people because we have this patriarchal focus which is unfortunate.
GR: You're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher and I'm speaking with Noah Charney. He's a professor of art history at the University of Ljubljana in Slovenia, and he's the author of, “Brushed Aside: The Untold Story of Women in Art”. Well, I noticed that about your book, too, that you get into, I'm going to talk about something you said just a few minutes ago, but women as critics and their influence there and then as patrons and collectors. So tell me a bit about those kinds of influences, either through money or social and cultural influence or through writing.
NC: So there are various ways that people can influence art beyond creating it, writing about it. We have people like Gertrude Stein, who is one of the great proponents of Picasso in particular, but she had a world class art collection at her home in Paris, and she was the center of a lively group of artists who would meet regularly and develop ideas, bouncing them off of each other. So that's one perspective we have. Hugely influential scholar Susan Sontag, whose book on photography is probably the most influential book ever written about photography as an artistic medium and how to look at photographs. And then we can go back to periods where a lot of the influential patrons of the arts were, in fact, patronesses, and we can go back in time to Roxelana, who was originally a concubine to the Turkish sultan, but who wound up being hugely influential as a commissioner of works of art. We have people who were in the New York arts scene, founding some of the most important art museums in New York. For example, MoMA was founded largely by three women, Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, Lillie P. Bliss and Mary Quinn Sullivan. Among the New York museums, we actually see that most of them were initially founded by society women who were at the forefront of an interest in contemporary art. Whereas the fuddy-duddy conservative men were stuck with the old masters. And I love old masters, but we have to tip our hat to the forward thinking female patrons whose influence and wealth and really their openness to new styles and avant-garde movements helped bring modern art to America.
GR: That's interesting. So changing the subject a bit, the female body as a subject for male artists, I guess a critic might say objectified, it's been a staple for centuries, whether that person is clothed or unclothed. And I was wondering whether either women artists or some of the kinds of people that you just talked about, patronesses and art critics, writers, have helped to reinterpret the female as a subject in important ways in art.
NC: Absolutely that's the case. So, there are a lot of examples of this, but I actually have a, I'm going to call it, because it sounds exciting, a lost chapter of this book that I didn't have the word count for to include, I sliced it out. I should have like a director's cut version on what women have represented in art, whether they were representing themselves as in a portrait, but very often they were idealized or they were allegorical personifications. For example, Justitia, or Justice, we have this concept because we've seen her on every courthouse in America as a blindfolded woman with a sword in one hand and scales in the other. Women were often included, and we have to be frank about this, as an object of the male gaze and especially nudes often couched as Venuses, but it was, in fact, an excuse to have a naked lady on your wall. And sometimes we have to be a little bit crass like that. But women have also tuned the tides a bit. And one example that I would highlight is Käthe Kollwitz’s, “Dead Child” (*Woman with Dead Child) is one of the most moving works of art I've ever seen. It's hard to look at, actually. And it shows this almost beastial sadness of a woman engulfing the body of her dead child. And it's something that you need to see and it's difficult to do so, but it's a level of emotional in-touchiness that I'm not sure a man would be capable of, especially that dynamic between a woman and their child. Another example of one of the most influential artists, both in terms of art and policy was Angelica Kauffman, who is a Swiss female painter and she was a real prodigy. And she also became one of the founders of the Royal Academy of Arts in London in 1768, one of only two women. And she was making statements about the policy of the Royal Academy, even as a member of it. For a very long time at salons and academies, women were not permitted to paint nude figures, and that prevented them from having access to accurate training for representing the body. And it was considered untoward for them to paint a naked man. And naked women models were often prostitutes before really the 19th century where professional modeling came in, and they simply weren't permitted to do so. And she played little games with this. She painted some murals for the Royal Academy and she joked that the only woman allowed in the nude painting studio was the one that she had painted on the ceiling. And then we also have the female gaze and we need to also be frank that women are allowed to have a sexualized dynamic to their gaze as much as men are. And there's a painting of a woman looking at the front of the famous Belvedere torso, which is a nude, hugely muscular torso that is all that remains of a statue of Hercules. And we can imagine that the woman is enjoying looking at the front of it with the naughty bits and all the muscles, but we only see it from the back. But, so sometimes you can slip in these subversive elements and shift the power towards the female gaze and empower women through creating art by women, understanding women's perspective.
GR: You're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher and I'm talking with art history professor Noah Charney. He's the author of a new book titled, “Brushed Aside: The Untold Story of Women in Art” and we've been discussing this book. So before the break, you were talking about how women have influenced the way that female bodies are portrayed or female subjects are portrayed. And I had some other questions related that. Would you say that there's such a thing as, for example, a woman's or a female view of the natural world or of a landscape?
NC: That's a very good question, and I'm not sure I thought about it yet in those terms. That's why I love doing interviews like these, because you just get my brain bubbling.
GR: (laughter)
NC: You know, it's too easy, I think it's too facile to say that women are better in touch with their emotions. And so emotional themes, particularly to do with parenting, are likely to be created differently from a woman's perspective. I want to say that's not the case, but I think it sometimes is and you have paintings by like Berthe Morisot or Mary Cassatt, two female impressionists, and they are particularly renowned for their paintings of women with their babies. And it's a subject matter that men would be less likely to turn to and also less likely to handle in a sensitive way. We also have, you know, landscape paintings are paintings of animals by Rose Bonhur, who was a very influential female French painter who created huge large scale paintings of landscapes with animals in them, including of horses or cattle. So part of it may be a willingness on the part of women to look at subject matter that wasn't considered as, I want to say, cool, for lack of a better term, to paint. Men were more focused on, you know, of course, you have historically religious paintings and mythology or history painting, which is battle scenes and kings and what not, and the quieter, more thoughtful pieces, genre painting would have perhaps appealed less and you have very rarely women doing this. What was considered the most desirable commissions which were history, paintings, religious and mythological, and focusing more on things like domestic scenes, which I think they're better empowered to paint. That might be one example. So I try to avoid the clichés, but I do think that there's nothing wrong with women being able to handle subject matters related to women in a more sensitive way than perhaps more interestingly than men would.
GR: You may have just spoken to this, but I was also wondering whether you could say the same things about representations of the social world. And I think that you just alluded to that was talking about what kinds of scenes might be painted. Do you have any brief further thoughts on that aspect, the social world?
NC: Sure. Yeah, the social world, a lot of it depends on whether a work was commissioned or whether it was made on spec by the artist out of passion or with the idea to sell it. So historically, nothing was created, sculptures or paintings that were not commissioned because the raw materials were prohibitively expensive. Then when you get to the 19th century in particular, starting in the 18th, but in the 19th, you start to get artists who are creating works with the expectation that they'll find a market for it, but they haven't been specifically commissioned to do so. And you get some social commentary that's quite sensitive. Some of it's sardonic, like Hogarth’s, “The Rakes Progress” or Jan Steen paintings of people parting outside a country inn. You get (Henri de) Toulouse-Lautrec painting prostitutes, but with a very sensitive approach, not objectifying them, seeing them as humans. Maybe one that I would mention that I think is incredibly strong and maybe the first great work of what we would call identity art today, at the time it would not have been called as such, is the 1923 self-portrait by Romaine Brooks. It shows her wearing men's clothing, a top hat, a walking stick, a white collared shirt, dressed as if she's a gentleman about to go out on the town. And this may not seem like much today, but back in 1923 that was really making a bold statement and it's showcasing herself and saying, this is who I am, toying with gender roles and sort of confronting the viewer who in almost all cases would be a male viewer with questions about gender identity, sexuality and all these things. So I think hats off to someone who really founded a concept that we only really started to talk about in the last few years.
GR: If you've just joined us, you're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media and my guest is Noah Charney. He’s the author of, “Brushed Aside: The Untold Story of Women in Art”. So maybe I should have started my interview with this, but there's a big obvious question about this project, and you address it head on in a preliminary note at the beginning of your book. And I'm just going to read from your note here. “When I first proposed this book to my longtime editor, I admitted to feeling somewhat sheepish, being a Caucasian middle class male, writing a book about women in art.” Well, I'm less sure about how you being white middle class creates an issue for this topic that's probably for another program. But certainly being male raises some questions about this. So how does that question get resolved for you?
NC: Well, for me, it was really a question of whether there was a book that hadn't been written yet on this subject that I felt very strongly about. And if it hadn't been written yet, then I might as well be the one to try for it. So when I started to research this, many years ago now, there were almost no books that you could find about women and their influence in the story of art. There were some encyclopedic books about women artists. There are individual monographs about female artists like Frida Kahlo or Georgia O'Keeffe, but there were relatively few books about women in general and their role in the story of art. Since the book came out, or rather about a year before the book came out, there started to be more of them and I like that this is a trend that other people are hopping on. But most of the books that are available now are about female artists, and that's great and very important. My goal is to create something that's sort of a one stop shop to cover all aspects, a 360 degree look about how women have influenced the story of art. And I haven't seen that in any of the books available. There are some very important ones about aspects of it, like, “The Story of Art Without Men” by Kate Hessel is about great female artists. We have Whitney Chadwick's seminal book, which has been published in many editions about, “Women, Art and Society” (book title). But essentially taking those two, putting them together and looking at the other ways that women could influence art beyond picking up a chisel or paintbrush, that's something that I hadn't seen. So I figured, you know, I'd rather do it, even if maybe theoretically it would be better if a woman had taken it up. But you know, what you left out of that quote that my editor said to me is that you don't have to be Egyptian to write about Egyptology. And my goal is, I'm hugely sympathetic, I’m trying to be empowering in the writing and I hope that empowered feeling is what comes across when you finish reading it.
GR: We've got about 3 minutes left, and I want to try to squeeze a couple, just two questions in if I can before we have to stop. And the first one is, and this is where I may know enough to be a little dangerous, I don't know, but I've got, I've got one 1,000th of your expertize in art, but it is an interest of mine and I took several art history courses in college. And one of the things that I've always puzzled over is the relationship between art and politics. And I tended to see sort of politics influencing art. And one of my art history professors tended to see it more in terms of art influencing politics. I mean, that's a huge question, but, you know, in a minute or so, do you have any thoughts about that?
NC: Well, I mean, whether or not you're dealing with women, art can influence politics, but it's often doing one of two things. If it's institutional, commissioned by, you know, the man, the people who are running the show, whether that's the clergy or aristocracy, then it's promoting whatever their message is and it has a propagandistic aspect. But it is still influential because it's visual, not written. So you don't even have to be literate to be able to be confronted with it and engage with it. And it's a propaganda machine. Then we also have subversive element, where rarely is the artist the first one to come up with a subversive idea but the artwork can pass on that idea in a way that makes people think about it more deeply. So I would say that the artists themselves are rarely the ones leading the charge, but they can often have the enduring relic of the idea whether that's in favor of the powers that be, and that’s propaganda, or whether it's something subversive.
GR: I love that phrase, the enduring relic of the idea.
NC: I should write that down.
GR: Yeah, I'm going to too, and I will give you credit for it (laughter). So my last question, we just have a few seconds left, has this book that you've just done led you to consider telling the story of other historically disadvantaged or less seen kinds of artists?
NC: It actually has, but it led me to tell the story for, I just started working on one that is historically advantaged but nobody's told the story yet. The next book I'm working on is called, “The Art of Fatherhood”, and it's about how fathers have been depicted in various art forms from literature to the Bible to film to paintings and sculptures. And that's the patriarchy, literally, but there's no book about that specifically, so that's the next one I'm turning to.
GR: That sounds fascinating. We’re going to have to have you back on when that one comes out, looking forward to it.
NC: I’d love that.
GR: Unfortunately, that's all the time we have, I could speak to you for hours. That was Noah Charney and again, his new book is titled, “Brushed Aside: The Untold Story of Women in Art”. Professor Charney, thanks so much for taking the time to talk to me, really enjoyed this.
NC: Thanks so much, Grant.
GR: You've been listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media, conversations in the public interest.
Karen Keiser on the Campbell Conversations
Dec 30, 2023
Senator Karen Keiser
Program transcript:
Grant Reeher: Welcome to the Campbell Conversations, I'm Grant Reeher. My guest today is a senator in Washington State, Karen Keiser. Senator Keiser is currently the president pro tempore of that chamber and chairs the Labor and Commerce Committee. The Democrat represents a suburban district south of Seattle. Prior to serving in the state legislature, Senator Keiser was the communications director for a chapter of the AFL-CIO and also a television journalist. She's with me today because she has recently published a book titled, “Getting Elected is the Easy Part: Working and Winning in the State Legislature”. Senator Keiser, welcome to the program.
Karen Keiser: Thank you so much. It's very, very nice to be with you.
GR: Well, we're glad that you could make the time to be with us. So let me just start with the title, “Getting Elected Is the Easy Part”. In my career as a political scientist, I've spent a lot of time watching and speaking with candidates. And to me, at least, it seems like getting elected can be very hard, especially in a purple district. So tell me what message about politics and the legislature that your title is intended to convey.
KK: Right. Well, it's a little bit of a joke, but it's also the fact that we spend so much time, energy and money on getting elected and so little time on getting prepared to be a good lawmaker. And to becoming someone who can have what we call, “policy chops” to get stuff done. So you get elected, you come into a legislative body with the wind at your back thinking you're going to change the world overnight. Well, that doesn't happen, right? The next thing that happens is sort of cynicism or discouragement sets in. And a few years later, they sort of wander away. Now, if you're going to spend all that time or money getting elected and you're going to have all those advocates lined up to help you, and then you wander away and do something else after four or five years, that's a total waste of talent and effort. So it was my goal to encourage urge new lawmakers that get elected to know that there's a whole lot of stuff they can do, but they need to know how to work it and how to make it happen. And there's a lot of learning to happen. You don't just learn it overnight. It's kind of slow and steady.
GR: Well, your book has lots of great advice. And also, I think to the general reader, a lot of inside insights into how the place works. So let me ask you this though, I was very curious to hear your answer to this. You came in as a former broadcast journalist, and, as I said before, a communications director for an interest group. So you obviously come into this political world with a lot of knowledge and understanding, you've been a close observer of it. So I'm curious, as a candidate, let's take candidate first and then we'll get there as an elected official. But as a candidate running for office, what most surprised you, despite your previous knowledge, talking to these people?
KK: Well, I tell you, I never had run for office before. I had put my name on the ballot to become a precinct committee officer. But that was about it. The first election I had and I was in a purple district at that time, and the Republicans were in control of our Washington State House at that time. So my first election was tough and I think I won by less than two points, and it was hard fought. And I'll tell you, the most important thing I learned was talking to real people at their doorstep and hearing what they had to tell you about their neighborhood and what you learned about their neighborhood walking around it was extraordinarily important. It's just an intuition and grounding that you get just by that one on one conversation, it’s so important.
GR: Yeah, I've had the same impression watching, it's interesting that you say that. And then, so after you're elected and you start to serve, what is the thing about the legislature that most surprised you? Just, you weren't expecting to have to learn?
KK: Well, you know, I walked into that legislature with a lot of hubris because, yes, I had been a reporter, I had covered the legislature as a reporter, right? I had been in communications with the AFL-CIO. We reported on legislative issues and gone to committee hearings and so forth. So I thought I knew what I was doing and then I got elected and then I found out I didn't know anything. I needed to learn it from the ground up. And so one of the first things I learned, and I had, I believe it was a gift to be in the minority for the first few years of my career because I didn't get to do much. The Republicans in charge were out for revenge after being out of control for so long. So they didn't let any Democrats get anything done at that time. It was highly partisan right after the Newt Gingrich revolution thing. Anyway, so I was able to sit back, watch, observe and listen. And that's probably the most valuable lessons I've learned is to find out what people were, where they were really coming from, not what they were saying.
GR: Hmm. And as far as the way legislatures work, your book really lays that out. What do you think are the most important things about the working of a state legislature that the public doesn't know and or doesn't fully appreciate that you'd want to share with our listeners?
KK: Well, it really is like making sausage, that's an apt comparison. You know, it is mushing and mashing and grinding and flavoring, all of the pieces of the meat that you're going to end up with. So it is a slow process. That's one thing people don't really understand between the hearings, the committees, the gatekeepers, getting out of one chamber into a second chamber, getting out of both chambers, getting the governor to find something that he might want to veto because it has something in there that might upset him. All of those pieces have to be strategized and you have to think ahead. You can't just walk in and think, I'm going to have this wonderful hearing and people are going to testify. It's going to be wonderful. And think you've done your job. That's just setting the stage. There's so many steps to go after that. And that's what people learn slowly sometimes because it is a complicated process. And it's intentionally complicated because the vast majorities of bills that are introduced, die. They don’t (unintelligible) passed. And it always amuses me that in the first part of a legislative session that the public and the news media always report on bills that are introduced. Like, that's a big damn deal, ha! It's the very first baby step.
GR: It's interesting, I had some training in political philosophy. And there's a quote from this German philosopher, Max Weber, that what you are saying reminds me of, and that his definition of politics was the slow boring of hard boards.
KK: (laugher) That’s so appropriate! It took me 20 years, 20 years virtually, to get our state Paid Family and Medical Leave bill passed and into law. It was a very difficult, I actually passed it twice. The first time, then the Great Recession hit so got set aside and we had to start all over again. But it is a very slow, difficult process and if you don't persevere and maintain your intention and your goal, you won't get it done.
GR: You're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher, and I'm speaking with Washington State Senator Karen Keiser. She's the author of, “Getting Elected Is the Easy Part: Working and Winning in the State Legislature”. So is that family leave law that you just mentioned, would you regard that as your biggest accomplishment or success so far as an individual legislator?
KK: I'm not sure. It's really been a very popular program, and it was implemented during the pandemic and was incredibly helpful to tens of thousands of families. But getting, I worked very closely with the federal government on getting what was called Obamacare passed and pulling that end as well. I was health co-chair at the time and we worked very closely with the White House and with our congressional delegations to get that done. That was kind of the last time we were able to do that kind of coordination. And that was huge because we reduced our un-insurance rate for health care from 16% to 5%. So that was amazing. But then just two years ago, I was really thrilled to be able to pass overtime pay for farm workers. We have a large agricultural industry in our state. And as you probably know, Grant, way back in the 1930’s, the federal government excluded farm workers at the insistence of the southern Senators from the Fair Labor Standards Act. So they didn't get overtime, they didn't get any of the basic safety net labor standards. So it's, we're able at the state level, and we need to learn this lesson in all of our state legislatures to thread needles to get around some of our federal limits. We've done this on minimum wage, for example. We can do it on overtime, ee can do it on non-disclosure contracts as long as it's a contract issue that you're dealing with. It's all kinds of technical things. You can really make real change.
GR: Yeah. It's interesting that you brought that last piece of legislation up. Washington State a little bit ahead of New York on that, because New York just went through that decision to include the agricultural laborers and that has been very controversial. And you can imagine the dynamics between the downstate and the upstate where the upstate relies on that.
KK: That’s right, we have eastern and western, same problem.
GR: That's right. Yes, that's right. There's a book I'm going to blank on the name of the author, but the author (David Guterson) also wrote, “Snow Falling on Cedars” about the state of Washington. And makes a lot about that ridge of the Cascades dividing east and west, yeah.
KK: It's a beautiful book.
GR: Yeah. So, okay, those are the good things, right? So what have been your biggest disappointments or failures?
KK: I don't dwell on failures, but I have had my face plants, I'll tell you. One was, this was a really strange thing, I thought hairdressers should get, should be treated as employees, hairstylists should be treated as employees and earn things like unemployment insurance and worker compensation coverage and all of the other things that come with being an employee, health insurance and so forth. But we have a law in our state that allows hairdressers to purchase a chair in a salon, and then they become their own employee, their own independent contractor, if you would. And they have persuaded themselves that that independence is more important. So when we had a hearing on the bill, I had a thousand hairdressers just show up to protest (laughter) and they were stretched out, you know, into the parking lot. It was really something to hear. And of course, the entire hearing was them opposing my bill (laughter).
GR: So that one, that one didn't go anywhere, I take it.
KK: Oh, lots of bills don't go anywhere, as I said. And I think also one of your jobs is to provoke, to put forward the issue. So you provoke questions and questioning. I put forward a bill a couple of years ago to require that all internships be paid at least the minimum wage. Oh, well, listen, here's an issue. Do you know that we have all of our health professions as requiring people with degrees in nursing or whatever to have clinical hours? That means working on the job. It's a very valuable thing to do, but they don't get paid for it. In fact, they have to pay tuition to do it. The same with teaching, do you know that teachers go through their college, get their degree then they have to do student teaching. They don't get paid for that either. So when I open that box and sort of saw the incredible extent to which we are depending on unpaid labor for our professional training, I was shocked and appalled. But I realized this could not be changed in a year.
GR: You're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher, and I'm talking with Washington State Senator Karen Keiser. She's the president pro tempore of that body and she chairs the Labor and Commerce Committee there. She's also the author of, “Getting Elected Is the Easy Part: Working and Winning in the State Legislature” and we've been discussing her book. So you alluded to this, I think, a little bit earlier in our conversation, but I want to ask you a direct question about it. Political polarization, that is the, you know, the drawing apart of the two parties and that having a rigid line between them, the lack of cooperation across the aisle, the lack of even conversations across the aisle. It's arguably our deepest political challenge, I think, in recent decades for us as a nation. And for a long time, state and local offices seem to be less affected by that than the national political scene. But that seems to be changing or have changed, really. And I wanted to ask you about your experience about that, political polarization as you've experienced it in Washington State and have you seen it change since you were first elected to the State House back in 1996?
KK: Well, as I said Grant, when I was first elected, it was just after the Newt Gingrich Contract on America thing, and there was great animosity and polarization at that time. It was really harsh. And it had, when I when I contributed my work in the House, that the House chamber seems to have a much more rigid approach in terms of partisan alignment, maybe because many more members in the House generally, and you have caucuses that really depend on having discipline and people falling into line. And when I got over to the Senate, there's a real difference in culture between the two chambers. In my experience in the Senate, it is considered a virtue to try and get some bipartisan support. And it is not easy, but it is an effort and it works in the end. Because we have become more of a blue state than we used to be. We used to flip back and forth in our chambers, but I've been in the minority three times and in the majority three times. So you want to have relationships with people across the aisle because you don't know after the next election where you're going to be exactly. So there's that, don't have the hubris to think you're going to be in the majority all your life. And secondly, we've found that when you pass things on a simply partisan basis, it's possible that they will be repealed in the future. And in fact, and you've brought this up in your book, we currently in this political season have, I believe, five initiatives coming forward to repeal several bills that we passed in the last three or four years, including our Climate Commitment Act and it is going to be difficult. In the past, initiatives have been more proactive about things like raising the minimum wage or providing other benefits. This one is on repealing legislative action, which has a suite of initiatives that were bought and paid for by a very, very millionaire deep pocket advocate. And he paid for the signatures and he got the signatures to the ballot. And we're going to have to deal with the issues that he's bringing forward again.
GR: Often on those the names of those initiatives are intentionally misleading.
KK: Very misleading and very simple. Initiatives are bad law generally, they’re very poorly written and often have to be changed. But politicians are very leery of initiatives.
GR: So you've got a chapter in your book on compromise without compromising on values. We do hear that phrase a lot from elected officials. So convince me that this isn't only a slogan. Because it might seem that compromising to get something necessarily involves giving up something of what you value in order to get a deal at all.
KK: There's several different methods. Okay, fundamentally, I come out of a background where I negotiated union contracts, right? And union contracts are very similar in some ways. You want to come out of it with a win-win for everybody because you want the company to survive and you want your members to be better off. So that's going after something on a win-win basis as opposed to a zero sum basis and that's just a style of negotiating. Now to get there, generally, I find that you need to have some things to give away, which means your original bill has to have some items that you will work, you know you could give away. So always know your bottom line, know where you can give and where you have to walk away. And that's my fundamental approach to negotiating, and it's been pretty successful over time, but I had to learn it by doing.
GR: If you've just joined us, you're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media and my guest is Washington State Senator Karen Keiser. What different kinds, if you can name them or describe them, what different kinds of ambitions have you encountered from your colleagues as an elected official? And are there any kinds of ambitions that you think are dangerous to the system?
KK: Well, I don't like to categorize people too much. So, I would just say that some people come to a legislative body as a stepping stone in a game plan, and it may be a political game plan or it may be a professional game plan, but it's not viewed as an avocation or as a profession. It's viewed as a stepping stone to some other goal. And people realize after not very long that you're just in their way. So that's one ambition that I've seen. But I will also say the vast majority of legislators on both sides of the aisle are really in it because they care about their communities. They really care to make things better for the people that they represent. I will say some of them have a very narrow view of who they represent and maybe come from a very, very limited perspective. But one of the great things about legislatures are you meet people from all over who have different perspectives. Your jaw drops sometimes, I never will forget being told that requiring lifejackets when a kid is in a boat is an interference of parental rights. I was absolutely stunned at that assertion. That was beyond my comprehension. But that was one of our members and you had to work with her.
GR: I have a right to have my child drown (laughter).
KK: Yeah, exactly. And so, you do, your eyes wide and your jaw drops to the floor and you can't believe what you're hearing. But you then have to think about that because they're coming from somewhere that you've never been.
GR: Right. Yeah, it's interesting. So, now you've got a chapter in your book on balancing work and family life. And you mentioned this earlier, and thank you for the shout out, I wrote a book on state legislators in different states a while back and I found that that challenge was really huge for many of them. Just that's one of the things that surprised me was just how much they struggled with this and is not only the toll that the service that they were in, public service took on their family life in terms of time and commitments and so on, but also on their financial situation, because in most states, state and local legislators aren't paid very much, they're not as heavily professionalized as they are in other states and even in New York here. This is one of the states that's got the highest pay for state legislators in the country. Most of those folks would earn more and other jobs if they were in other jobs with their skill sets and their resume. So it often involves taking a pay cut. So tell me a bit of what you think about this challenge, what you've learned about it, concerns that you have about these kinds of issues.
KK: Well, it's a huge barrier I'm sorry to say, to so many people who could be wonderful lawmakers because they cannot afford to take a pay cut. Or most legislatures in our country, state legislatures are part time jobs. And even though they're part time in a session level, they're really not that part time. You work when you're out of session as well and your pay is part time. So it's very difficult for anybody who is not independently wealthy or having a spouse that supports them or having a job that they can keep and go to the legislature. I was so lucky to have an employer who allowed me to take unpaid leave while I was either campaigning or in the legislature or doing legislative work. And by not having to quit my job and take just a legislative salary, I could not have afforded to do that. I had three kids, I was a single mom, I couldn't do that. And most people have to figure that out before they take the plunge. This is very important for them to think about, because you're going to have to pay for daycare when you're campaigning and when you're in the legislature and all that kind of thing. But you don't have any benefits to take care of that except for a part time salary. You need to have a support system that can be dependent on. It doesn't have to be a spouse, it doesn't have to be a parent. It can be friends and other acquaintances that you can count on back home in your district. The other the other piece is not just financial, but it's also mental because you spend so much of your waking hours working on puzzling out problems or working on finding solutions or going to events because you have to make appearances. You know, I haven't had a 4th of July or Labor Day off in 20 years. And so you miss a lot of family time in that and it just has to be accommodated somehow. I used to take, I used to have a rule to basically take a month off in sometime in August or early September and just be. And I think that's a little bit of balance there. But it's a tough job and you have to think ahead to figure out how to do it. It is actually a barrier for people who, like I said, don't have, come from a secure background economically and don't have a secure situation with their family. I ended up getting divorced because I just couldn't balance it all. And I thought, well, I'll be a good mom but I wasn't a very good wife.
GR: I've heard I've heard those stories a lot from legislators. Well, we've got only about 2 minutes left or so, but I want to try to squeeze in two more questions, if I can. The first one is, your book was written, and you're open and honest about this, your book was written from your own experiences and perspectives as a liberal or progressive Democratic member of the state legislature. And oftentimes, I think as I'm reading it, it seems like you're kind of speaking to those folks primarily, not exclusively, but primarily so I just wanted to get you, if you could briefly tell me, because I have one final thing I want to ask you, but briefly, what value for a more conservative or moderate reader is going to be found in this book?
KK: Well, I think that the making of sausage is universal. What party you depend on or belong to doesn't matter. The process is the process and you're going to have to go through every step of that process, whichever way you go in terms of your political leanings. And I think the human reality is also something that is really beyond partisanship, which is you learn from other people that have different perspectives. And I have to admit, I learned from people who come from the Republican side of the aisle. And I hope that Republicans learn from the people on the Democratic side of the aisle, too. If you close your mind and your ears to learning, you might as well just hang it up.
GR: I think what you just said in my own view is one of the biggest problems with political polarization right now is that it does cause that closing of the mind to happen, unfortunately. So just about half a minute left. Final bottom line question for you, is politics still a noble profession?
KK: I don't know that it ever was a noble profession, but I do think that it is in danger right now that the public disdain and the sort of honest skepticism about politics is something we've always had in our country. But what I am getting very concerned about is this dark cynicism, which does seem to pervade almost all conversations now.
GR: Well, we'll have to leave it there. We didn't have that dark cynicism in our conversation, though, on a note which I'm glad. That was Karen Keiser and again, her new book is titled, “Getting Elected Is the Easy Part: Working and Winning in the State Legislature”. Senator Keiser, thanks so much for taking the time to talk with me, I really enjoyed this.
KK: Thank you very much, Grant.
GR: You've been listening to the conversations on WRVO Public Media, conversations in the public interest.
Marc Molinaro on the Campbell Conversations
Dec 23, 2023
Mark Molinaro
Program transcript:
Grant Reeher: Welcome to the Campbell Conversations, I'm Grant Reeher. My guest today is New York Congressman Marc Molinaro. The Republican was elected in November 2022 to represent the 19th District, a large geographic area that spans from Ithaca in the West to the Massachusetts border in the East and includes the city of Binghamton in the Southwest. Congressman Molinaro previously served as Dutchess County Executive and prior to that served in the New York State Assembly. And before all that, he was elected as mayor of the town of Tivoli at the age of 19. Along the way, he's been a Republican candidate for the governor of New York State. And he's appeared previously on this program. Congressman Molinaro, welcome back to the program. It's good to see you again.
Marc Molinaro: Glad to be with you again, Grant. And you've covered the obligatory one time calling me Congressman rule. Now it's Marc, just Marc.
GR: (laughter) Well, I don't know, I'll try.
MM: Please do.
GR: (laughter) Okay. Well, we have a lot to discuss and we'll kind of cover the waterfront today. But the last time that you and I spoke, you talked about, you know, you were kind of just getting going, and you talked about your interest in issues surrounding mental health and substance abuse treatment. So I wanted to start by asking you to share with our listeners what kinds of things you've been doing on that, what's been going on those fronts?
MM: I'm glad you asked. You know, I probably said something like and still believe, if our health care system in this country is in crisis, our mental health system is on life support. And I think that's fair. And we've seen certainly an increase in the acknowledgment and recognition of mental wellness as a concern and certainly a rise in the challenges people with mental wellness face. And so, you know, this is a, the 19th district of New York, the eleven counties of upstate New York is a really good test case, an example for the challenges we face. Too many people don't have access, ready access to services. And so expanding access to community based mental health services in communities like ours. So you have you know, you have a progressive community like Ithaca and you have a rural county like Chenango. You have student centers like the ones in Cortland and hills and mountains of Delaware County. And I say that in that, no matter where you live in communities like ours, getting the access and support you need if you're living with mental wellness issues is truly a challenge. So first, it's creating the connection. You know, the federal government rolled out 988, it was once referred to as the suicide hotline. I'm grateful that we've remarketed, rebranded. It is a mental health hotline. It's available, 988 available, you'll be connected no matter what challenge you might be faced with a mental health professional. But here's the problem. Unlike 911, when you dial 911, the FCC has a relationship and cell phone providers particularly have agreed to route those 911 calls to your geographic location. So they triangulate based on those cell towers, now we're getting wonky, and you get to your local 911 dispatcher. 988 is different. Even though the FCC had the resources and the dollars to move this forward a year ago, we're still in the stages where the technology reroutes you based on your area code. And so if you're calling and you're a student in Ithaca or Cortland, or you're by the way, somebody has moved from maybe my end of the district to your end of the district, you're routed to the service center that your area code is associated with it. So there may not be a local connection. Good professional people, but not able to say the campus student services center is available to you, the Binghamton Mental Wellness, you know, et cetera, is available to you. And so we're pushing the FCC, I'm leading the charge to push the FCC to move more aggressively to get that to happen. We fought and we're working pretty hard with our friends in Broome County and in Sullivan County. I think I talked about this, in my previous experience as a county executive, 12 years responsible for overseeing a whole host of things, including community based mental health. My home county launched what is now the most comprehensive, community based mental health infrastructure of any county in the country. And it is the model that New York State is trying to get counties like Broome and Cortland and others, Tompkins, to invest in. And so we're trying to direct some federal resources to Broome County to open a veterans mental health service center, service center for veterans. And we're working with Sullivan County to try to launch a stabilization center, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, in order to provide direct access. And that leaves nine more counties that we're working with one after another to try to expand access to those resources. I truly believe that by investing in mental wellness and mental health, you're not only helping the individual, but societally, more, even broadly, you're confronting a lot of other of our challenges from substance use disorder to those who are criminally involved to just general public health. And in many cases, mental health leads to better physical health. And all of those things can be benefited by expanding access.
GR: And you've also got, I believe, an initiative to try to change the way people think about those with mental health issues called, “Think Differently”. And say a little bit about that.
MM: Well, I'll be careful not to correct you, but to correct you, right?
GR: Go ahead.
MM: So the Think Differently initiative is focused on those with intellectual, physical and developmental disabilities.
GR: Okay.
MM: It’s okay. But there are there are many links. And in fact, I'd offer to you those, and you'll appreciate this, those in particular who are neurodivergent do end up with significant mental wellness concerns that are often undiagnosed. And so creating the stabilization centers like the one we created in my home county, my former home county, Dutchess. I’m living in green, beautiful Catskill, New York. And so in that situation, we trained our professionals to be aware and alert for those living with disabilities and the connection to mental health. But Think Differently is now a nationally recognized initiative meant to change the way in which we think and support those with intellectual developmental disabilities, breaking down barriers and creating opportunities. And let me just mention, you know, where this is a priority for me. If you ask most people to list the top ten things they're concerned about, perhaps services and support for those with disabilities isn't on your list unless you have a family member with a disability and then it's number one, because it is all consuming. Ask a politician what's on the top ten, they may not have it on their list. Some may get to it sooner or later. For me, it's well within our top ten. It's likely a little bit higher than that because this is a population, these are friends and neighbors who need a voice and need a champion. And so we had two successful Think Differently field days. These were an opportunity in the district to connect individuals with disabilities with service providers. I've introduced a number of Think Differently bills, a whole package of bills, everything from ensuring that emergency responders are aware of and have tools to respond to individuals with disabilities in the case of an emergency, to improving ADA compliance by the nation's largest rail provider, Amtrak. And so and everything in between and several of those bills are moving forward. I expect, in fact, one of them to come to the floor as soon as next week and we continue to expand. (The) Down Syndrome Diagnosis Act to be sure that those with young children who are diagnosed with Down syndrome have access to the supports their health insurance might provide, so on and so on. And what I'll tell you is, because you'll appreciate this as much as I do, when you're talking about mental wellness or issues related to those with disabilities, this isn't partisan. Nobody is fighting left or right. It's just is this your priority or not? And I've been blessed to work with tremendous community leaders and service providers around the district and wonderful Republican and Democrat leadership in both Washington and Albany to move these policies forward.
GR: Well, I appreciate your correction at the outset. Because of some of my family experiences and experiences that you and I share, I tend to lump all those things into one pot when I'm thinking about them, but it is important to separate them out. You're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher and I'm speaking with first term Congressman Marc Molinaro, who represents New York's 19th congressional district. Well, obviously since we last talked, there's been a lot that's gone on in the House of Representatives, perhaps the biggest thing has to do with the speaker.
MM: Yeah.
GR: You've got a new speaker, Mike Johnson. What are your early impressions of him as a leader of the House?
MM: Yeah, so I worked very hard to express to my colleagues that we have to deliver and we're not going to deliver for the people we serve, I'm not going to get the priorities that upstate New York has to the floor and federal government response if we were going to spend weeks in hallways trying to pick who the next speaker is. And I'll let you know, like most voters, my frustrations got the better of me. And I sort of spoke and said the things that many of my constituents are saying every day, which is, you’ve got to get the job done, you’ve got to get back to work. And we care deeply, we voters, we neighbors of upstate New York, care deeply about public safety and immigration and mental health and substance use, natural resource protection, so get back on the floor and get to work. And so I tell people, you know, we should be judged in part for those three weeks. I think it was a mistake certainly to oust the speaker. You had eight Republicans and every Democrat of the House vote to oust the speaker of the House. I just think it's a mistake that should not have occurred and it's something that should never be repeated. Mike Johnson, when I met with him and I'll tell you, I met with him and had a real deep heart to heart conversation before his name finally came to the floor in our conference meetings about making sure members like me and districts like ours are going to be listened to. And that's for me what matters. You know, the person who holds the gavel has some weight. But if that person is going to listen to us upstate New Yorkers who know too often what it's like to be ignored by federal and state government officials, if we're going to have a seat at the table, that's important to me. And sort of symbolically, he asked me to serve on the Escort Committee to help him, introduce him to the House, his very first days as a speaker. And even now, tomorrow we're going be sitting down, I'll be representing members like me and voters like the ones and neighbors like the ones I represent in a very important conversation about a future appropriations to support Israel, the consideration of concerns in Ukraine, border security. And so having a seat at the table is what's important because again, our voters deserve to have their voices heard and he's guaranteeing us an opportunity.
GR: Well, that's interesting to hear. And I do want to come back to both Israel and Ukraine a little bit later. But let me ask you another question about Johnson as speaker. You've already kind of alluded to this in different ways, but there have been some concerns expressed about him looking at his background and his career in the House up to the moment where he became speaker. And I think it's fair to say, and you said when you were talking about members like you, you know, you were distinguishing, I think, someone who's more to the middle than where he's been in his past. And just a couple examples here. As an attorney, for example, he argued for the criminalization of homosexuality, and as a House member, he contested the 2020 election results. You know, you're obviously a bit on the more moderate side. Do those kind of things worry you? I mean, it sounds like you feel at this point anyway, pretty reassured that that he's going to be inclusive and how he handles things.
MM: Well, he should be judged by his previous actions and how they will or will not apply now as a speaker. So, what you may have done as an individual member and voted as an individual member has to be tempered by the concept that as speaker, which is what he assured us, is that you got to build the coalitions, the consensus necessary move legislation. But of course, he should be judged for those things, as I should be judged for my opposition to some of those things. And so what I tell people is, just as, by the way, what I could have accomplished as a county executive, I have to now be judged on what I can accomplish as a member of Congress, they’re different roles and I think he understands that and I'm assured that he understands that. And so that's important, but I want to reassert, you know, I believe that the people I serve, you know, your neighbors and my neighbors, we truly know what it's like to be ignored by big business and employers leaving. We know what it's like to be overlooked by state officials because they're more concerned about the votes downstate. I want to be sure, regardless of who the speaker of the House is, that your voice is heard. And I have received that assurance both verbally and in action. And by the way, again, in a close majority like ours, our votes matter. And so here's an example, the Agriculture Appropriation bill, the budget for agriculture policy in this country had a provision that would have prohibited over the counter mailing of over the counter birth control pills. What does that have to do with agriculture policy? Nothing. And so I objected. And it is not moving forward and it will not move forward without readdressing those issues. And so, you know, I think, again, it's not a reflection on him. It's just this House is run by the people. And the people are you and your voices need to be heard. And he's assured me both by action and word that those voices, my voice is going to be at the table.
GR: You're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher, and I'm talking with Republican Congressman Marc Molinaro. He was elected in November of 2022 to represent New York's 19th congressional district. One of the things that the new speaker we were talking about, the new speaker before the break, one of the things that he will have to negotiate successfully which is going to be difficult, is the budget. And we're operating currently, the government is operating under another continuing resolution. The provisions of those resolutions are set to expire in January and in February. What do you think the prospects are for a successful negotiation of the budget that's going to be more permanent, that's going to get us out of that cycle of continuing resolutions?
MM: Well, let's be clear that we have a marriage of three, the House, the Senate and the president. And I wanted to offer you is everyone sees things just a little bit differently. And so the burden of this is not entirely on one House nor one branch, but all of us to find consensus. And so I will say that I worked aggressively to have a process that would move forward individual appropriations bills, up or down. Agriculture bill, I couldn't support, hasn't moved. Labor bill, which would have too much impact on the most vulnerable in our communities, I couldn't support, isn’t moving forward. National defense is, homeland security is. And so what I'd offer to you is that the House has adopted about 90% of the federal budget. Our bills are adopted waiting for the Senate. The Senate I think is about halfway there, 45%, and we are now in the midst of negotiations. What I spoke of earlier in fact tomorrow whenever your listeners hear this, it may have been yesterday by then but nevertheless, I'll be part of negotiation, speaking up for pragmatic members like us and upstate New Yorkers like we are. And so that process is ongoing, we can negotiate forward, but it is important that we respect taxpayers. We cannot continue to borrow way our kids’ future, the federal government continue to spend money it doesn't have. But at the same time, we need to balance that against the need to be responsible to taxpayers and constituents, the American people rely on services we provide. And finding that sweet spot, that balance is really what I'm focused on. And I'll tell you, it's how we got the debt ceiling agreement, the Fiscal Responsibility Act, which does, by the way, save $2 trillion in taxpayer money while at the same time being respectful of the fact that you can't just arbitrarily gut the budget without actually focusing on how you deliver services. And so these are the kinds of challenges that we face. But I'm confident we're making some good progress. I think that the continuing resolution, which got bipartisan support in both houses, speaks to the capacity to reach those agreements and the American people demand it. We have a bipartisan government by design or default, we need bipartisan solutions and that's what I'm focused on.
GR: And aid for Ukraine and aid for Israel and also thinking about the war in Israel more broadly. But those are both going to be part of the budget agenda. What are your views on aiding Israel and aiding Ukraine and also on the idea of treating and voting on those two things separately versus doing them together?
MM: Well, let me offer, generally my perspective is that America needs to continue to assert its leadership in the world and that leadership isn't based merely on strategic interests, but also on the advancement of individual liberty. The concept that everyone should enjoy the same God given rights that we protect or seek to protect here in this country. And that's needs to be balanced against the concern, which I share, that we cannot continue to enter into every conflict without an exit strategy, because there's just no capacity to do that and we don't want to further and put at risk America's servicemen and women when that is unnecessary to do so and so those are the bookends. I think in the case of, so in both cases, we're going to evaluate a Ukraine and an Israel supplemental. That actually is what will likely happen in the next 30 days. And I think that there needs to be oversight, accountability and some degree of certainty as to the mission in Ukraine so that we don't end up in a in a ceaseless battle. But in the same respect America needs to assert itself as a way of showing that to China and other aggressors like Putin and others that we're just not merely going to allow folks to take illegal and warlike actions in this world. So oversight accountability is important. Exit and sort of mission accomplished strategy is important and that's what really I'm going to ask to try to address. As it relates to Israel, we have a fundamental obligation to stand with Israel. And I understand, to a degree, the concerns that everyone has. But no, no one in the world is a more important ally to us than Israel. It's as simple as that, not just in the Middle East, but in the world. And because of that relationship we established in the 1940’s, we believe then as we do now, Israel is the embodiment of not only democratic principles, but human principles in the Middle East. And what we saw was a vile terrorist strike against innocent people. And in response to that, Israel has the right and in some case the responsibility to defend itself. And in that defense, sadly, there are going to be lives lost, that shouldn't be should be discounted in any way, we care deeply about this, but this is a moment of war. And Hamas, as terrorists themselves are embedded in every aspect of the Palestinian Authority and I use that lowercase p lowercase a. But within Gaza, Hamas has been emboldened and Israel has a right and responsibility to confront it, just as we would had we been attacked in such a way. And of course, just as we did when we were attacked, in 911.
GR: If you've just joined us, you're listening to The Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media and my guest is first term Congressman Marc Molinaro. I wanted to stick with the issue of Israel here, and this may be what we'll talk about for the final part of the program. You've alluded to this, but I wanted to dig a little deeper on it. Do you have any concerns though, in Israel's response that they're being overly aggressive or too general in some of their bombing strikes? Because those criticisms have been aired in this country and certainly around the world.
MM: I am concerned about the loss of any life. I say that fundamentally, I am concerned about the loss of any life. At the same time, I recognize that Israel was attacked and in response to that attack, because no one of authority has stood up to Hamas in in Gaza. Hamas has used individuals as human shields, they've embedded themselves strategically in communities and in neighborhood where innocent individuals live. And they they've used every tool, every vile tool that they can to act out to extinguish Israel. And as many leaders, Republicans and Democrats of good, solid background will say, if Israel doesn't press for the total elimination of Hamas, Hamas will only be emboldened and likely this will continue. And so I want us to be as sensitive to that as possible. It’s why, by the way, we worked very hard to get Israeli or American citizens in Israel out. Our offices worked to get dozens of people out of Israel. And it's why, by the way, if Israel believes that this hostage exchange is in their best interest, then they should continue to press, obviously, for this exchange. But I would offer to you that every hostage that Hamas has taken needs to be returned, they all need to come home. And so the fact that Hamas is harboring women and children as hostages should in its very self, speak to the need for Israel to be strong in its response. And frankly, I think America needs to support that.
GR: And as things can change rapidly in this area, I want to remind our listeners, you and I are talking on November 29th and so things may be different by the time they hear this. I wanted to ask you now about this issue, but from the standpoint of here at home, thinking about the United States. Have you been surprised? I mean, it's still the case that a majority of the nation supports Israel. But have you been surprised by the large numbers who have expressed deep concerns and in some cases very strong criticisms over Israel's behavior? Has that surprised you?
MM: I'm surprised by the level of by which those, that opposition is fueled by what is blatant anti-Semitism. In moments of war, there are those who support and those who oppose. But in this case, there are those who oppose simply on the grounds that they are engaging in, embracing of or party to anti-Semitism. And they could suggest they're not, but they are. Israel is a democracy that protects its minorities unlike any other nation in the Middle East. It elects its leaders and its leaders represent the people that live there. There is no other Middle Eastern country that protects its minorities as Israel does. That said, the level of anti-Semitism is truly frightening. I mean, it just truly is frightening. But I also will tell you that whether it's through K-12 or college education, we're missing opportunities to remind people of the horrible experience Jews around the world lived through, not only through the Holocaust, but coming into and up to the Holocaust. And there's just far too many of America's children who think, young people who think the Holocaust is was overstated and that somehow Israel is the aggressor. We have to get back to educating people to be critical thinkers, but also to understand that the indiscriminate loss of millions of Jewish lives during the Holocaust led to this country standing shoulder to shoulder with our partners and friends in Israel. And there are just too many American Jews that are frightened. I mean, I talk to them on college campuses, I've met with them in neighborhoods. They're just frightened because of the level of hate and anger and that needs to be confronted.
GR: I've got friends who are who are very frightened. And, you know, to your point about education, I've just seen some polling that was interesting. And that's that when you break it down by age, the support for Israel almost flip flops as you get younger and I think it speaks to what you're saying there. We only got about a minute and a half or so left, but I wanted to ask you one other question about this issue. And I'm going to say, I'm going to own the observation here, but then see what you think about it. It does seem to me that there is a segment on the left of this country that very quickly, I mean, in some cases even before Israel made a response, started leveling criticisms of Israel's not only its treatment of Palestinians, but even some of them seemed to suggest that the terrorist attack was somehow deserved or, you know, the country had it coming. And I'll have to say, you know, you hear a lot of these voices at colleges and universities. There was certainly a strong one at Cornell that went way over the line in your district. So, you know, in only about a minute. Does that concern you, and one of the things I'm trying to puzzle out, and you already spoke to it is, is anti-Semitism a cause or is it sort of an effect? Do people start by having this view of Israel and then it kind of bleeds over? I mean, you know, it's really complicated. I'm only giving you a minute, I'm sorry.
MM: The shortest answer to all three of those questions is yes, it concerns me. It is both in the cause and the outcome. I mean, and the fact that some will comfortably fall or find their way to anti-Semitic feelings or thoughts should be troubling enough to all of us. In other words, anti-Semitism is not an excuse for accepting something that you think is rightful. And I don't know if I describe that particularly correctly. But to suggest, there are those that either start from anti-Semitic views or end there and neither of them, none of that is acceptable. But again, this is what I think, we have to do better to educate kids and young people about history and critical thought. And I stand shoulder to shoulder with Israel's right to defend itself.
GR: Well, we'll have to leave it there. I'm sure we could talk about this for hours, but that was Marc Molinaro. Congressman Molinaro, thanks so much for taking the time to talk with me again, I really appreciate it.
MM: Anytime. Happy holidays, Merry Christmas.
GR: You too, you too. You've been listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media, conversations in the public interest.
Phyllis Chesler on the Campbell Conversations
Dec 16, 2023
Phyllis Chesler
Program transcript:
Grant Reeher: Hi, this is Grant Reeher. Some of you may strongly disagree with some of the views you're about to hear from my guest on this week's program. That in itself doesn't make it any different from other programs, but the topic this week is extremely politically charged and has deep emotions attached to it. For that reason, I want to remind you that these are the views of one guest, and not those of NPR or WRVO. Thank you.
Welcome to the Campbell Conversations. I'm Grant Reeher. My guest today is a lifelong feminist scholar and writer who is deeply concerned with some of the rhetoric from self-styled feminists that is critical of Israel and its war with Hamas and supportive of Hamas in Palestine. Phyllis Chesler is a psychotherapist and a professor emerita at City University of New York. She's written many books among them, “Women and Madness”, “An American Bride in Kabul”, and, “The New anti-Semitism”. Professor Chesler, welcome to the program.
Phyllis Chesler: My pleasure to be with you.
GR: Well, thanks for making the time. So let me just start right at the beginning with something very basic. Give me some examples, if you could, of the public expressions that you have been seeing recently and hearing that worry you and concern you.
PC: More than 62 days after Hamas launched a pogrom on steroids from Gaza into Israel, the public (audio cuts out) feminism (audio cuts out)… Nobody said this is rape, this is barbarism, we believe this happened. They shot their own footage joyfully. And yet feminist icon after feminist icon, feminist listserv after feminist listserv said nothing. They didn't decry it. When they spoke, most said yes. But the Palestinian civilians are in danger and they see as the rest of the academy and the United Nations, all human rights groups and the media in general, they see Israel as the Nazi apartheid nation state, complete big lie, a lethal lie and they think that Hamas, funded by Iran, which has America in its gunsights, they think that Hamas, a terrorist group, are resistance fighters. And in the streets of our country, they're marching in favor of death, in favor of genocide. They denying what they've seen with their own eyes. So that's one example.
GR: Well, I made a, give you perhaps another one you'll want to put on your list, and unfortunately it's from Syracuse University. But I wanted to get your reaction to this, this one caught my eye. This was a statement that was made public from the Department of Women's and Gender Studies. And well, let me read it to you, and I'll just read you the first paragraph. “We…” and this was this was a statement that was made public, and it was also repeated by some faculty in their classes, “We, members of the Women's and Gender Studies Department at Syracuse University mourn the lives claimed by the violence in Palestine and Israel and denounce the escalating Israeli military attacks on Palestinians in Gaza. This position reflects our longstanding feminist commitments to anti-racist education, emancipatory politics and decolonial praxis. We are in solidarity with the Palestinian people in their struggle against Israeli settler colonialism and occupation and support Palestinians in Gaza who are being subjected to ongoing Israeli military violence through indiscriminate bombing, collective punishment of civilians, and the prohibition of life sustaining resources such as water, food and electricity. We oppose the act of genocide…” I want to repeat that, “We oppose the act of genocide of a dispossessed people and population who are trapped and what the UN, Israeli and international human rights organizations have long called an open-air prison”. Okay, so that seems to be in the same vein then, of the things you’re talking about?
PC: Oh, absolutely, yes. But alas, or to cover my shame as a feminist, a real one, it's not just feminists. However, they have long been since the 1980’s, they are Stalinized and they are Palestinianized and they view America as the Big Satan as Iran does, and Israel as the little Satan. And they really are concerned with the occupation of a country called Palestine, which has never existed in history, more so than with the occupation of women's bodies in Gaza or on the British mandatory West Bank I call Judea and Samaria. They do not care. They will not say, well, Hamas is forcing women to a face veil and wear hijab and marry as children and marry into polygamous unions and they risk being honor killed if they won't marry their first cousin or want to leave a violent marriage. Because for them, what used to be radical feminism or real women's studies, which lasted about a decade I think, maybe 15 years at most, their concern now is with the abolition of prisons on behalf of black men with anti-racism, as long as it doesn't mean Jew hatred, that's not seen as racism. They're concerned with, if there's a colonizer, that means someone's colonized, someone's got to be blamed. And they have, against all evidence based truth, against proof, footage, videos, they've decided that Israel must be the oppressor. And so they repeat these indoctrinated lies, open-air prison, Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005, what occupation are they talking about? What open air prison? Unless they mean that Hamas, which is true enough, has created their own people, turn them into human shields for the purpose of debt, for good propaganda. But that's not what they mean. So why are they teaching at universities? Who are they?
GR: Well, I wanted to focus in on one phrase because it's something that I've been struggling with, and it is this use of the word genocide to describe what Israel is doing right now. And certainly it seems to me that people can have disagreements over whether the response of Israel is proportionate and whether it is careful enough or discriminate enough, I suppose to use the language here of the Women's Studies Department, but I have heard this a number of times, this use of the word genocide to describe it. First of all, by my understanding of what that word is, what Israel is doing cannot be considered genocide, it's not the indiscriminate and complete effort to eradicate a people. They're not rounding up people, civilians by the hundreds of thousands and just killing them and so that concerns me. But the other piece of this that concerns me is, given the history of the Jewish people, given the Holocaust and World War Two, to use that word, seems to me to be at the very best, incredibly insensitive. Now, I guess I'm giving my own opinion here, but I wanted to ask you about this, that's a hell of a loaded question I just asked you, and I apologize for that, but I just wanted to get your sense of the use of that word in this context.
PC: It's post-Orwellian. Black is white. It is such a reversal of reality. First, the Palestinian population or the Gazan population has grown while Israel did occupy Gaza and since it left Gaza. So if we're talking genocide, you would imagine the numbers would be down by millions, but that is hardly the case. But I think also, one thing I didn't mention, and the hysteric herd-like overstatement of certain brainwashed words like genocide, genocide is everywhere, Palestine is everything, anything is equal to anything else. There is no objective standard or reality left in the academy. But what the feminists and the, everyone, public intellectuals, human rights activists, they do not want to accuse men of color, especially if they're Muslim, especially if they have been in countries that were once occupied by Britain, for example, or by Turkey before that. They don't want to accuse them of committing any kind of barbaric crimes because that would be a colonialist (audio cuts out) overreach. So the fact their victims are other people of color who are also Muslims for the most part, it seems to be a blind spot. So, are these professors? And I have to say, I'm happy to hear that they're still calling Women's Studies, “Women and Gender”, that's very good, because in general, women have been disappeared and it's gender and sexuality studies. And the sexuality studies have been totally taken over by, quote, queer and transgender profiles and these are the courses. I did a survey of the Ivy Leagues a few years ago in terms of gender studies, I couldn't believe what I was reading. Queer people in the Caribbean in the 19th century. And I thought, all right, I'm open minded, but what has this got to do with the violence (audio cuts out) issues that we raised in the second wave, which began with rape, went to sexual harassment, then incest, then woman battering. These are not sexy issues anymore, even though, I mean, rape, what's the slogan at #metoo, believe what a woman says. Never believe a man, always believe a woman. Well, but not if she's Jewish, not if she's in Israel and half of Israelis are not white. They are Jews from Arab and African countries who were forced to flee by the Muslims who hate Jews. And on that subject, I work with Muslims and for Muslims who do not hate Jews and who are pro-Israel, God bless them, as well as Christians. So, and many of them are feminists, so I don't know who these feminists are in women's studies, do you?
GR: Well, I'm asking you, you're the expert. You're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher and I'm speaking with the psychotherapist and feminist writer, Phyllis Chesler. So, you mentioned a couple of things I want to get into a bit later about where some of these views might be coming from in terms of the history behind who these groups are. But I did want to ask you something else that's in the news cycle in the last few days. The other day, there was an incident that has gone viral. It was Congresswoman Elise Stefanik’s challenge of the presidents of MIT, Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania. They are all female presidents, as it happens, I believe. And their refusal to state that, in the hearing, their refusal to state that calling for the genocide of Jewish people violates their university's code of conduct and none of them would be willing to do that. They all said it depends on the context and whether it leads to behavior. And Congresswoman Stefanik, I think, was genuinely shocked by this, I don't think it was just political theater. Do you have any reactions to what these presidents were saying? If you've seen this video clip?
PC: I've watched it, it's outrageous. I doubt that they would have the same response if students marched and said, shoot all the blacks, kill them now, lynch them, hang them from trees, let's get rid of the Hispanics, or let's build a wall on the southern border of America. That would be seen as inflammatory, incendiary, it would be seen as hate speech and it would be condemned. But Jews, it's cool, it's okay, that's free speech. And for years in the 21st Century, I kept writing about the way in which the concept of academic freedom and free speech are being increasingly used to engage in Jew hatred. And anti-Semitism is now anti-Zionism, they are one and the same. There's only one Jewish state, and that seems to be considered the very worst country on Earth, not Sudan, wait, I'm remembering something. Remember how the feminists and the women activists were so quick to condemn the so-called rape camps in Bosnia? The rapes in Rwanda, the rapes in Africa, in North Africa, done by paramilitary Islamist groups? Certainly I called it a gender cleansing in the Sudan, the public repeated gang rapes of girls and women by the Janjaweed. And on this utter silence, what conclusions can I draw other than the anti-American, anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist, that's the Stalinization. And in a terrible way, the anti-woman, I mean, rape is rape no matter who was being raped and in Israel, boys and men were raped by these barbarians as well. And I think that the way to handle this, and I wrote a quick piece, is to have an Eichmann like or a Nuremberg like trial in Jerusalem after Israel, only after Israel is militarily victorious.
GR: I want to follow up on a couple of things you said, but we have to take a break. You're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher and I'm talking with Phyllis Chesler. She's an emeritus professor at City University of New York and a psychotherapist and feminist writer. We've been discussing her concerns about some of the public rhetoric about the Israeli-Hamas war. So, Professor Chesler, you've mentioned this at a couple of points in the first part of our conversation, I want to draw it out a little more directly. And it has to do with where some of this stuff might be coming from that you're concerned about. And from day one, I've had this theory and you seem to be saying it's a similar version of it, and that is that the criticism among some of the left of Israel seems to me to be criticism of the United States by proxy and in the extreme form, anti-Americanism. And it does seem like something that was already pent up came forward like the day after the attack. And it does seem like, I wanted to get your sense of that, I wonder if that's one of the things that's really driving this.
PC: The sight of Jewish blood thrilled and excited the long prepared, globalized intifada activists who've been funded by left wing people like Soros, the Tides Foundation, who have been funded by, to some extent, the Arab oil countries and by, certainly by the Rockefeller Fund Foundation. So this has been long in coming. And you're right, this is anti-Americanism, Israel's taking the hard hit. And America with the academics, the intellectuals and the politicians are not paying attention to the danger to us from Iran. Iran right now is causing the kind of international conflict that the secretary general just said he's got to invoke Article 99 because the conflict is spreading all on Israel, excuse me, Iran is having Hezbollah in Lebanon, rocket after rocket. They're shooting during a so-called cease fire into the north of Israel. And the Houthis in Yemen are attacking American warships in the Red Sea in the Mediterranean, excuse me, the international conflict or if you will, the increasing visibility of World War Three is clear to me. And why the American presidents, why Congress doesn't get this and doesn't act on it instead of funding Iran and appeasing Iran is everything that President Obama started. So I think that there are all these factors at play. And then add to it, the left wing academic curriculum. America once had slavery, the fact that we had a civil war to abolish it matters not, it did exist, original sin can't be cleansed, no awareness that Islam practices slavery to this day and always has, as well as being a colonial power. I mean, once I lived in Afghanistan, which was, believe it or not, a Buddhist country, until Arab Muslims came and took it down and turned it Islamic. So every continent and every religion has committed all kinds of crimes, it's not just America and America might be the best relatively speaking. And so the way of thinking that one culture is really the same as another, one culture can't judge another, everything is kind of equal and everything is relative, but America is to blame. White people are to blame, Israel is to blame. This is Stalinist thinking and there was a huge amount of Russian propaganda that became absorbed in the bloodstream of Westerners. And then add to that Arab League propaganda, then add to that Islamic, basic quintessential Koranic propaganda and you have this brew, this dangerous brew that bubbles up as Jew hatred to start with, soon will be infidel hatred acted on in the West.
GR: Now, let me interject here and say now, my thought about the anti-Americanism driving it, it wasn't as deeply rooted as what you just said. I was thinking more in terms of the fact that the United States is Israel's single biggest, or Israel is the single biggest recipient of foreign aid and a lot of that is military aid and the fact that we have stood by Israel over the years. And so I wanted to ask you though, two questions here. One is, some people hearing this, I think, are going to be very concerned about some of the ways that you're talking about this and that it's going to sound to them like you are engaging in a similar kind of thinking that you are criticizing just from the other side. And so I wanted to get your reaction to that and then I'll come back with the other thing. But what how would you respond to that?
PC: Well, unfortunately, the anti-Zionist anti-Semites have been fed propaganda, I have not. I have researched and I've read and I've thought and I've consulted with military experts, counterterrorism experts, psychologists, psychiatrists. I'm now thinking about the trauma of people who have been not only held captive but who have been brainwashed as well, I'm talking about the Israeli hostages. And while I can't, let me say this, of course I'm concerned about the death of innocents, and that includes innocents in Gaza. But most of the innocents in Gaza voted Hamas in and now, of course, can't get rid of them, can't get rid of them even though they're being used horribly as human shields and always have been, even though Hamas, clearly we can see even though people are excelling in denying their own eyes, they're choosing their narrative above reality. And I'm not sure how to break that hold. So I don't, I mean, while I could be not expressing at this moment enough sympathy for Gazans who are in a dreadful situation caused by their own leadership, and it could be ended in a moment, all Hamas has to do is return all the hostages safe and sound to Israel, all Egypt has to do is accept these Gazan civilians, let them out. All right, keep them in a camp if you don't want them to become citizens, which, by the way, no Arab country, 57 of them have refused the populations in the areas as we have after every single war in human history. Refugees in flight have been, they've become citizens elsewhere and life moved on. Only in this instance, the Palestinians are being used from the river to the sea to get rid of the single Jewish state. So, this could end in a minute.
GR: My understanding also, correct me if I'm wrong, is that the Arab countries have not in the past provided much support or help to Palestine.
PC: No support, none. It is, you know I was part of a grassroots team that rescued 400 women from Afghanistan, one of whom I've made my granddaughter from Afghanistan and she's excelling in graduate school here, she's an amazing young woman. And we could not get Arab countries to accept them. And these are Sunni Arabs as they are, not Shia from Iran. And the lack of responsibility for, I mean, the whole this entire disaster could have been solved if Jordan had said, yes, you know, actually, we're the Palestinian state, come home, everyone come home to Jordan. But that never happened because they wanted a fake Hashemite dynasty. So this is not on Israel, this is on the Arab world. It's on Iran, it's on Hamas.
GR: Well, we've only got about 3 minutes left or so. But there's another kind of topic I wanted to make sure that I covered with you here and it's a more personal question, if I could. I wanted to know how you have experienced this personally. Obviously, you've got very strong views of your own. And if I could just share one thing very quickly on this or in this context, is I'm a little different from a lot of other academics in that I have friends and acquaintances that span the entire ideological spectrum. And I'm proud of this in the last seven years, I've managed to avoid losing any friends over politics throughout all of this. But, I have lost my first friendship over this issue and I'm struggling with it. So I just want to know, have you have you dealt with this kind of thing since this war has started?
PC: Oh, my dear, when I published after many, many purely feminist works, some bestsellers, some very influential in the academic world and beyond, when I published, “The New Anti-Semitism” in 2003 because I absolutely felt I had to speak out, that was the first time that The New York Times didn't review a book of mine. That was the first time that major left liberal venues, wouldn't interview me even to fight with me because I held the left liberal intelligentsia in the West as responsible as the 9/11’ers, as the Islamists and terrorists. And then, funny thing began to happen on the way to the forum. But this was going on before, that's a longer story. Yeah, there are feminists now who have not reached out to me, some of whom I've sent one of my pieces about the rape issue and their silence, asked for something and either no response or very hostile response. These are not close friends though. And a lot of distance kept, a lot of silence, which is profound. So I'm thinking you know, I work with Muslims who are feminists, men and women. I work with Christians who are feminists, men and women. I'm not going to say that feminists have failed entirely because it's not true, not true. I'm a founding member of something called the Clarity Coalition, go look it up, they have a website. So, but the feminists of the second wave, third wave, fourth wave, their silence is reverberating down in history and will never be forgotten. Never.
GR: Well, we'll have to leave it there. That was Phyllis Chesler. Professor Chesler, thanks so much again for taking the time to talk with me. I really appreciated it.
PC: It's my pleasure. Good questions.
GR: You've been listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media, conversations in the public interest.
C.W. Goodyear on the Campbell Conversations
Dec 09, 2023
Grant Reeher: Welcome to the Campbell Conversations. I'm Grant Reeher. You know the name James Garfield, probably, but how much else do you know about him and why might he be relevant to thinking about today's politics? My guest today is a historian who has written a new definitive biography of Garfield. C.W. Goodyear’s new book is titled, “President Garfield: From Radical to Unifier”. Charlie, welcome to the program.
CW Goodyear: I agree and thank you for having me on. It's a pleasure.
GR: It's great to have you on. So, as I mentioned just a second ago, for a lot of our listeners, I think Garfield probably occupies this murky middle between the end of the Civil War and the turn of the 20th century. So, to start us off, just give us a very, very brief thumbnail sketch of Garfield's background, you know, the highlights of his career and then when and how he becomes president.
CWG: Sure. His career is, he was described, James Garfield, and I'm surprised by the way, you mentioned in the introduction that readers would probably have heard of him, many probably would not have. But James Garfield was even before his election to the presidency, he was our 20th president, he was already being described by his contemporaries as one of the most impressive, accomplished and influential Americans in the history of our nation. Rutherford Hayes categorized Garfield as being above Benjamin Franklin and Abraham Lincoln in terms of statesmen who would started so low but accomplished so much in all of our history. And so I'll give you a quick rundown. Garfield was born in a log cabin in rural Ohio. He was actually the last president to be born in a log cabin. Raised by a single mother, never really knew his dad, but by his late twenties, he was a state senator, college president and a very prominent abolitionist preacher all at the same time. And then you fast forward another year and change, and he is actually the youngest general at that time in the Union Army. And then you fast forward another year and change, and he is, by his categorization, the youngest congressman in the nation. And then you have a 17 year House career that follows which is almost a record breaker by the standards of that time in American history. And that House career, by the way, ends with him being elected to the presidency. He was the only American to ever be a congressman, a senator elect and a president elect all at the same time. He was also simultaneously a practicing Supreme Court attorney while he was in Congress. He was a prolific writer, he wrote these great columns for The Atlantic and the North American Review. He founded the first federal Department of Education as a congressman. And then on top of that, he authored an original proof of the Pythagorean Theorem.
GR: Wow!
CWG: So, yeah, it was an incredible, incredible career and a very long one. You know, his persistence on the national level was insane. And then he was assassinated. He was the second president to be assassinated. And I, you know, I think it's generally understood now that by virtue of being assassinated, a remarkable career was remembered for how it ended rather than its full breadth.
GR: Yeah, I want to get into some of that a little bit later. So, well, now that you've just given that answer, this question sounds a bit dumb, but I'm going to ask it anyway. So why did you decide to write this full on biography of him now?
CWG: Yeah, no that is a good question. I was working at the time as a ghostwriter in D.C., this is about five years ago. And I was very interested, just as a researcher and a writer in finding a period of our history where there was division overrunning our nation, economically, socially, politically, racially. And I wanted to find that period of our history and I wanted to find somebody who was on a national level leading in a way that was trying to overcome those divisions. So I was drawn to reconstruction in the Gilded Age. And throughout those eras, the post-Civil War and then the post post-Civil War, I found the same name appearing in all of these important national events and it was James Garfield. But his career would be distilled, this long career would be distilled into a single sentence very often in these histories. It would be, James Garfield, future president would be assassinated, you know, within his first year in office. But then, and this goes back to my prior answer, the more I dug up about him, the less fair that seemed as a record. And so I got sucked in. And, you know, by gosh, the subject just unfolded and it became, the book became far longer than a lot of us would appreciate but it was just a real blast. When you find a good subject as you know, it just possesses you. So it became a very fun odyssey from then on.
GR: Well, you mentioned this when you were talking about his career, but my understanding is that he became, for the standards of the day, and it's in your title, a radical by that standard then in his thinking about the Civil War and the treatment of those who were slaves and would become former slaves after the war. How did that radicalness of his thinking develop and what exactly were some of the basic contours of those beliefs?
CWG: Yeah, so from the very outset of the Civil War, Garfield was a radical Republican. So he was from a wing of the Republican Party that was militantly progressive on these issues of race and equality in American society. They were too, for lack of a better term, the radical Republicans were to the left of Lincoln and where Lincoln was slow to implement the abolition of slavery and slow to warm up to the ideas of civil and political equality, radicals were there right from the very beginning. And they believed wholeheartedly that the Civil War was not really a war about sovereignty, it was not really about preserving the union. In fact, it was really about addressing the root cause of this division in society, which was inequality of race. And so Garfield was a member of that faction from the very beginning. He had this firebrand progressivism that he intertwined with patriotic history. He blended progressive ideology in the civic religion of America very, very passionately. The origins of that have much to do with where he was from, northeast Ohio, the Western Reserve. And that was a militantly progressive region of the nation on these issues. It's been estimated by one historian that the Western Reserve had a higher concentration of stops on the Underground Railroad as any other part of the nation. And the social and political history of that is very, there's also a religious aspect to that as well. Garfield's brand of Christianity, the Disciples of Christ in that region, believes wholeheartedly in, you know, implementing equality of race. But when he got into Congress halfway through the Civil War, he was described as wild a radical as ever set foot in the halls of the Capitol. That's how they described the young firebrand James Garfield, “that radical James Garfield”.
GR: One famous presidential historian has claimed that for most presidents, there's a moment in their lives, often it can be an early political victory, sometimes it's a loss that informs the way they approach their careers and particularly when they become president. Was there a moment like that for Garfield? It sounds like he had so many accomplishments that maybe he didn't have that, I don’t know.
CWG: He did. I'll tell you what, it was not the loss of an election because Garfield never lost an election. He had a perfect political record, which just adds to his resume. But there was something that really did define his style of national politics from a certain, you know, as the subtitle of my book indicates, “…From Radical to Unifier”, Garfield became distinctive and it actually was the reason he was elected to the presidency in the end anyway. He became distinctive as being this remarkably conciliatory, pragmatic, ideologically flexible legislator in an increasingly partisan era. Other Republicans as varied as Ulysses Grant to Frederick Douglass to all these other reformist Republicans, they all said the same thing about James Garfield. They all said he lacked moral backbone because he was seen as being so friendly, so kind, so open minded that he was really almost useless in a pitched partisan battle. Now, when did that emerge, when did this firebrand young radical in the post-Civil War Congress change his mind? The impeachment of Andrew Johnson. There's this great line, because Garfield, you know, he, having been one of these firebrands and who believed militantly in the need for a thorough reconstruction, when he saw the impeachment of Andrew Johnson continuing on and he anticipated the political cost the radicals would pay for pursuing a pretty weak impeachment agenda, he started to back off those principles and he had this great line. He had a few great lines, and I'll spare you the details from this period. But one of them, and he's you know, he's sitting there in the trials and he writes, “I'm trying to do two things, which, if I'm to judge by the theatrics around me, are going to be very hard to accomplish. I'm trying to be a radical and not a fool.” So you see him starting to change his tune on politics in America being not about necessarily what's ideologically right, but about but perfecting the art of the possible. And that's where that change happens.
GR: Of course, that has no relevance to anything today.
CWG: (laughter)
GR: I'm Grant Reeher. You're listening to the Campbell Conversations, and my guest is C.W. Goodyear and we're discussing his new biography of James Garfield titled, “James (President) Garfield: From Radical to Unifier”. So he was also known as a political reformer of the spoils system. So tell us a little bit about that.
CWG: Yeah, he was. So, it's really interesting because the term civil service reform, you say that to a modern audience and you think it's designed to put them to sleep. But in fact, civil service reform was the blazing grassroots political movement of the second half of the 19th century. And what it involved, the Federal Bureaucracy, our civil service system on the federal level, it was not professionalized. In fact, most wings of the federal government from clerks in local courts to local sheriffs to local tax collectors and even post office workers, these were not professional civil servants, they were political appointees. So you had political control by local congressmen of federal jobs. And that was a recipe for corruption and machine politics on a grand industrializing scale. And you saw civil servants legally and then not legally taking public money for private use, rigging elections, paying bribes to senators and congressmen in exchange for jobs. And so this idea of reforming our federal government to make federal jobs awarded, not based on politics, but just competitive examination. That was a massive movement and a very important one and a very frustrating one and Garfield was part of that. He was though, I'll say this, he was not a militant reformer during his life. He became critical to the passage of civil service reform, but during his life, he tried to, like with many issues, he tried to split between these very polarizing factions. He believed that there needed to be some standard of competitive depoliticization and professionalization of the federal government. But he also awarded cushy federal jobs to close friends of his. And whenever these clean government activists would get too up in arms and they would give him grief, Garfield would chide them for being too militant. He was somebody who believed in working with the corrupt bosses of his party rather than entirely antagonizing them. So in that shows you his type of politics in general on a very small scale, but a very important issue that he became critically connected to by virtue of how his life ended.
GR: So, I've intimated this a couple of times now, once in kind of a sarcastic way, but do you think that Garfield's relevance for today as a political figure, is it this quality of having these very deep passions, but also being a unifier, being someone that could listen to everyone and try to find compromise if that's what we want to call it, or middle ground? Is that what we take from him today, you think?
CWG: Yeah, I think his life, because I've you know, you get asked this a lot on the book tour. I think his life is a long, in part, a long, long, protracted meditation on political pragmatism. Because he is somebody who makes this shift, who changes with the political tides of the country and who becomes, as he gets older and more experienced, he becomes somebody who embodies, in both good ways and bad, what it looks like to be a pragmatic powerbroker in Washington, fighting against partisan forces who are not entirely, you know, morally clean in many cases. He, as I've described it, I didn't put this in the book, I didn't put this line in the book, which I kind of regret, but he's a great case study of what it looks like when a pathologically reasonable person is in power in Washington. Somebody who defines the desired outcome of a political or impasse or a crisis, a constitutional crisis based on how do we give everybody at the table something to walk away with and how do we keep the gears of our government turning? How do we keep the basic processes rolling on? A very patient, man, and that's not a clean story either, by the way, he is a very grey figure politically. But also, his life is a very good reminder, because he dealt, the crisis he saw in his career from Congress through the White House, it's that Mark Twain line: History doesn't repeat itself, but it sure rhymes a lot. So he's also a reminder, and I’ll end this answer on this, he is a reminder that a lot of the things that we're going through today that we call unprecedented are never entirely so, not in the history of our nation.
GR: You're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher, and I'm talking with C.W. Goodyear. He's a historian who's published a new biography of James Garfield titled, “President Garfield: From Radical to Unifier”. So you mentioned at the beginning he was shot early in his presidential career. How and why was he shot?
CWG: Oh, yes, okay. Well, so he was, the important background is that Garfield was catapulted to the White House half unwillingly. He was nominated spontaneously from the floor of the nominating convention for the Republican Party in 1880 because all the different factions of the Republican Party, their candidates, their declared candidates who were gunning for the presidency couldn't get a majority support. So the Republican Party was so factionalized that it needed this dark horse candidate to come out of nowhere and take the leadership post. And that might sound familiar to a lot of listeners right now. But Garfield's immediate problem, immediate, and it carried through the campaign and into his presidency, was how do you balance these factions? And there was a faction called The Stalwarts who were supreme practitioners of the spoils system. They loved manipulating and profiting those federal jobs, the civil service jobs. The Stalwarts wanted a big chunk of the federal government to control themselves. Garfield did not, and despite what he said in the campaign, he did not end up giving them as much as they expected when he became president and it led to this massive falling out. And after that fallout ended, Garfield ended up winning that fight with the Stalwarts. A mentally ill man who wanted one of these jobs and who identified as a Stalwart, came up with this kooky idea that if he shot Garfield, the new president who was a Stalwart, Chester Arthur, would be so grateful that President Arthur would give the assassin whatever job in the federal system the Stalwart assassin wanted. So it was this mix of toxic political climate, this corrupting federal patronage system, and then good old fashioned timeless mental illness. Which combined to result in Garfield being shot in downtown D.C. He was stopped for weeks by this assassin and then finally killed as he was about to get on board a train or shot as he was about to get on board a train.
GR: Wow, yeah. And ironic, really, as I think about it, that you take Abraham Lincoln, who was a martyr to the Civil War, I mean, shot because of that by John Wilkes Booth. And then Garfield, who had stronger views, ends up being shot by someone who's concerned about the spoils system. And that's this crazy idea, it's an interesting comparison about that.
CWG: In those two snapshots they show you how much the country had changed in those times and the issues that they regarded. You know, it shows you where the priorities of the country are shifting towards. It's from, you know, the winning of the civil war and civil rights, that was Booth's motivation to corrupting, you know, federal power.
GR: And you know, I saw a documentary several years ago about Garfield's assassination. I think it was a documentary, as I recall, and it focused on his medical care after the shooting. And the argument in the documentary was that the medical care was what basically killed him. I mean, if he'd have gotten good, if his doctor hadn't made all the mistakes about infection that that he made, he would have survived the shooting. Is that correct? And tell us about the aftermath.
CWG: Yes. Yes, that's generally correct. I will say a lot of these doctors did not know any better. The idea of germ theory, because Garfield, for listeners who might not know, he didn't die of the shooting per se, he actually died of the infection that developed in his body afterward. American physicians were slow converts to the idea of germ theory. They still believe that infections were caused, not by outside microorganisms, but by internal fluidic balances and that pus was actually a sign of healthy healing. So with that topsy-turvy medical knowledge, that is not a foundation for good infection care. So you did have this, he, Garfield died just awful, you know, the details are in this book. One, you know, I've gotten a lot of good reviews, but one of the ones that had a little bit of reservations was like it was a little bit too grisly when you get into how Garfield died.
GR: (laughter)
CWG: But, you know, what are you going to do? But you know, when he's shot, when he's shot in the station in D.C., the doctors on the scene, they flip him over and they immediately start burrowing into his back with unwashed fingers. They didn't believe in washing their hands. And so you have about 80 days it takes for him to, that infection to run its course. And he has great resilience throughout it. He has ups and he has downs and the country is hooked on news of how he's doing. But ultimately and tragically and it's this long, protracted drama for not just the president, but the whole nation.
GR: So you kind of go a little Cormac McCarthy there in the end of your book it sounds like.
CWG: Ah, that's interesting. You're the first person to say that.
GR: (laughter)
CWG: I disavow any comparisons. I just don't want to bring Cormac McCarthy to my level. That would be unfair to him.
GR: (laughter) If you've just joined us, you're listening to the Campbell Conversations. I'm Grant Reeher, and my guest is C.W. Goodyear, and we've been discussing his new biography of President James Garfield. It's titled, “President Garfield: From Radical to Unifier”. So you have the Pendleton Act, which comes after this, right?
CWG: Yes.
GR: Did his assassination lead to changes in government in the same way that, you know, Johnson was able to draw on Kennedy's assassination to push through civil rights legislation?
CWG: Yeah, absolutely. That's a really interesting comparison. So we mentioned earlier how Garfield, in life, was kind of a, he was a half-hearted reformer, not half-hearted, but a moderate one. When he died, he was immediately canonized as this martyr to the spoils system. That was the phrase that a lot of the commentators used at the time, because his assassination was seen as a product of this corrupt way federal jobs are awarded between political factions. And, you know, this assassin’s mental illness was seen as also a product of that. So he became in death an invaluable symbol to the civil service reform movement. And the Pendleton Civil Service Act, which you mentioned right there, that was signed into law by President Arthur's administration and it was a direct result of Garfield's death. And what it did was it introduced the idea of merit into the awarding of public jobs, or sorry, federal jobs for the first time. It introduced competitive examinations for Americans trying to get these federal civil service jobs. It freed federal civil servants from being forced to contribute to political campaigns in exchange for jobs and it excused them from being forced to actually participate in campaigns themselves. So they were, walls began to go up between, you know, wings of the federal government and political activity. That's all incredibly valuable in terms of the yields that's paid and is still paying to our government. Civil service reform historians have said that Garfield's death accelerated the cause by about 30 years and actually a less charitable historian has written that Garfield dead was more useful than Garfield alive to the civil service reformers.
GR: Ouch.
CWG: That might not be totally fair but the great surprise was that Chester Arthur was supporting of civil service reform after. Because Arthur was a Stalwart, he was a corrupt boss. His story is very interesting, but I won't go down that rabbit hole quite yet.
GR: (laughter) So you've kind of alluded to this a couple of times, but I've read in my limited reading about Garfield outside of your book, that many presidential historians think that Garfield could have become one of our great presidents, like the way that he was regarded in his life as you already pointed out. But that that promise was cut short by his assassination. So do you concur with that view, that there was a potential real greatness to be in the top tier of presidents?
CWG: So I'm going to stick a big old asterisks into this, and I'm going to say it's always incredibly hard to tell what could have been.
GR: Right.
CWG: And also with Garfield's legacy, the reaction to his death, the public reaction to his death was not unlike the way our nation also reacted to the Kennedy assassination. Like, the death just radically transformed the way people viewed the life. It's like setting off, as I've said, it's like setting off a firework at the end of a Broadway play. No one remembers the play, they remember the firework that went off at the end. And so the views of him, his legacy and what he could have done, I think it's always been tended to be viewed through rose colored glasses. He was widely regarded as somebody during his life who was actually not well suited for executive tendencies because he was this vacillator. He was somebody who was seen as being very easy to swing one way or another. But whether that would have led to progress or not on a lot of these key issues, I'm not entirely sure. The potential was certainly there. In his inaugural address, it just reads as a prophetic document in many ways. It's the first inaugural address that calls for universal public education in America, because education was such a transformative force in his life, in his public life, he believed in it. And so there's always going to be this worry about what would have been. But as I mentioned in the answer to your previous question, you know, reformers believe that his death was actually, he actually accomplished much more in death on that issue than he would have in life. And, you know, you can't help but wonder, he was probably going to be an incrementalist president. Whether that is the recipe for greatness or not, I don't know. But I bet he would have been somebody who had made slow progress on all these issues he still believed in.
GR: Interesting. Well, we've got a couple of minutes left. I want to try to squeeze at least two questions and if I can and the first one is more about your process of writing this and what you learned from it. Do you think there was one thing about American politics or our political history that you discovered while you were working on this book that you didn't already know before or weren't as fully appreciative of? Was there kind of an a-ha moment for you in any of this?
CWG: Yes, because the a-ha moments, there's actually a few of them, but they all regarded the exact same thing, which is in the structures of our federal system and its founding documents, in the way our legal precedent has developed over time, the recipe has held true throughout the years, since before Garfield's life, but in Garfield's life, it was especially, especially clear. You only discover loopholes when you walk through them as a nation. And one of the incidences that really brought that to light was the disputed aftermath of the election of 1876, which was the first time where in the aftermath of a presidential election, the losing side claimed fraud and threatened civil war if their candidate was not inaugurated. That was the president before Garfield, Hayes, who ended up taking the White House. But when you read the writings of these congressmen who are on the verge of, it seems an armed insurrection that's going to take Washington, inaugurate the presidential candidate by force, you know, they're saying, the questions they're asking themselves and they're debating in the Capitol is, does the vice president, you know, the president of the Senate have the right to count the votes? What exactly does that mean? Do congressmen have the right to interrupt the certification of results? And you're thinking, hmm, well, you know, so when you're you discover that not only is there precedent but, you know, in this day and age when we read the Constitution and we think creatively about what exactly it means, we've always had that problem throughout our times. And Garfield was right there front center for, you know, that election resolution and then other crises throughout that time.
GR: Fascinating. Just a few seconds left. One last question. Who or what are you working on now?
CWG: I'd like to write a biography about Senator Robert Byrd of West Virginia. I think he would be very interesting. And so I'm talking to his aides and I'm at his legislative center getting that stuff together. It's going to be a long, long work. But that's the next target.
GR: Oh, I hope you do that. We'll have you back on if you do that. That was C.W. Goodyear and again, his new book is titled, “President Garfield: From Radical to Unifier”. If you're looking for something a little bit different for holiday reading or for gifting, I highly recommend this book and I think you could tell from our conversation there's a lot of really interesting material in there that speaks to issues of today. Charlie, thanks so much for taking the time to talk with me. I really enjoyed this conversation.
CWG: Oh, my pleasure. I really enjoyed it, too. Thank you so much, Grant.
GR: You've been listening to the campus conversations on WRVO Public Media, conversations in the public interest.
Billy Barlow and Paul Stewart on the Campbell Conversations
Dec 02, 2023
Program transcript:
Grant Reeher: Welcome to Campbell Conversations, I'm Grant Reeher. My guests today are two people who have been central to some turnarounds in economic development and housing and the city of Oswego in recent years. And they're here with me to discuss those efforts and the lessons that come out of them. Paul Stewart is the founder of the Oswego Renaissance Association, which he also directs and is also a psychology professor at SUNY Oswego. Billy Barlow is the mayor of Oswego and is currently finishing up his second four year term. He's also Vice President of Public Affairs and System Development at Oswego Health. Mayor Barlow, Professor Stewart, welcome to the program.
Paul Stewart: Thank you.
Billy Barlow: Thank you.
GR: We're glad to have both of you. And, Paul, I'll start with you as the founding director of this organization. I think our listeners are pretty familiar with the standard narrative of Rust Belt City decline, which obviously has hit Syracuse and Utica and Rochester and Oswego, too. But is there anything specific or unique to the case of Oswego, or Oswego’s history that led you to want to form the Oswego Renaissance Association back in 2013?
PS: Well, there's nothing specific about Oswego, per se, that led me to form the association. We have in common, what you described, that sort of slow motion decline over 40 years. Well, what led me to form the association was I didn't think that decline was acceptable nor did many of my colleagues and friends. And so in that respect, we knew something had to change back in the 2012-2013 time frame.
GR: Okay. And was there something about that time that sort of pushed you over to say I'm going to do something actually organizational about this to try to help turn this around?
PS: Well, sure. I mean, almost everybody knows during that time the city had been in a decline phase and had become particularly acute in the late twenty-aughts, you know, and I think in 2008, myself, my partner bought a house in Franklin Square and we were investing our lives into it but all around us things seemed to be degrading and we started to ask, can we continue to do this if the whole neighborhood is going to go down? And so that kind of became a personal question and then led to larger questions about the whole city.
GR: Okay, and I want to get in a little bit later into actually how the association works. But Mayor, I wanted to turn to you just on this background on Oswego. So, is there anything you'd want to add to what Paul said about specific to Oswego or things that our listeners should know and understanding the context for this effort that we're about to discuss?
BB: Well, I think what's important to realize if you're, especially if you're an elected official, but for anybody who cares about their community, is I think it's easy to, when you think about economic development, it's easy to think about cutting a ribbon or new construction, a new building, old downtown building being rehabbed. But at the end of the day, the biggest economic asset a community has, the biggest economic driver is the quality of neighborhoods. And that was something that the Oswego Renaissance Association and Paul pointed out and in as we'll get into in a little while, it's proven to be correct over these last ten to fifteen years. So when you restore old neighborhoods you instill confidence in homeowners and potential buyers. That behavior is contagious and it spreads throughout the community as I'm sure Paul will detail in a little while and how that strategy actually works. So, you know, new buildings, cutting ribbons, it's nice, but at the end of the day, neighborhoods is really what drives the local economy.
GR: Okay, well, let's get some better sense then of how this organization works. So, Paul, I'm going to start calling it the ORA because Oswego Renaissance Association, it sounds great. It's a little bit of a mouthful. So from now on, ORA. How does the ORA work and where does your funding come from?
PS: Well, the ORA gets funded by the Richard S. Shineman Foundation and multiple local businesses and sponsors. And we have been involved in this strategy for the last decade now, it's our 10th year. Where we focus on what are so-called middle neighborhoods. These are neighborhoods that are not your best neighborhoods by any stretch, but they're also not the most blighted neighborhoods. They're in-between. And the rationale is that in those neighborhoods, you still have an opportunity to leverage its potential. And the cost of restoring that neighborhood pales in comparison to what it would cost if we wait till it tipped, right? So we work from these middle markets outward. So, while that traditional experience for people is looking at creeping blight headed their way, loss of owner occupancy, degraded public streets sort of slowly making their way to their neighborhood, we turn that upside down and we start investing with neighbors in those middle neighborhoods so you have a spiraling improvements in the fiscal and social capital. That neighborhood beautification, that neighborhood, it starts to actually spread outward. It's contagious in the opposite direction. And so geographically, we have a unique approach that's not typically the approach most people think of when they do community development. And the other thing I think that's critical is that the majority of resources we leverage comes from the neighbors themselves. You know, we offer, they’re relatively small amounts of money. We'll say, look, we will grant you dollar for dollar, up to $1,000 out of our pocket per house to every neighbor on a block to make exterior improvements as long as it's visible on the street. But the rule is you have to recruit at least five households on your block to form a cluster. And typically because the grants are competitive, you'll have ten or fifteen houses apply. And the really interesting thing is that what we're leveraging, as Mayor Barlow said, is actually long term confidence. When neighbors start to realize that not only are they investing but their neighbors are also investing. They see a real potential for that and it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy as it snowballs.
GR: That is interesting. And you also get I imagine, neighbor and peer pressure sort of working for you in a good way.
PS: Right.
GR: Because you're looking at each other. Okay, interesting. And so you have this money, it comes from donors and a foundation, and it's like a matching system then, matching dollar system, okay, for these kind of exterior improvements.
PS: Yeah.
GR: So, Mayor Barlow, describe the impact that you think ORA has had on the city and the area. How have you experienced this?
BB: It's hard to really, it's hard to even talk about without underselling it. As Paul mentioned earlier, I actually was born and raised in Oswego. I went to school out at Arizona State and went out there in 2008. I returned in 2013. Nothing good happened in Oswego between 2008 and 2013. And the first positive thing that put Oswego back on the right track was Paul creating the Oswego Renaissance Association. And starting in one small area in the city and slowly growing outward into different areas of the city. It was really the first spark that put Oswego back on the right course and then city government, as often happens, was a few years behind but ultimately began to assist the ORA in their mission. And I'll say, in 2013 you could have driven around the city and you would have been hard pressed to find a neighborhood that anyone would have wanted to live in. Now 2023, you can drive around and it's hard to find an area where you wouldn't want to live. It really has taken off from just one condensed area into the entire neighborhood. I mean we, I often joke with the Code Enforcement Department at City Hall if I see them City Hall I’ll say, do you have any work to do? And you know, sometimes they say, you know, everyone is compliant and you know, we're just finishing up paperwork and it's true. You know, you're hard pressed to find a few properties now that really detract from neighboring properties. So it's smart strategy that's paid off and the city continues to reap benefits from it.
GR: Yeah, I have to say, just as an outsider perspective, and I've been doing this program that you know, the station is based in Oswego there, in a building at SUNY Oswego. And I've been driving back and forth in this time period that we've been talking about. And I remember, you know, in 2009-2010 going up there and thinking, wow, you know, in a bad way, wow. And then just the last time I was up, I think, to do an election night coverage, you know, I had the same impression. So, yeah, it's noticeable. I'm Grant Reeher, you're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media and my guests are Oswego Mayor Billy Barlow and SUNY Oswego Professor Paul Stewart and we're discussing the Oswego Renaissance Association. So I want to put this question to both of you and maybe Mayor Barlow, start with you on this one. And it is kind of a more general sense of this context and I want to bring it out to the whole area of central New York. And this is something I just mentioned, things I've noticed since 2010, but this is something that has struck me as an outsider coming in 30 plus years ago now and then now living in central New York. And I've spoken on this program about it a few times to people like the writer Sean Kirst, for example, we've talked about this. But it seems to me there there's a kind of a pessimism or a fatalism, maybe even sometimes people call it an inferiority complex about this area that comes through. In addition to the real affection and real loyalty that people feel. It's like a sense that things are never going to quite work out or something else is going to leave or, you know, and is that, you're in Oswego, Mayor Barlow, am I tapping some part of the psyche here when I say that?
BB: I think you're absolutely right. We're kind of pessimistic or negative by nature. But I will say it's somewhat turned around the last five to eight years, you know, and a lot of that is because people are now seeing results. I think, in Oswego particularly but I think it's probably more common than not. The public hears ideas, they hear concepts, they see renderings, the government conducts these studies and analysis and talks about what could be. Rarely does it ever actually happen in front of your eyes in the real world. And, you know, we've had a great run this last decade or so where, and I'm not just talking about city government, but whether it's SUNY Oswego, the ORA, city government, we've said things and then we followed it up with reality. Then I think the public has come to expect that now when city government shows our rendering of something that's actually going to happen versus sitting on a shelf, and it's something people talk about what could have been years from now. So you're right, there's definitely a pessimism or a doubt. But, you know, Oswego has shown what confidence and positivity can do, I think they trust their government now and there's a lot of partners working together to move our area in the right direction. And it's certainly refreshing and it's a change from what we've been accustomed to in the last 30 or so years.
GR: And Paul, sort of a similar question, is that something you have felt and do you feel like ORA, you know, is that part of the satisfaction that you get is participating in something that may be changing that?
PS: Absolutely. I mean, first of all, I understand that the sort of, the pessimism you're talking about, I think to some extent, you know, there's kind of a, I don't know if I would use the word cultural trauma but, you know, regional trauma, when you go through just decades of decline, that is an understandable ethos, if you will. But I think what's been missing is, we are too used to waiting for the state or some outside force to make the change for us. And one of my favorite sort of things to tell people is, no, nothing is coming to save your town, nobody is coming to save your town. If you want to save your town, you have to do it. And what I think is very special about what's happening in Oswego at multiple levels is we have found ways to leverage the spirit and the resources, the time and the energy and the money of the residents here and essentially crowdsource revitalization. And once people see those efforts begin to pay off, it becomes easier and easier to build on that momentum.
GR: Yeah. You're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher and I'm talking with SUNY Oswego professor Paul Stewart, the founding director of the Oswego Renaissance Association, and Oswego Mayor Billy Barlow and we've been discussing the work of that association. So we were talking about turnaround both in Oswego and I think we're feeling it generally throughout the area. And obviously, if we're talking about this most recently, we have to talk about Micron, and there was some pessimism and skepticism when we were tossing around some of the numbers that were associated with Micron. But I think people are beginning to believe now. So, Mayor Barlow, speaking of this potentially huge development for Syracuse, I was curious from your perspective, further north up in Oswego, how do you think it's going to affect things up in Oswego? Will it have a ripple effect that far out? What's your sense of this?
BB: Well, first, I often tell my constituents who are maybe pessimistic or doubtful of what may or may not happen with Micron, if even a quarter of what they're talking about happens that is still larger than anything we've seen in this area recently. So, there's a lot of reason to be optimistic and looking forward to what Micron brings to the community. As far as what Oswego stands to gain, I think obviously we're not in a position being, you know, probably a half hour or so away from the plant. We're not in a position to benefit as much as communities that are closer. But we are in a great position to see some benefits. And luckily, we've had this great round of economic development and victories here in the last eight years or so. If Micron employees and their families are looking for an affordable waterfront community with great neighborhoods, great community assessed assets, nice parks, a quaint downtown and a tourism type feel to the community, particularly in the summertime, Oswego is the place to be. And for a lot of these folks who may move from other areas into Central New York for Micron, a 30 minute commute to work, if they're from a metropolitan area, it's like cutting their commute by 50%. So we're in a great position and luckily we've had a successful eight years or ten years or more to be the community we are now. So I think we will see some Micron employees up to live in Oswego and a lot of that is credit to the Oswego Renaissance Association because when people look where to live and raise their family, they look at education, they look at access to health care, and they look at the quality of neighborhoods and we’re excelling in most of those areas. So I think we're in a good position.
GR: And so Paul, there's something that you've mentioned a couple of times now. You mentioned the phrase social capital, you mentioned the idea that, you know, no one's coming to save the town, you have to be the one to save the town.
PS: That's right.
GR: And there's a puzzle that I've always had as a political scientist about effective leadership that this particular case speaks directly to. And that's the relative roles and the relative importance and even sort of the order in which they occur of grassroots activity and kind of, leadership from, I don't know if I like the phrase bottom up, but, you know, the base level out maybe is a better way to say it, as the driver. And then individual leadership, like the kind of leadership that you, Paul Stewart, the impact that you have made or the impact that Mayor Barlow has made and the confidence that the city has and the confidence that people have in the government. I don't know if you have thought about this in your experience with the ORA, but do you have any insights on sort of what comes first or how they're related that could give me some insight on that?
PS: I've thought about that, I think quite a bit. I mean, my friend Chuck Marohn from Strong Towns has a phrase I really like. When we talk about the difference between top down strategies and bottom up strategies, the ORA is decidedly bottom up. And let me clarify, a lot of times strategies from the top, like a program that's been developed for your community, or some new, even sometimes new money that comes in some it's very orderly and structured and plan, but it's also dumb oftentimes. It's called orderly, but dumb, in that it doesn't necessarily take into account local conditions. And a lot of times what is being done for a community is occurring hundreds of miles away in terms of the decision phase. In contrast, when you're working at the grassroots level, like in the DNA of a community, you're on the ground there. We call it chaotic but smart. The people that live in the community kind of know what their neighborhoods require because they're living in it every day. And so we can make much more, I think, directed decisions about what individual blocks need because we're in them and living in them. And when you empower blocks to lead and neighborhoods to lead, you get, they will pursue their interests in the way that that makes the most sense for them, that's very powerful. And in terms of social leadership, social capital leadership, you know, you hit on another important point, which is that for a community to work well, to succeed, it's sort of like a football team. You're not going to execute your plays if you don't know each other, you don't have a camaraderie there and you don't trust each other, right? So one of the things that we do is in these small granting programs that we’re involved in, it requires that neighbors work as groups. And in the process, they get to understand each other. They know what their shared values are and most of them realize we want our neighborhood to be a better place five years from now where we want to raise our kids, et cetera, et cetera. And then letting them lead. It's very much, I think, on point for where those neighborhoods need to go.
GR: If you've just joined us, you're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher and my guests are Oswego Mayor Billy Barlow and SUNY Oswego Professor Paul Stewart. So, Paul, I want to get the mayor in on this one and before I do, I want to push you just a little bit on what you said. And so a thought experiment here. Let's say Paul Stewart gets a job in Chicago instead of Oswego, what happens? I mean, so, it does need, I mean, you sketched out and you were very generous and spreading out the credit, but doesn't it need a spark and weren't you that spark? I mean, this is the thing, the puzzle that I struggle with.
PS: Is that for me or the mayor here? (laughter)
GR: That’s for you, I’m putting Paul Stewart on the spot here. (laughter)
PS: Well, no, it's critical. You never want success of any movement to depend on a single individual, because if they get hit by a bus tomorrow, you know, that's a problem. So what you want to be able to do is build the leadership of the residents you have so that what you eventually do is, you make it normative that blocks, of course, people paint their houses every seven to ten years. Of course, everyone mows their lawn. Of course, people want to live here and maintain their homes because it's now become healthy and normal to do that. So in many ways, we are changing a culture that outlives any one individual, right? The second thing I want to emphasize, and I know that the mayor would agree with this, is people think that the ORA is about like me and this organization, it's not. It's an application of a philosophy that says, if you as a community want to thrive if you want to grow, you have to invest in yourself and build on your assets rather than being focused solely on what's broken and what's wrong. You have to identify what is it that we're good at, how can we get better at those things? That's a philosophy that's not an individual. And one of the things that I think among many that I have in common with the mayor here is, is he has the same approach. He wasn't coming to office to say, oh, well, here's all the problems I'm going to fix. He pursued a vision that built on our strengths. So I just want to emphasize that, part of this is changing a culture to be focused on building on what's working rather than trying to fix what's not.
GR: And Mayor, we've got about 3 minutes or so left, but I know you want to get in on this, so go ahead. What are your thoughts on this puzzle of leadership and Paul and you and Oswego here?
BB: Well, first I I want to make something extremely clear, is that I view the ORA as the lead in neighborhood restoration and our mentality and strategy at city hall is not to try to be the leader, let ORA lead and our job is to assist as much as possible. And that assistance goes beyond anything financial or just Paul and I getting along personally, it actually means focus at the ORA, what they call target zones. And the city government not only assists in terms of code enforcement, you know, we strategically deploy code enforcement to work in those target zones and certainly around the perimeter of those targeted zones to assist and supplement their investment with strong code enforcement. But also, look, when we decide which roads to pave, where to replace sidewalks, where to make sure the streetlights are in working fashion. We try to work and concentrate investment, city investment in the ORA target zones. And we do that because it's easy. If you take a picture in let's just say in February, ORA comes in, investment, they get homeowners all on the same page to beautify their homes in the neighborhood and then take a pitch for October. And the neighborhood went from a C-plus to an A-minus. That's easy to show. And that progress is contagious versus letting ORA do their thing and city government does their thing. The second component to that is, Paul and I can have the same opinion and take the same action on any given topic without even talking to each other. And that's what a true partnership looks like. You know, I can, we go to make a decision in the city. I can think in the back of my head, would Paul Stewart and the ORA agree with this and is this in line with their strategy? And Paul can be very aggressive because he's so passionate. And I often tell department heads, when Paul Stewart asks for something, assume I'm asking for it, right?
GR: Wow.
BB: Because you know it's coming from the right place, it's not to benefit Paul personally. Why would Paul care about something at Breitbeck Park? He's asking for a reason because there's a strategy and a method behind the madness. And, you know, my job is to empower him, embrace the ORA as much as possible, and let them lead. And we assist as much as we can because the strategy is right.
GR: And Paul we only have a second or two, so it’s got to be a couple of sentences.
PS: So, I want to follow up with that. What we talk to our neighbors about is, if you lead and you show that you’re going to invest, it encourages the city to double down on your investments, that’s part of what Billy just said.
GR: Well, we’ll have to leave it there. It sounds like in Oswego, smart chaos is working and it’s nice to have a good story to tell. That was Billy Barlow and Paul Stewart. Mayor Barlow, Professor Stewart, thanks for taking the time to talk with me.
PS: Thank you.
BB: Thank you.
GR: You’ve been listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media, conversations in the public interest.
James Charney on the Campbell Conversations
Nov 18, 2023
James Charney, MD(jhu.edu)
Program transcript:
Grant Reeher: Welcome to Campbell Conversations, I'm Grant Reeher. My guest today is an accomplished mental health clinician who's also a movie buff. And he thinks that movies can help us better understand mental illness. Dr. James Charney is a practicing child and adolescent psychiatrist on Yale University's medical school faculty, and he's also the author of a new book titled, “Madness at the Movies: Understanding Mental Illness through Film”. Dr. Charney, welcome to the program.
James Charney: Thank you for having me, glad to be.
GR: Glad you could be here with us. It's a really interesting book. Let me just start with a little background question. Why did you decide to write this book at this moment in time?
JC: Well, I'm going to have to give you the short version of this because this is a story that can probably fill our half hour. I've been wanting to write this book for the better part of 20 years. Before that, I was teaching the subject of this book as a course at Yale for undergraduates, for seniors. And it was a seminar that was sponsored by two different departments, because the subject of the course, “Madness and the Movies” straddle two disciplines. It was about abnormal psychology, and it was about film. And it was an attempt to use film to understand abnormal psychology, but also to use the watching of the films to improve your ability to observe and to analyze and also to learn a little bit about how films have their effects, what's the craft of film that make them work. I've always found that fascinating. So I taught that course for about 15 years at Yale. And then as I retired and spent more time away from New Haven, I wound up having opportunities to teach the course in other places, versions of the course. But in the back of my mind always was, I really would like to record this as a book, to share it with a wider audience, but also a little bit as a legacy, to be able to have a project that was really a passion of mine for so many years could people could relive it and experience it and if they haven't experienced it in person when I was teaching it, they could enjoy it on the road. However, I never got down to writing it. I had a hard time imagining how I could write about the movies. I couldn't expect people to watch the movies just because they had bought my book or wanted to read the book. When I was teaching the course, every one of the students watched the movie the day before, it was fresh in the minds, they watched it together, it was a shared experience. And as a result, it was fresh in everyone's mind and we were able to refer to it, talk about it, analyze it in detail. How do you deal with that in a book that people are going to be reading? They may not have seen the movie and they may have difficulty accessing the film. And also just ballpark procrastination, just ordinary procrastination just didn't happen. So I was very, very lucky that I have a son who's well published and as he keeps churning out books, he would say, Pop, you want to get this book done? And I would say, yes. And then he'd say, shall I keep nudging you? And I'd say, yes, but I didn't do anything. And what made it happen was COVID. Because all of a sudden I was pretty much in lockdown, and I had no excuse. And by that time, I had been obsessing about it long enough that I figured out, I thought, a way to make the book accessible to people who didn't necessarily have the movie in front of them.
GR: It’s funny, I've talked to several authors on this program in the last couple of years where COVID is the answer to this question.
JC: Well, it certainly helped me out, so I had no excuse. My son was very good, he helped me organize a proposal, he helped help me choose the various publishers to present it to. And once I found the publisher, Johns Hopkins University Press, I was on a roll. And I discovered something that I, I actually knew was I loved writing and I loved researching it. I loved reliving the course. And it was the best year and a half or two years I've spent. So, it was very gratifying. And I guess that's a long answer to your short question.
GR: Well, you've already spoken to the thing I wanted to ask you next, which is some of the ways in which movies can help our understanding of mental illness and you talked about that at the beginning about how you use it in your course. One of the things in particular that I was wondering about that, I wanted to get your reactions to, was whether you think movies can help viewers have more of a sense of empathy for people who are suffering from mental illness, because there is a lot of judgment in our society about this. Do you think that movies can help with that?
JC: I really do think they can, and it's one of the reasons it matters to me, if films portray various mental illnesses accurately, even if their agenda isn't necessarily to teach. For instance, a movie that I have a great deal of mixed feelings about is the movie, “Joker”, that was very, very big and very popular just before COVID hit. In fact, it is the film, the R-rated film, with the largest box office in history - internationally. And so it was a very, very big film, and it portrays the Joker character, it's an origin story. It portrays it as though it is taking it very seriously. It's a one off in the world of comic book movies. Trying to really kind of get under the skin of what would make somebody become an arch villain. And the problem is that it doesn't trust its audience, I think. In that it throws so many different incompatible mental illnesses into this one character that it's a bit of a mess. And I think it's a missed opportunity because there would have been a very, it could have been straightforwardly a portrait of the making of a psychopath, it could have been straightforwardly the portrait of somebody who had maybe a borderline personality disorder or had problems with mood because we know that in the film they do show Joker acknowledging that he's had periods of deep depression. Instead, they hand us a mix of symptoms that covers such a broad category that you can't categorize and as a result, you can't really understand them. And yes, people didn't watch this movie to be taught about mental illness, but would it have hurt for them to do it right? And yet, I think they could have told a very good story. Now, as a teacher in my book and in the course, every once in a while I would choose a very good movie that was very bad in its portrayal of mental illness because showing what they got wrong was another way of getting at what's right. If you can point out something and say, this doesn't happen this way or it doesn't happen, if this person has this problem, he's not going to have a separate symptom that reflects another problem. And so showing a bad movie or discussing a bad movie could be educational too. But I would much rather talk about and experience a film that gets it right, gets under the skin of it so we can kind of really experience what it might be like to have that illness. And if you, as a member of the audience, are witness to that, you're going to be empathizing. You can't help it. And so I think it's a wonderful thing. It can remove the stigma because it's presented in a way that allows you to imagine, maybe I could have that problem.
GR: I'm Grant Reeher. You're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media and my guest is Dr. James Charney, a clinical psychiatrist and the author of, “Madness at the Movies: Understanding Mental Illness through Film”. So you talked about the Joker, and that was something else I wanted to ask you about in terms of, we have a sense of the upsides of this, this is about the downside. Do you think, though, that Hollywood has tended to make us view people with mental illness as more dangerous than the average person on the street?
JC: Oh, yes, absolutely. In part because it's, a film that shows someone who's kind of benignly off center is not necessarily that engaging or that interesting, so they ramp it up. I mean, you know, it is true that a percentage of people who do violent things are psychopaths. But it's not the majority of them, by a long shot. And yet you might think that the world is filled with psychopaths, you look to your left, you look to your right, and there must be one there. The film seemed to suggest that, in part because that's what's exciting, that's what what's dramatic. Similarly, films often suggest that someone who is violent might be violent if they're psychotic, if they’re not in touch with reality. And in fact, the opposite is true. If there's any violence in someone who is psychotic, it is usually toward themselves. It is much less likely that the violence will be toward other people, though that can happen if someone is paranoid enough and psychotic enough that he or she thinks that someone is out to hurt them and are really aggressive in a meaningful way, they could strike out. But the percentages are very, very small and movies don't match that percentage.
GR: Yeah. So you mentioned the movie, “Joker” having such a huge audience worldwide and the impact that it had. I did want to ask you, let's set the Joker aside for a minute.
JC: Please do.
GR: Give me the like three or four, and just name them, I don't go into detail about each one, but the three or four movies in your mind that have had the biggest impact on the public's understanding about mental illness. I mean, several come to my mind, but I'm curious how your choices are going to match up with mine.
JC: Well, you're asking a question that's a little bit different from one I prefer to answer, which is how the movies that have affected the public's understanding of mental illness more than others, because I'm not exactly sure how to measure that. I can tell you the films that I think are…
GR: Your hunches, your hunches, because you're a movie buff and a psychiatrist.
JC: For instance, “Prozac Nation” was a film that brought the conversation to the table. The whole concept of someone who is so depressed they needed to be hospitalized and whether or not medications could be helpful. That was based on a memoir, it was basically a true story. And what's her name, Elizabeth Wurtzel, I think, was the author of that. And it was made into a very good movie with Angelina Jolie and Winona Ryder. And, no I got that wrong, that’s, “Girl, Interrupted”.
GR: Right, yes.
JC: Also another film that that had a big audience and portrayed mental illness sympathetically, dramatically. Got some of the details wrong but it matters less because they got a lot of things right and it had a big impact, again, putting the conversation on the table. Magazines were writing about it, newspapers were printing articles judging how accurate it was or how inaccurate it was. As a result, people were thinking about it. The film that that inspired my course and the book is a movie that was a big, big hit called, “Ordinary People”, directed by Robert Redford. It won the Oscar for its year on which I think was 1980. It's a beautiful film it's beautifully acted. Donald Sutherland, Timothy Hutton and Mary Tyler Moore and Judd Hirsch playing probably the best psychiatrist portrait in the movies. And it's the film that inspired the course because when I saw this film I said, if I can find other films this good, that this effectively get under the skin of a person with an emotional crisis, in this case a beautiful portrait also health how it affects the family. And also a very vivid and convincing portrait of how therapy can help. If I can find a few other films on different types of mental illnesses, this is something that I think would be the backbone of a course and then the backbone of this book. So, “Ordinary people” is just a wonderful example of a movie that gets it right.
GR: Interesting. You're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher and I'm talking with Dr. James Charney. He's a practicing child and adolescent psychiatrist on Yale University's medical school faculty, and he's also the author of a new book titled, “Madness at the Movies: Understanding Mental Illness through Film”. So, you gave me your two or three greatest hits and certainly I remember, “Ordinary People” being very powerful when I saw it. A couple that you didn't mention that I thought would be sort of the ones that people would point to right away, would be, “Psycho”, “Three Faces of Eve”... well, let's start with those two. How come that didn't pop into your mind right away?
JC: Well, it obviously did because it's in the book. And it was something, of course, it was a film I taught. But actually the reason I taught it, it was less for the portrait of the mental illness, which this one is a bit of a muddle too, and more for the fact that this movie changed the way we watch movies and I thought that was fascinating. Because the ending was such a surprise, Hitchcock was brilliant at marketing and he pretty much invented the: you have to stand in line to get into the movie on time, which was not the way movies were seen before. So I found that interesting. “Psycho” seems to want to suggest that we're dealing with somebody with a multiple personality disorder, and what's very nice is they do have a psychiatrist at the end who calms you down after the excitement of the movie saying, no, that's not the case and it's also not the case that he's a transvestite, but in fact, he has a psychotic disorder, but that kind of gets lost in the shuffle. It's a powerful film, it points to some kind of mental illness, but it doesn't tell us really what's going on. And what was the other one you mentioned?
GR: I mentioned, “Three Faces of Eve”, you don't need to comment on that one, that goes back a ways.
JC: The brief comment about, “Three Faces of Eve” is, it's a mediocre film with a powerhouse performance by Joanne Woodward.
GR: Right.
JC: But it's almost like a classroom documentary. It keeps on over-explaining things, it's a clunky screenplay. It's a film that doesn't hold up, it’s very much of its time.
GR: And you mentioned one of the things you liked about, “Ordinary People”, I'm kind of jumping around here, but you've given me different things to think about, was the portrayal by Judd Hirsch of the therapist.
JC: Yes.
GR: And I don't know if this is in your book, but I wanted to get your take on the movie, “Good Will Hunting”, because that has a portrayal of a therapist as well that is featured quite heavily in the book. What's your thought about that one? That of course was Robin Williams, Robin Williams being the therapist, I should have mentioned that, but go ahead.
JC: I would have loved to be in the same room with Robin Williams and not necessarily as my therapist. I actually have the final chapter of the book is on therapy, how therapy is portrayed in the movies and that's where I talk about, “Good Will Hunting”. The Robin Williams character breaks about a dozen therapy rules. Among other things, you don't choke your patient because he presses the wrong button emotionally and he lectures more than teaches therapy. But what is very good are several early scenes where he does something where he is engaging the Matt Damon character by talking his language and by saying that they have some shared experiences. This is a very good way for a therapist who is using a model that, family therapists use this model more, they're much more talkative and much more revealing about their own persons than someone who's got an analytic background or a psychodynamic background, where there tends to be an insistence that the therapist is relatively neutral or even invisible as a person in the room. But if you're willing to acknowledge who you are as a human being with your patient, you can help the patient begin to feel like you can understand him or her if you are able to say, I've had that experience too, or at least I know about that experience and Robin Williams does that. He talks about the fact that they're both weight lifters, he talks about his relationship with his wife, he acknowledges how brilliantly intelligent the Will Hunting character is, but at the same time makes the point that being intelligent intellectually doesn't make you intelligent emotionally. And so that's where he falls into, he's a little bit too full of himself and he talks too much. As I’m doing right now.
GR: (laughter) Well, it's your book.
JC: But it's a very good movie and a very entertaining film.
GR: Yeah. So two other questions about the movie specifically, and then I have some other questions for you more generally, but, is there one movie that you think has had the worst impact in terms of misinforming our understanding of mental illness, the one that would be at the top of, instead of your hall of fame, your hall of shame.
JC: I can't think of a worst. Very commonly if I mention to people, you know, maybe I'm being introduced to them at a party or something about something about my book or the course, they hear the title, “Madness of the Movies” and the very first movie that is that comes to mind is, “One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest”. People are always saying, are you teaching, “One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest”? That is not a bad portrayal, but it is a very shallow portrayal and it really is not a good movie to teach about the experience of mental illness because it's not about that. It's about the politics of psychiatry and the politics of therapy and how hospitals can misuse or mistreat people who have some kind of mental illness. And also at the time, it was also a portrait of some people who retreated to the life in a hospital when you could, when you could stay indefinitely in a VA hospital, for instance, simply because they couldn't quite deal with the world outside. So it was more about politics and society than it was about any one individual. As a result, it's not a teachable film about psychology. So it doesn't make it a bad film, it's an extraordinarily good film and wonderfully well-acted, beautifully directed. It's a favorite of mine, but not on this subject.
GR: That's interesting.
JC: I don't know, do you have one that you were thinking of that is particularly bad?
GR: No, no, no. Because I, you know, I'm probably one of the people that's been misinformed by these things. But that's a real interesting take on, “One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest”. If you've just joined us, you're listening to the Campbell Conversations. I'm Grant Reeher and my guest is Dr. James Charney. He's the author of, “Madness at the Movies: Understanding Mental Illness through Film”. I've got a more personal question from my perspective, actually, for you, if I could, and it's about the portrayal by Hollywood of people on the autism spectrum. And certainly when you bring that up, “Rain Man” comes to the front of everybody's mind. My son is on the autism spectrum and recently, well, a couple of years ago, we watched a TV series on Amazon called, “As We See It”. I don't know if you've seen that.
JC: I don't know that one.
GR Oh, okay, you might want to check that one out because the show does a good job demonstrating the fact that if you've met one person with autism, you've met one person with autism. But at the same time, it did capture some shared tendencies. And as we were watching it, it resonated both with me and with my son. And so, you know, it was interesting for that not only to watch the show, but to watch us watching it. And I just was wondering, are there particular films that you think have done a good job with that particular issue?
JC: There are. First of all, one of the difficulties in even talking about autism in films or talking about it at all, is it really is a spectrum disorder, which means, speaking to what you were just mentioning about that program, which is that there are so many different ways that it's expressed, so many different degrees of disability and by no means do we have an understanding of them. So to use to say someone is autistic, they could be so compromised that they can't in any way take care of themselves and can barely leave the house. Or you can have somebody who's just a little bit eccentric and yet, it fits the autism definition. And, you know, in general, one of the common elements is a difficulty, a kind of reading other people's expressions, a need for saneness and have difficulty transitioning from one moment to another or one focus to another, but the degrees are just dramatic. “Rain Man” is a very good portrait of a certain kind of autism. And I can't put my finger on a particularly good film, not that there aren't any, but I'd have to go back and kind of remind myself of the autism. I actually don't deal with autism in the book and I never did in the course either, I just had to choose my diagnosis. So I haven't researched it as much. But I'll tell you, there's a TV series that does a wonderful job of portraying the essence of a high functioning person with autism, and it's the, “Extraordinary Attorney Woo”, I believe it's on Netflix. Do you know it?
GR: I don’t, no.
JC: It's a Korean show, it's a series. It's not a movie, but it's a series of about 35 episodes and it is charming. The lead is a young woman who has many, many symptoms of autism. But she becomes the very first lawyer, attorney, practicing attorney in Korea as an autistic person. And it's a fictional story, but it's very real in terms of its portrayal of the society and it's a terrifically engaging movie. And the woman who plays the part has an Audrey Hepburn kind of charm. It's a comedy drama and I would recommend it. It’s sweet and it's accurate.
GR: Great. I'll check it out. So we got about a couple of minutes left. I want to squeeze a couple, two questions at least in if I can, because I’d really be remiss if I didn't get to one of these. But first of all, briefly, are other than film, are there other artistic mediums in your experience that you have found particularly good at conveying important aspects about mental illness?
JC: Well, one of the things that a novel can do, and there are many novels, and don't put me on the spot to name titles right now, but there are many novels that are very good portraits of mental illness. And one of the things they're able to get at that films don't do so well is, beyond the behaviors that can tell you how a person is thinking. Films that don't do that as well. Certainly artistic expression can convey emotional problems, not just disabilities, but emotional feelings, whether it's painting, whether it's sculpture, whether it's craft art. So there's so many ways that it can be expressed in a way that can communicate the experience to someone else.
GR: Yeah. Back in the 80’s, I thought German expressionism that I saw a lot of these galleries in New York was very powerful that way in terms of emotional pain. So last question is, and I should have given you more time to answer this because it's where you start your book, but you grew up liking horror movies even though they scared you and at the beginning of your book, you told a story about seeing the, “Creature from the Black Lagoon” and then having nightmares. I had to laugh out loud when I read that because I had exactly the same experience, I was drawn to that thing and then regretted it. But, just in a minute or even less, tell us about the natural relationship between movies that incorporate mental illness and horror.
JC: And horror? The short version is that horror films are really good at tapping into some of the deepest fears we have. It's not just fears of death, it's fears of pain, it's the fears of the unknown, fears of people or experiences that are just different enough to be unnerving. And all of those are part of the experience of someone who has a mental illness. They're also part of our own normal emotional experience and the ups and downs of life. So horror, you know, cranks up the intensity and often the level of violence and somehow in experiencing it in a horror film, we can often say, well, I'm glad that's not happening to me!
GR: (laughter) Well, we'll have to leave it there. It’s a really interesting book, I recommend it to everyone who's listening. It's both fun and it's really informative at the same time. That was James Charney, and again, the title of his book is, “Madness at the Movies: Understanding Mental Illness through Film”. Dr. Charney, thanks again for taking time to speak with me.
JC: Thank you, Grant. I really have enjoyed the conversation.
GR: Me too. You've been listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media, conversations in the public interest.
Kirsten Gillibrand on the Campbell Conversations
Nov 11, 2023
Kirsten Gillibrand( gillibrand.senate.gov)
Program transcript:
Grant Reeher: Welcome to the Campbell Conversations, I'm Grant Reeher. My guest today is United States Senator Kirsten Gillibrand. She's been representing New York in the Senate since 2009. Senator Gillibrand, welcome to the program.
Kirsten Gillibrand: Thank you so much.
GR: We appreciate having you. Let me just start, I know that for a long time now you've been out in front on issues of sexual assault and gender and women in the military and also the military justice system. Tell our listeners what's been the nature of your recent work in that area and have there been any significant accomplishments that you'd want to share?
KG: Well, yes, last year, we finally, after about ten years of work, passed a fundamental change to how we address sexual violence in the military. We are now taking those crimes, along with murder or other harassment related crimes, other violent related crimes out of the chain of command and giving the review of that crime to a trained, independent military prosecutor. And they will review the claims and decide whether it's a prosecutable offense. That was passed into law last year as part of our defense bill and now my job is to make sure we actually implement it. We are training the lawyers, we are - I think their requirement is to have everything up and ready by January. And starting January, all new cases will go through this independent legal system. So I am hopeful that this independence and professionalism gives more hope to survivors that they can report these crimes and that justice is possible, that the rigor and professionalism of this new system will allow for more investigations and hopefully more convictions.
GR: And you've also done work on sexual assault in the civilian workplace, I believe. So, tell us what you've been able to change there in that regard.
KG: So, in the civilian world we realized, because we heard a lot of stories about workplace violence and workplace harassment, and I had a meeting with a woman who worked at Fox News, and she, Gretchen Carlson, she said, I can't tell you the details because I had to sign a nondisclosure agreement and I'm forced into this nondisclosure agreement by the employment contract that I signed on my first day. I'm also forced into mandatory arbitration by an employment contract I signed my first day. And so we looked into it and everybody signs an employment contract that basically says if you have any lawsuits or litigation with the company you're working for, you have to go to mandatory arbitration. You have to sign a nondisclosure agreement if that's settled. Well, in the issues of sexual violence and harassment, you might have a serial harasser like they did at Fox News, a serial assaulter at Fox News. And she couldn't even tell her colleagues, beware of this guy, he's going to lock you in his room and he's going to take advantage of you or he's going to, she couldn't warrant anyone and she certainly couldn't call out what happened publicly. So I worked with Lindsey Graham across the aisle on writing laws to say you don't have to go to mandatory arbitration. You can sue in a court of law and if you want to name your harasser in that trial, you can. And so now if you're harassed or assaulted on the job anywhere in America, you can go to a jury trial and you could name out your harasser and are not confined. That changed 60 million employment contracts overnight. And now, because Lindsey and I had such a big success, I said, how about we do this for all types of litigation, for gender discrimination, race, religion, LGBTQ status, disability, age. And Lindsey, while wanting to be bipartisan, agreed to just do protections for older people and so we are now doing age discrimination. And so the nature of bipartisanship is you have to take your partner and where he can meet you and you pass common sense good laws in that common ground area. And so while we would love to apply to everyone, we will now apply it to age discrimination, hopefully, and get a vote on it this Congress.
GR: Well, it sounds like a significant change and it's also a good story about working across the aisle, which is tough to do these days. So, I also want to come back to the military, and I understand that you've also been active in trying to bolster benefits for the veterans of Afghanistan and Iraq and also going back to Vietnam. So tell us a little bit about those efforts.
KG: So, as you know, I worked for the past decade, a decade and a half on the 9/11 Health Bill to get health care for first responders. And what we found is that the diseases that these first responders have been getting are horrible lung cancers, stomach cancers, throat cancers, brain cancers, because the toxins that were released when the towers fell that were lit on fire by jet fuel, were just this horrific mass of toxins. And we started learning from veterans that they were getting the same diseases. And we realized that a lot of our veterans were exposed to burn pits, which were just like the 9/11 towers falling. It was all things being burnt and set on fire by jet fuel, from human waste to medical waste, to electronics to wood to building materials, all the kinds of things that happened on 9/11. And as a result, the coalition that we put together for 9/11 came back together. Jon Stewart, John Feal, a lot of our first responders, we all work to getting these protections and health care for veterans exposed to burn pits. And we did, we did it in like two years. It was just unbelievably in its speed but it was such a bipartisan issue when it was voted on the Senate it got 88 votes. So it was very bipartisan. I teamed up with a number of different Republicans. Marco Rubio was my lead in my first bill on this. And so, common sense, thoughtful, important and any now and my bill was burn pits. We added it to a larger bill that was any environmental exposure in your service, including nuclear sites, including Vietnam era, anybody who wasn't covered in the Agent Orange. I also covered the Blue Water Navy vets a few years ago. But it's for all exposures. And so we passed the bill and it's magnificent for the for the burn pit survivors. It's going to affect 3.5 million veterans. And we have to get the word out. So far, only, I think only 500,000, yeah, I think only 500,000 of the 3.5 have signed up for health care and to get those benefits. So please, anyone who's listening to this radio show, if you know a veteran who served anywhere in the last 20 years, any part of the war on terror, they were likely exposed to burn pits. They are now covered. And any veteran, you know who is denied coverage, they can now resubmit and they will be covered. So it's really important that New Yorkers know that this benefit is now there for them.
GR: I have a friend who just relatively recently started getting the Agent Orange benefits and the person that the VA had to encourage him to do it…
KG: Yes, because they’ve denied for so long.
GR: …but he wasn't he wasn't aware of it.
KG: Yeah.
GR: You're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media, I'm Grant Reeher, and I'm speaking with U.S. Senator Kirsten Gillibrand from New York. So I want to ask you a question about something that is currently occupying most of the headlines, and that's the Israel-Hamas war. And your public statements on that I think I've been very direct and very clear regarding your support of Israel and its right to protect itself, but not all members of your party have been equally clear on that. And I wanted to ask you first, do you think that being a representative of the state, you already mentioned 9/11, but being a representative of the state that suffered the most during 9/11, and also in this instance, a state that has such a large Jewish population, do you think that gives you a particular perspective on this issue?
KG: Well, it does. And I also sit on the Armed Services Committee and the Intel Committee, and I've been focused very intently on issues of anti-terrorism and counterterrorism. And so there's multiple reasons why I am standing with Israel. The attack on October 7 was heinous, it was brutal, it was barbaric, it was a level of terror that Hamas has never been able to conduct. And it is absolutely necessary that Israel stop the terrorist attacks on Israel. They have to as a nation, you have to defend your borders, you have to root out terrorism as best you can, you have to keep your people safe. So I think we must stand with Israel and the fact that they took 240 hostages, I mean, it's incalculable the pain, the terror, the unbelievable suffering that so many Israeli citizens and U.S. citizens and Jewish Americans are feeling and facing. And then the exponential rise of anti-Semitism has been truly horrific. So yes, we must stand with Israel. It doesn't mean we cannot also stand to protect innocent Palestinians and communities that are in the crossfire. Hamas uses innocent Palestinians as human shields, that is why they are a terrorist organization and they locate their bombs and their rockets and their munitions in civilian neighborhoods, in hospitals and schools. And so this is a very difficult anti-terrorism effort by Israel to conduct effectively and safely for innocent people. It's very hard. And the United States is going to stand with Israel to support them and to help them. We had our own challenges in responding to 9/11. We had 20 years of war that did diminish al Qaeda and ISIS considerably. But al Qaeda and ISIS left. They reformed, reconstituted in Africa and other parts of the Middle East and it's hard. So I think it's important that Israel work with the United States and our allies on how to prosecute a war against a terrorist organization as effectively and with the protection of innocents as much as possible. It's hard.
GR: Do you think that this war could become an issue that divides and hurts Democrats politically? There's been some speculation about that.
KG: I think it's dividing America right now. I think that TikTok, particularly, is an app that a lot of our young people use, and they don't realize that it's a platform for the Chinese Communist Party to spread misinformation, to mislead people, to divide people. A lot of our social media platforms are used to create misinformation. And I think for a lot of the people who profess to be pro-Hamas, they don't know a lot of information about why that is such a dangerous position and why, in my opinion, is a very wrong-headed position. Hamas is a terrorist organization, they are not freedom fighters. And Israel has a right to exist, the world community decided that after World War II, after 6 million Jews were eviscerated. It is essential that we recognize that this is a commitment by the world, by America to protect the state of Israel. And so when you say things like from the river to the sea, you're saying Israel doesn't have a right to exist and all Jews should be eliminated. That's what they're saying. And I don't know that they all realize that’s what they're saying. I don't know that they all realize that they're calling for genocide of Israelis. So we have to do more to educate our communities, our children, young people on what's really at stake here and that the real enemy is Hamas and terrorism.
GR: You know, there was a Republican presidential debate recently, and there was a lot of talk among those candidates of federal funding for universities being cut off, depending on what that university was doing in terms of allowing this kind of pro-Hamas type of rhetoric to be put forward. Do you have any thoughts about that?
KG: Well, I called on the professor from Cornell to be fired because he celebrated terrorism. He celebrated the capture and taking of children and older people and civilians. He celebrated the beheading of babies and the slaughter of innocent people at kibbutzes. It's like, there's just no place for that on a college campus. You're given a position of authority and privilege to be a college professor. I just thought that was so more than uncalled for, more than inappropriate. It was deeply irresponsible. And that's why I don't think there is a room for celebration of terrorism ever and celebration of death of innocent people, ever. I think it is important that we talk about the real challenges of terrorism in our world, how it felt to be attacked on 9/11, how it feels if you're an Israeli or a Jewish American to see what happened in Israel on October 7th. And so I think it's real. And I think we do have to have accountability for people in authority, particularly people who are teaching our next generation.
GR: You're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher and I'm talking with U.S. Senator Kirsten Gillibrand. She's been representing New York in the Senate since 2009. I understand that you were pivotal in getting provisions to make gun trafficking a federal crime and have that included in the 2022 gun regulation package that went through Congress and was signed into law. Now, this came as a bit of a surprise to me because I would have assumed that gun trafficking would already be a federal crime.
KG: Yeah.
GR: Tell me why it wasn't and why is this change important?
KG: Well, it wasn't a federal crime because the NRA didn't want it to be a federal crime. The NRA doesn't support hunters, the NRA supports gun manufacturers and gun dealers. So they want more weapons sold and used and it's all about money. They like to use hunter’s rights as a shield but it's not true. They just want more gun sales and they want proliferation of weapons. And they want proliferation of all weapons, even weapons that aren't appropriate for hunters or gun enthusiasts like assault weapons. So one of the things that we recognized was that in New York State, most of the weapons used in crimes came from out of state, and almost all of them were illegal. So it was just really frustrating that we could have common sense gun laws in New York, but that a gun dealer in Georgia could just send up 100 weapons in the back of a truck and sell them directly to gang members in the Bronx or in Brooklyn or in Buffalo. And so when I was first appointed to the Senate, I went to meet with a community in Brooklyn who had just lost a young girl who was about to graduate and was on her way to UPenn and had her whole future in front of her. And she was killed with a stray gun bullet from gang violence. And I met her parents and I met her classmates, and I decided that this was the one thing I was going to try to do to get these illegal guns off the streets because it was hurting so many innocent people. I mean, gun deaths every day. And so I wrote legislation to make gun trafficking a federal crime so that law enforcement could go after these bad gun dealers. It’s only 1% of them, but they're bad, and go after these straw purchasers and traffickers. These are criminal networks. And we got a pass last year and we paired it with a great deal of money for mental health because a lot of our public safety issues in New York are mental health related. The obvious mentally ill man who pushed a woman, an Asian woman to her death in the subway. We've seen mental health crises absolute metastasize in every community, resulting in violence, a lot of petty crime. We also have seen a rise in youth crime, and that is largely mental health related. So this bill will have billions of dollars for violence disruption, mental health investments. We can spend that money in our schools for school counselors, for after school programing, summer school programing, keeping kids from going down rabbit holes of the internet to become shooters themselves. Kids, you know, prevent them from committing suicide or substance use disorder. So it's very meaningful. We've already charged about 150 traffickers in the country and we've confiscated over 1100 weapons since that bill was passed. And it's going to keep growing because law enforcement now sees these tools are working and they know they can use it. And it's really good for anti-crime, anti-gang violence, anti-disruption in our communities. So it's working.
GR: I always remind our listeners any time this topic comes up and you just alluded to it, that two thirds of all gun deaths in the United States are suicides. A lot of people find that surprising. We just had an off year election. The quick take from the pundits was that it was a good election for the Democrats. I wondered if you discerned any particular political tea leaves of note in these recent off year elections.
KG: Well, nationally it was a great day. Boy, it was, I mean, there was so much affirmation that this country believes in equality and want to protect women's rights, reproductive freedom, bodily autonomy. The win in Ohio alone was unbelievably inspiring. In Ohio, I think the voter turnout was something like 85% of young women turned out or young people turned out with some extraordinary number. And I don't know it for sure, but you can look it up and tell us. But it was a huge voter turnout amongst young people. And as you know, they're not our regular voters. Our best voters are typically older people who are higher information voters and really know why their basic civil rights are so important. But to have the young people turn out in Ohio, I was so happy and so excited because it's their lives. Because what the Dobbs decision said is, if you have reproductive years and you are female, you do not have a right to privacy. So, so overreaching. And so a lot of these red states have used that to say you don't have rights to privacy in the mail. So you can't get your mifepristone in the mail. You don't have a right to privacy to talk to your mother on Facebook about what you should do if you're pregnant and can't take that pregnancy to term. You don't have the right to privacy to take your child who is ten years old who's been raped across state lines. And I think that story alone was one that Ohioans really was most outraged about that, that there was no protections for all these circumstances, that we need health care and that you have this right to privacy. You have this right, basic civil right and civil liberty to make decisions about bodily autonomy and whether you're going to do something that you might die. I mean, these are life and death decisions. So that was the best part for me. We also had some other successes about who's in charge and why. Our governor in Kentucky won, Beshear, which I thought was pretty impressive it's a very red state, but they liked him. And in Virginia, we had a bunch of local elections that we won that so that we could have a bulk word against ultra-conservative policies by their current governor. So I think that people voted on record numbers in these key states where it really was a life or death matter. New York, we didn't have as many victories, but we had a few really good ones that I was happy about. We did well in the Hudson Valley, which is an important battleground area for next year's House races. A local D.A. in Columbia County won, which I thought was terrific. We also had some other local election successes in Syracuse and other places around the state. The part that was pretty red was Long Island. So I think we have more work to do on getting our vote out and making sure people are inspired by the work we're doing to address these challenges that people are facing. So all in all, it was a great, great day nationally and some real bright lights in New York as well with the landscape of what work we still have to do.
GR: If you've just joined us, you're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media and my guest is United States Senator Kirsten Gillibrand. You ran for president in 2020, did you learn anything about politics through that experience that you didn't already know from being a member of Congress or a United States Senator? What surprised you?
KG: I did. Well, what I really loved about it, and it was very short and sweet, it was only eight months, but I really learned there's far more that binds us than divides us nationally. There is so much common ground, because when I was traveling in places like Michigan and Pennsylvania and Ohio and Iowa and New Hampshire, I learned that the top three issues for everyone everywhere were the same, health care, education, jobs. And it was different versions of like what health care they didn't get. So in in Iowa, they had no maternal health in a lot of rural areas and they were closing OBGYN wings. That's happening in New York City right now. In a lot of our communities in Mount Vernon, they don't have a maternal wing anymore. And that whole group of people have to find some other health care system to meet their needs. Now, in Iowa, they had to drive an hour. That's not true in Mount Vernon, but it was still the number one issue, maternal health care, maternal mortality. I learned issues like water quality in places like New Hampshire. Number one issue was the PFAS in the water in a bunch of communities. That's true in upstate New York, that's true in the county I was living in at the time in Rensselaer County, PFAS was a huge issue. And so it really emboldened me that there's no excuse for proposing any legislation that's not bipartisan. Like, you just have to find where that common ground is because the problems are universal and we have to focus on what we can do together and to pass legislation. So I think it made me a much better senator, a much bolder leader, a much more fearless leader. I gained a lot of confidence, even though I didn't do well electorally and could never get my name out there, it really made me certain that my efforts to make a difference, to serve others, to bring people together and get things done is exactly what I should be doing. And I'm that much more excited to be a senator and running for my reelection next term.
GR: Great. So, what do you make though, of these polls that are consistently showing this is for this election cycle, 2024, that majorities of the country don't want either President Biden or former President Trump, let alone win, they don't want them to even run again. It's really quite shocking when you think about it. What do you make of that?
KG: I think it's the noise. There's so much noise in people's lives today. They can't get basic facts, they can't get basic information and almost every piece of information they receive is colored. So it's been, it's got bias in it. I mentioned on the issue with regard to Israel's war against Hamas, the potential for misinformation and misleading Americans is so real and it's ever present. It's on every social media page. Russia uses it against us, China uses it against us. Iran uses it against us. We are very soft targets, I will tell you that. And people just don't know what's what. And I think that if they heard about all the good things we're actually doing to help people, like the big bipartisan infrastructure bill that's going to rebuild all the roads and bridges and sewers that are desperately in need of repair, new airports, new ports, new high speed rail, it's exciting. Rural broadband, all that stuff. Like, that's great, that's exactly what people want to know because it's about jobs. It's about making their everyday lives better. If they knew about the advanced manufacturing we did with the CHIPS Act, bipartisan, again, Dems and Republicans working together, you know from Syracuse, MICRON is coming in. When I looked at the plans of what it's going to look like, it's something like 20 football fields lined up next to each other. I mean, it's huge, it's going to be thousands of great jobs and a great economic growth. And the gun safety bill, again, bipartisan, helping deal with public safety problems, deal with mental health problems. If people actually knew about all the good things that are happening with Democrats and Republicans, I think the country would be far less divided. I think there would be less hate and division in all of our conversations. And then the few Dem-only things we did are also really good. We got the cost of prescription drug prices down for the ten biggest drugs that older people take along with doing a cap on insulin at 35 bucks a month. That's huge, lots of people have diabetes, they really need that medication. So, I think it's that and I think that the lack of truth and the lack of, what's the word, places where people know they're getting honest information and that's being given to them so they can make decisions. We have less and less, you know, honest actors that people know they can rely on. And that's our challenge. And I'm going to work hard for President Biden to tell people that he's a great leader.
GR: Well, we'll have to leave it there. That was Senator Kirsten Gillibrand. Senator Gillibrand, I want to thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me. We really do appreciate it.
KG: Thanks, Grant, appreciate it.
GR: You've been listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media, conversations in the public interest.
Dina Nayeri on the Campbell Conversations
Nov 04, 2023
Dina Nayeri( dinanayeri.com)
Program transcript:
Grant Reeher: Welcome to the Campbell Conversations, I'm Grant Reeher. Refugees and their resettlement have been prominent and challenging issues in the United States and throughout the world in recent years. My guest today is both a refugee and a writer on the topic. Dina Nayeri is originally from Iran, who was granted asylum to the United States when she was ten years old. She's the author of, “The Ungrateful Refugee: What Immigrants Never Tell You”, and more recently, “Who Gets Believed?: When the Truth Isn't Enough”. Her writing has garnered many awards and accolades. Professor Nayeri is also on the faculty of St. Andrews University in Scotland. Professor Nayeri, welcome to the program.
DN: Well, thank you for having me.
GR: It's great to have you. So, let me start with your first book, “The Ungrateful Refugee…”, and the title of that book, I think contains a deliberately provocative word, which is, “ungrateful”. So could you unpack the meaning of that word for the issues that you're dealing with in that book?
DN: Sure. I think in many ways this was a taking back of a phrase you hear a lot. And I think from the very beginning, you know, when I was a kid arriving in Oklahoma in the U.S. and in the 90’s, you know, you did hear people put those two words together, ungrateful refugee, which implies that you should not only be grateful, but you should be performing your gratitude for the benefit of the people already there, which, of course, doesn't make a lot of sense to me. It also didn't make a lot of sense to me because refugees are naturally, like the instinct is absolute gratitude to God and the government who's accepted you. I mean, your life has just been saved. So once you arrive, all you want to do is be useful. All you want to do is like, you know, pray and be with your community and say thanks, you know? What you don't want, though, is people who are born way luckier telling you to perform that gratitude. That irks, that feels awful. And I think there's a lot of people who do feel compelled to do that sort of like, gratitude theater and performance. So for me, it was you know, I wanted to take back that phrase. I wanted to kind of make people ask why. You know, we say ungrateful refugee, but we don't say, oh, she's an ungrateful physicist (laughter). You know, like there's this assumption that this is something that has to be a part of their lives now, an experience. And I want to challenge that, I think gratitude is private, and I think it's something that it's between us and our communities and our people that we love and our deities.
GR: So what are the experiences of asylum seekers and refugees that the people living in the host countries least understand? Is that what you just set forward there, or is there something else that people just don't get about refugees usually?
DN: I think there's a lot that people don't understand, and I think that's why I divided the first book into five parts. You know, it has kind of the entire arc of the refugee experience, and the five parts were, you know, escape and waiting and camps and things. There was asylum and asylum storytelling. There was assimilation, and then there was cultural repatriation. And the reason I divided it into those five parts is because there are things in each of those parts that you know, the native born don't really understand. And I think it'd be helpful they would want to understand because a lot of them want to do well, want to be kind, want to, you know, kind of help people adjust to a new life. But they make mistakes inadvertently. And I think one thing that I did with the book that I wanted to help kind of bridge that gap, is to kind of compare each of these moments with something that's very universal. We all experience, for example, the camp portion. It's about waiting and we've all been faced with waiting. We've all been forced to wait by someone with authority and it's infuriating. You know, it's the worst place to be. And I think to understand how the biggest burden of a refugee camp is not those tangible needs, it's the waiting, it's the not knowing, you know? Or, for example, asylum storytelling. We've all told stories and situations where we really need the other person to believe us, you know, and just how incredible actually it makes us when we need that person to believe us, it makes us worse. It makes us perform the story worse, you know? And I think that that's something else that's worth understanding. But I think what over arches all of this that I think I would communicate to people, is to be aware of the fact that once you've lost everything and arrive in a new country, more than first order needs, you are consumed by your loss of identity and your shame. You know, there is so much. And I think there's a lot people do that they could do differently that can help, you know, refugees overcome that shame quicker. You know, like, don't give charity from like the perch of the helper, don't put yourself above that, there's so much. I think it's all about like, approaching these newcomers with the same curiosity and welcome that you would anybody else, you know, that comes to your community.
GR: You know, I think finding that theme of finding the universality of it was very effective. So, you also blend in memoir along with the broader reflections and the analysis as you have in the book. So could you just briefly tell us your own story as a refugee?
DN: Sure. I mean, I was born in Iran in 1979, which is right around, well, right when the revolution happened. So before that in the Iran of my parents, this was a secular Iran under the, you know, kind of a monarchy which had its own problems. But you know, it was an Iran that was kind of becoming more modern and progressive. There were the arts and literature and modern people, it was very, it was an interesting place. But then the Islamic Republic came in and changed all that, put the women under the veil, took away so many of their rights, started persecuting religious minorities and then the war happened too with Iraq. So my story is that my mother was a Christian convert, she converted to Christianity when I was six. And she was part of an underground church and deeply involved with all that. And she was also a doctor, so she treated a lot of vulnerable women. And so she started kind of talking about, Christianity was like her feminism, you know? And so as she got into trouble and she got put in jail and we had to escape because her life was in danger. So we escaped the country when I was eight years old and we were two years displaced, part of that time just undocumented in Dubai and then part of that time in Italy in a refugee camp before we were given asylum in the U.S.
GR: Wow. So I have to ask this question, and I hope you won't resent it, but do you ever desire to return to Iran?
DN: Oh, no, why would I resent that question? I do, I do want to. I mean, I imagine myself being able to go back there, you know, and I think one thing we all dream about, you know, the diaspora, the Iranian diaspora, is to kind of step foot in the Caspian Sea again, you know, to go into the mountains and the little villages. I mean, one of the wonderful things about Iran, I think an experience Americans won’t have had is that it's a country where the cities can be very modern. Everyone's like got their phones and, you know, wi-fi and they understand American culture. And, you know, you have people who know music and literature and all that stuff. And then like half an hour away, you could be in a village that hasn't changed in 200 years. And like with a grandmother who hasn't changed in all that time and, you know, really get the experience so just being immersed in a truly natural, bucolic, beautiful place that is untouched, I guess, by time. And that's what I miss. I want to go and like grill fish on the Caspian with some grandmothers.
GR: That sounds wonderful. Now, some people might say some of the same things about Scotland that you just said about villages that haven't changed in 200 years.
DN: This is one of the reasons I love it. I mean, I can go half an hour this way and start hiking in the Highlands and like run into people who are just like, wonderful in that way.
GR: You're listening to the casual conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher, and I'm speaking with Dina Nayeri. She's the author of, “The Ungrateful Refugee: What Immigrants Never Tell You”, and “Who Gets Believed?: When the Truth Isn't Enough”. So, a broader question now. Are there are there significant trends in the prevalence of movements of refugees that you've been aware of in recent years that we should know about?
DN: Well, I mean, we know the big ones. And I should say that I'm not like a geopolitical analyst of any kind. But, you know, I write about people's individual stories. But, you know, you've seen what's going on in the world. You've got, you know, people from Ukraine and Palestine and other places. But I think the kind of trends I'm interested in is people's attitudes toward those refugees, you know, not necessarily what happens, but what happens among, you know, the native born as they receive these people. And what I've seen in the U.K. is kind of a disturbing difference between how they treat the white refugees you know, like Ukraine versus, say, the refugees from the Middle East and Africa. It's a different attitude, it's a different level of empathy and that makes me sad, you know, because, of course, they all come from places of like ruin and ravage and war and all wish for the same kind of opportunity to rebuild.
GR: I noticed that when I was in England as well for several summers in terms of the attitudes toward immigrants. The Polish immigrants, for example, were pretty warmly received, but not so much some of the ones that you're talking about. There is one thing that I personally was surprised to learn, and I just wanted to put it out there and see if you had thoughts about it. But I was surprised recently to learn that the majority of refugees in the world, they resettle in the Southern Hemisphere. And I think there's a stereotype in the United States that this is a phenomenon that largely takes place in the industrialized West, that's where all the refugees are going. But they're fleeing and going to neighboring countries that are in that area.
DN: Yeah, most of them, I don't know the exact numbers right now, but that's absolutely right. Most displaced people actually either get displaced with in their own country, just something happens that they move or in a neighboring country, and, you know, they stay, they settle and that’s it. Iran has a lot of refugees from Afghanistan, for example, who settle and become Iranian. I think it's very easy for us to just look at things from the point of view of the West, like, oh, look at all these people coming. I mean, they're a tiny fraction of all of the people who have had to move. You know, there isn't this idea that, oh, we want to come and like en masse settle in the West. I think they just want to get to safety. Sometimes safety means coming to the West. For example, people like my family, if you are, you know, an outspoken Christian in a Muslim country, it doesn't help you to settle in a neighboring country, you know, what I mean? Like, they're all Muslim countries, you have to just get out of that region and try to find your way to a country that has religious freedom, you know? So, for example, in the book there's a story of how we were in Dubai for ten months and then my mother got in trouble with Dubai. Because they found out and they were going to deport her back and so the UNHCR had to kind of step in and say, these are refugees and we'll take them. And then they took us to Italy, which was a safe country for Christians, while they sorted out where we belong.
GR: You're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher, and I'm talking with Dina Nayeri. She's a professor at St Andrews University in Scotland and the author of, “The Ungrateful Refugee: What Immigrants Never Tell You”, and more recently, “Who Gets Believed?: When the Truth Isn't Enough”. And we've been discussing the issues that she raises in those two books. So you'll probably be interested to hear this, Dina, but Syracuse is a federally designated refugee resettlement area, along with cities like Utica and Rochester. So this whole area up here in Central New York. And it's my impression, I think it's widely shared that these waves of refugee populations that have come in have really helped to revitalize these cities, in particular Utica. But you also see it in Syracuse, both economically and certainly culturally. And I think it's to the point now where it's part of Syracuse's identity as a city, that this is this is who we are. So I'm just wondering, is that your sense of the general impact of having refugees come to any particular area that you get that dynamic?
DN: It is. I think, first of all, that's wonderful to hear and I can't wait to be there and see for myself. It's very exciting. I always love to hear about communities that welcome refugees and that are changed by them because I think one thing that I want to make sure people understand is that this is only good for everyone, it's only like, wonderful. Refugees for the most part, you know, what they want to do is come and immediately get back on their feet, be useful, help put their skills to good use and to like, you know, show, I mean, it's such a shared compulsion that they want to show the native born that they were worth it, you know, that they will add something to that community. And often they do because, you know, refugees come from all walks of life and they have all kinds of skills and professions and talents and they put them to use there. But another thing is I think, you know, in the U.K. and parts of the U.K. and the U.S., I've also heard these fears about, oh, will they change our culture? Will they change, you know, the feeling of our cities? And like for me, you have to take such a long term view because when I was growing up in Oklahoma, for example, nobody from the Middle East to come into my community and changing the culture was essentially us, you know, adding our foods to the mix in the church and like bringing our music and our songs and things like that. And all those things were actually joyful to receive for our community. But nowadays, like 20 years has passed and like, say, for example, nobody would bat an eye at somebody bringing hummus to a church. You know, like people, like your regular everyday American is like feeding the foods that we brought 20 years ago, you know, to their children and it doesn't make them less American. It doesn't take away from their family culture because that's how change works. Like time works that way, no matter how much you try to keep people out, the fact is that the world is going to change your children and make them different from you, you know? And so all of these influences that you're so afraid of actually are going to just enrich, you know, who your children are in a different way. You're not going to miss that the, you know, who they would have been had they had maybe a little bit less of this influence and a little more of this. You can't control that stuff, you know? So I think it's a much happier existence for a community to embrace everything everyone has to bring and to like just create like a much richer tapestry, you know? And I think those are the communities that thrive and they do so for a reason.
GR: So let's shift to your more recent book, “Who Gets Believed?...” What are the main issues that you're wrestling with there in that book?
DN: Well, the book came out of, you know, the last one and that, you know, as I said, I was doing this the different stages of the refugee life. And I was doing a lot of research. I put in stories from current refugees and people who had just received asylum or were on their way. And I had woven together my own story with theirs throughout this book. But after I finished it, I found myself just constantly returning to one of the sections, which was storytelling. You know, how asylum seekers and refugees are forced to tell their story in asylum interviews, but also in other contexts, too, and how those stories are received. And I had all of these extra other stories that I hadn't yet put in the book, but there was one in particular I was absolutely obsessed with that I couldn't put in the first book because the Supreme Court case was still ongoing and I hadn't yet met him and his lawyer, and it was such a big story and it hadn't quite come together. And that was the story of KV. And KV was a refugee who came from Sri Lanka, and he came in 2011 at a time where Sri Lanka was actually putting out a lot of refugees, and a lot of them came in with these very characteristics, torture scars on their backs, you know, and their arms. Because the Sri Lankan detention camps, the Sri Lankan authorities, were torturing people with hot soldering irons, you know, in the same way over and over and over again, if they suspected that they had helped the Tamil Tigers in any way or resistance groups, you know? So he came in, KV came in to the U.K. with these exact same scars and somewhere along the line I guess, the asylum officer who heard his story had been desensitized to this story, these pictures. She or he had seen one too many, you know, and rejected his case for a completely made up reason that had been recently made up precisely because too many people were coming in with these same scars, which is that they called itself infliction by proxy. Like he put the scars on his own back they said in order to get asylum. Like, forget the fact that all of the humanitarian organizations are saying this is characteristic of Sri Lanka at the time and that all the doctors were saying nobody would do this to themselves. Still, they rejected him and it took years of going through the system before the Supreme Court said this is absurd, you cannot create an entirely made up category and like attach such a burden of proof to the other categories that you kind of dump everyone into this one, which has no burden of proof, you know? So that story had me so enthralled that I had to you know, include it. But it also made me want to expand out from refugees to other vulnerable people who are not believed for one reason or another. You know, we have the wrongfully convicted, we have people trying to get particular types of medicine or medical attention. You know, a lot of times vulnerable people, the poor people of color, you know, being disbelieved by, you know, the people who are meant to help them. So I started gathering stories for those. And of course, again, I wove a memoir because I had a childhood obsession with how to be believed. And not only that, but I had been a refugee and I had also been someone who, like, came up through places like McKinsey and Harvard Business School and these places of, like, you know, kind of elite education where they taught you how to be believed. And as a former refugee, I was just appalled all the time by some of the things and some of the tools that were handed to the privileged, I guess, that I was now, you know, one of. So I felt that this was a topic that was rooted in my obsessions and also, you know, important because I had all these stories.
GR: Well, this next question is related to this in a way, but gets at it somewhat differently and that is, it seems to me you mentioned, you know, putting everybody in one category rather than seeing the differences that are there and it's related to that. It seems to me that the distinctions between refugees and more traditionally considered immigrants are becoming blurred, at least in the United States, the way they get talked about. And I just wondered if, A, is that impression correct and if it is correct, what do you think it reflects?
DN: Well, I mean, it depends on who you're talking to, because the thing is that the distinction is blurry. You know, it is blurry because the world is changing. There's all kinds of reasons people get displaced, all different types of circumstances. And it's really hard to interpret something like the refugee convention. So just for our listeners who don't know the exact definition of a refugee, you know, after World War Two, you know, the nations, Europe and America, they got together and they signed the Refugee Convention, which is an agreement that they would take in people who have been displaced and in danger and who can't go back to their countries based on five characteristics. So that the danger has to be because of your race, religion, national identity, political opinion or membership in a social group. So if you are in one of these five categories and you've been persecuted and you're in danger, then you are owed I guess, asylum, right? The trouble is, so the people who originally drafted this, they created that fifth category, membership in a social group, to be kind of a giant, et cetera. What they didn't want is for something like the Holocaust to happen again to a group that they didn't anticipate, right? So they were like, you don't know who the next persecuted group will be and why, so what we're going to say is something along the lines of, for any reason, you're in danger, right? But now, like countries are, you know, like people who want to narrow that definition and to close the doors are basically just essentially narrowing the definition, saying things like, well, women are not a social group, battered women are not a social group. You know, like if you're been involved with, if a gang has threatened you, you know, and you're in danger, that's not one of these categories or a social group. But the fact is, there's lots of different reasons people need to get away, you know? In Central America, you do have gang violence and threats, you have climate change, you have like people who have to run because they're the place are living isn't sustainable. And then you've got people that we call migrants, economic migrants who you know, have to get away because they are dying, you know, because they can't get food or work or whatever in the place that they live. For some reason, we separate them out and say they are not real refugees. Well, I think those lines should blur because the fact is that those people are in just as much danger. You know, at the end of the day, that's not a life any of us would accept either, you know? And so it is complex. It is hard to know where on that spectrum to draw the line. My personal, you know, ideals and beliefs say you draw them in a place that is generous, you know, a place where, like, if it was anything on this side of the line, you wouldn't be willing to live there because why should the accident of birth decide that, you know, you get to live happier than this other person?
GR: If you've just joined us, you're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media and my guest is the writer Dina Nayeri. We've got about 4 minutes left or so, but I want to try to squeeze in two more questions if I can. And you already anticipated the first one, you mentioned this at the very beginning of our conversation. You were saying that, you know, the current situation, there are going to be a lot of Palestinian refugees. And I did want to ask you, what do you anticipate happening regarding refugees and their resettlement as a result of the Israel-Hamas war? What would you think is going to be the place where they go and how is it going to work?
DN: I don't know. I'm not an expert in that region. I mean, I'm just kind of watching with horror like everyone else. You know, obviously, it's sad because this is not a group of people that a lot of the neighboring countries want, you know, like the doors seem to be closed from every direction. And also, you know, people don't want to leave. They don't want to leave their homes, so I think there's a lot of complicated issues there. I don't know, I have not like, I can't anticipate it. But I think as with every refugee crisis like this, you know, people in luckier countries should be ready to receive them, you know, we should kind of be a little bit better at thinking, what would we want if we were in that situation?
GR: And this last question is, I wanted to give you some time for it, because you mentioned also at the beginning suggestions about how the host people living in the host countries should be relating with the refugees and the things that they could do differently. And I did want to ask you, what do you think are the most important and doable changes in the refugee and asylum seeking process in the West? You know, particularly in the United States that you'd recommend.
DN: Yeah. I mean, I think there's lots of things that could be different short term and long term and within communities and also with the systems, you know, so just very quickly, within communities I think it's really important to, you know, tend to those first order needs, but also come, kind of to greet these people from a place of curiosity, the kind of curiosity you would have for someone new to your community that is kind of rooted in wanting to be their friend and friendship and welcome and all of that. From a, in terms of systems and asylum systems, et cetera, one of the biggest problems that I heard about from asylum lawyers is that not everyone gets equal representation. And some of the reasons that people get rejected and sent back into danger is because they come in and they're kind of forced to speak to an asylum officer before talking to any kind of legal representation. They say the wrong thing and immediately have themselves put in the wrong category. For example, if they come in and say something like, yes, well, you know, I was Christian minority in Iran and persecuted but also, you know, we had some money trouble, like, well there you go, they'll immediately put you in the economic migrant category because you said the wrong thing. One of the lawyers that I talked to said the number one predictor of whether or not someone will get asylum is nothing in their background but whether or not they have a lawyer. And that is not fair because then the rich will always do better. You know, people who have means and money and education will always do better, people who are closer to a Western culture always do better. Second thing is, I think there needs to be better training of asylum officers, you know, in cultural storytelling, the way that people tend to be, tend to tell their story in different cultures so that it doesn't, they don't think immediately that someone is acting suspiciously when they're really just telling their story according to their own cultural rules. But all that stuff is just, it's complicated and hard to implement and a little bit kind of longer term. But I think, yeah, there's a lot we can do.
GR: Well, we'll have to leave it there. That was Dina Nayeri. And again, her two books are, “The Ungrateful Refugee: What Immigrants Never Tell You”, and “Who Gets Believed?: When the Truth Isn't Enough”. Also on Friday, November 10th, she'll be giving a talk at Syracuse University titled Reconsidering Refugees and Immigration. That's at 4 p.m. in the Maxwell Hall Auditorium. And for more information on that free event which is open to the public, please visit the website of the Maxwell School's Campbell Public Affairs Institute. But for now, we'll leave our conversation there. Dina, thanks so much for taking the time to speak with me. This is very interesting and insightful.
DN: Thank you. Thanks for having me.
GR: You've been listening to the Campbell conversations on WRVO Public Media, conversations and the public interest.
Daniel Jaffee on the Campbell Conversations
Oct 28, 2023
Program transcript:
Grant Reeher: Welcome to the Campbell Conversations, I’m Grant Reeher. Perhaps one of the less well known frontiers of environmentalism and sustainability concerns the problems with bottled water. You know, the one you probably drank from the last day or so, and maybe you finished it and maybe you recycled the empty bottle afterwards. My guest today has written a new book about the subject titled,, "Unbottled: The Fight against Plastic Water and for Water Justice". Daniel Jaffee is a professor of sociology at Portland State University in Oregon. Professor Jaffee, welcome to the program.
Daniel Jaffee: Thanks, Grant. Great to be here.
GR: Well, we're glad you could spend some time with us. So let me just start with a very basic first question, briefly, if you could. How did you get the idea to write this book at this time?
DJ: Well, I was interested in, I had been interested before in the controversial issue of water privatization, more broadly and was, as someone concerned, I'm an environmental sociologist, I'm concerned about the relationship between environment and society. I was very interested in what the implications are of the market having more control over different areas of nature. And there were a lot of social movements, very vocal around proposals to or actual plans to privatize drinking water supplies, tap water supplies around the world, and then also in the U.S. And gradually I started realizing that bottled water was kind of a less recognized frontier in this process of increasing private or market control over our increasingly scarce fresh water worldwide. And so I started digging into this process and discovered a whole interesting set of movements that had emerged in response to the growth of this product.
GR: Interesting. Yeah, I want to get into some of those bigger questions in a minute, but let me just kind of lay the groundwork here. First of all, about the water itself. Beyond the packaging, what's the actual difference between most bottled water and tap water?
DJ: It is important to get a handle on what's actually in those bottles. Worldwide, a little less than half of all bottled water on the shelves comes from groundwater in some form, springs or wells. But in the U.S., it's less. In the U.S., many may not be aware, nearly two thirds of the water that's being sold on the shelves that we drink is actually sourced just from tap water supplies, it is extracted from municipal public water systems by bottling companies and often re-filtered, they strip out the minerals. They add their own proprietary mineral mixes, you know, so that Dasani, for example, would taste the same in New York State as it does in Oregon over here, and that's it. Only about a third plus comes from those springs as pristine springs and lakes that you see emblazoned on the labels and so that's a paradox. And the fact bottled water is linked to growing distrust of tap water seems pretty ironic given that fact.
GR: Yeah, I've seen the growing distrust of tap water, and it's a conversation that I have with my son from time to time. Also, for the backdrop here, give me an idea of the recent trajectories of the consumption of bottled water and soda and if you know it, of tap water. I know that bottled water has been going way up and I think soda has been going down. But I don't know if anybody knows how much tap water people are drinking.
DJ: Right. So I start the book with sort of a confessing that I'm old enough now to remember that when I was in grade school back in the 1980's, Americans in 1980 consumed only two gallons per person per year on average of bottled water and it was mostly, you know, Perrier and those heavy glass bottles, it was a luxury product. No, there was no such thing as mass produced private single use, plastic, bottled water. And somehow we got from that situation to today where Americans are consuming over 47 gallons per person per year and it is coming to us in those lightweight PET bottles. And really it's fascinating because in the US, in a place where the great majority of the population has the privilege of access to very clean overall tap water on demand 24/7, nearly nine and ten people say they consume some bottled water. And really surprisingly, recent stats show that one in five Americans get all of their plain water from a bottle, they shun the tap entirely for drinking. And so that trajectory has been almost entirely steady upward slope with one little dip in the Great Recession. And I show in the early part of my introduction a graph that looks like an X. Soda is sort of in inexorable decline replaced by bottled water's dramatic rise and two lines intersect in 2016 and bottled water is now the most sold packaged beverage not just in the U.S., but around the world. And just incidentally as a bookmark, that means that it is responsible for the biggest slice of the global problem of plastic bottle pollution which is on the order of something like 600 to 700 billion single use plastic bottles being disposed of each year.
GR: Interesting. You know, in terms of being able, what you can remember, I've got your beat because I can remember when Perrier was first introduced in the United States. Now, the bottled water companies come into play heavily in your book, particularly in terms of this larger issue of privatization of water that you mentioned at the beginning of our conversation. I wanted to ask you a question about that specifically. The bottled water companies claim that they're not in competition with tap water. They're only in competition with soda, beer, other bottled beverages. Is that true? Is that a realistic claim?
DJ: It's an important question, and it is actually a central claim of the industry. Very briefly, I talk about the big four firms who have dominated or at least led the industry in the US and abroad around the world. They're very familiar household names, food and beverage companies, Nestle, Coke, Pepsi and Danone. They are the four leading firms, and some of them, as people might be aware, Pepsi and Coke, for example, only sell re-filtered tap water in their bottles, Dasani, Aquafina other brands. But the claim that they don't compete with tap water is an important claim because the industry has many critics, and those critics have often charged that the bottled water industry is contributing to increasing public distrust of tap water through its marketing, whether it's overt or subtly implying that tap water might be unsafe to drink or less safe. And the industry's response, as you say, is, no, no, no, we are not in competition with tap water. We are in competition with soda, juice, beer, milk and all those other beverages. And so I dig into those claims and I look at a range of evidence around that question. I look at marketing literature, I look at industry reports, internal discourse by the industry statements by beverage executives and some stats which are relatively challenging to get on changes in tap water use. And here's what I found, it is certainly true, as I said already, that bottled water gain has been in part sodas' loss. Many people have switched from consuming unhealthy sodas to less unhealthy plastic bottles of bottled water. But it is also true that bottled waters' gain has undeniably also been a result of dramatically falling top water consumption here in the US, the statistics are clear. Tap water consumption has dropped dramatically, particularly among certain economic and other social groups, we can talk about it a little bit later. And so what I conclude is that the industry's claim that its growth has not come at the cost of the tap simply doesn't hold water.
GR: You're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher and I'm speaking with Daniel Jaffee. He's a professor at Portland State University and the author of a new book titled, “Unbottled: The Fight against Plastic Water and for Water Justice”. I wanted to ask you another question about those four big companies you mentioned. But first, I'd be remiss with our listeners here in Central New York if I didn't mention that this area is one of those areas that is renowned for its quality drinking water, tap water. And I notice the difference when I travel other places, particularly, I go to Washington a lot in D.C. and the water tastes awful the first couple of days I'm there. And so it really is remarkable to see the number of bottled water drinkers that I see around here, because we live in one of these places that's supposed to have great water. But let's talk about these four companies. And they do kind of figure as villains, I think, of sorts in your book. And you mention them and, you know, I don't recall seeing bottled water with Coca-Cola on the label or Nestle on the label or Pepsi on the label. They have these exotic names, you mentioned a couple of them. What explains that? Are they just trying to fool us here? That that you know, I'm not I'm not getting a Pepsi product. What's going on?
DJ: I honestly can't answer your question, Grant. This is you probably need to find a marketing or branding expert to really answer that question. But I think it's true across the board in food products, we often don't see the parent brands and that might be for a variety of reasons. And certainly the you know, there is an effort to have consumers believe they're buying from more of a mom and pop company. But Coke's brand is Dasani, Pepsi's brand is Aquafina. Danone does not sell a lot of its own brands here in the U.S. and Nestle, interestingly enough, and this may maybe getting ahead of the game, but Nestle due to a variety of factors including falling profits and competition from cheaper brands, in 2021 sold its entire U.S. and Canadian bottling operations and all its seven spring water brands and wells and sold it out to a private equity venture which has the name BlueTriton. And there's actually just a piece in the New York Times a couple of days ago about BlueTriton's extraction of groundwater in Maine. So they've taken over Nestle's business and so they have become the fifth largest global bottled water company.
GR: Interesting. Well, let's get to some of these bigger questions that your book opens up. And you write about the connections between environmental concerns and bottled water. And I can certainly see how those are connected. You know, the bottles themselves, as you mentioned, you know, the other ways in which this is just cutting into something that we don't need, it's not as sustainable as tap water. But you also write about the connections between social justice and bottled water. And that connection, I think, is harder to see in an obvious way. So tell me a little bit more about that connection.
DJ: Right. And this was actually honestly even a surprise to me as I dug into the research for this book. The standard narrative, and I think it's one that I partly even had in my own mind is that, you know, think back to the days of Perrier and those glass bottles and sort of selling it based on snob appeal if you want, a luxury product, right? And the standard narrative, the conventional story is that bottled water is a discretionary product that is most consumed by folks with a bit of disposable income. And, you know, the argument would be that if your income falls, you buy less bottled water and you turn back to the tap. And that certainly was true in the industry's early decade, maybe the 90's, when when the industry grew really dramatically but I think what we are finding is that in at least in the U.S., the evidence points in a very different and surprising direction. Which is that it turns out that bottled water is not just a controversial product with a range of negative environmental impacts, but it turns out to be very deeply linked to the, sort of the social justice crisis of uneven access to safe and affordable water, you know, here in the U.S. as well as abroad. And to jump to the chase, there is a problem of uneven distrust in tap water because our tap water problems in the U.S. are unevenly distributed. It's really only something like 7 to 8% of water systems across the U.S. on average, ever even have one health related violation of that federal regulation, the Safe Drinking Water Act in any given year. And most of those are remedied quite quickly. But the problems, the recurring problems tend to fall in particular kinds of communities. Low income communities, rural communities, small water systems. And these are often in places that are disproportionately low income and home to disproportionate populations of people of color.
GR: You start you start your book with Flint, by the way, and that's what immediately comes to mind, yeah.
DJ: High populations of communities of color, particularly black and latino, as well as indigenous communities. And it is among those groups, the folks, I think it's fair to say, who are sort of on the losing end of the uneven deterioration of public water infrastructure here in the U.S., who expressed the highest concern about their tap water quality and who buy the most bottled water now in the U.S. and who spend the most doing it, despite the fact that these are groups on average who are the least able to afford that extra spending. That spending can go from the hundreds of dollars per year to if like many millions of people, you're relying on bottled water for not just drinking water but your entire cooking, now we're talking into the thousands of dollars per year. Some folks in some of the academic studies, some families, low income families, we're spending 12 or even 16% of household income to acquire bottled water on top of water bills that are rising rapidly. So, you know, I like to say we don't have so much a widespread water safety problem in the U.S. as much as a water injustice problem. And those water crises like Flint, like Jackson, Mississippi and others, unfortunately, I mean, those are indicative of some of the deterioration of our water systems. But they also, as I imagine you could figure out, they have a disproportionate effect on scaring many more people who live outside of those affected areas about the quality of tap water overall.
GR: You're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher and I'm talking with Daniel Jaffee. He's a sociology professor at Portland State University and the author of a new book titled, “Unbottled: The Fight against Plastic Water and for Water Justice”. And we've been discussing the issues that are raised in his book. So, when you were talking before the break about this connection that is related to social justice, which was not obvious when you first think about it, it's very interesting and disturbing, but it makes sense once you say it. I couldn't help but think of the same type of argument about food for a lot of under-served groups, particularly in inner cities, and that they pay a lot more just to feed themselves because you have these food deserts where there isn't a lot of competition and the larger grocery stores. And this strikes me as a different version of that problem. But I wanted to hear more about Flint, because you do start the book that way and it does come into your story at several points along the way. So tell me a little more about how Flint plays into all this.
DJ: Right. Okay, so Flint in some ways has become kind of emblematic of this newly discovered crisis of threats to tap water in the U.S. In some ways, some of the factories in Flint were unique in that Flint was subjected to an unelected emergency manager who whose authority overrode the local city council and who made some of the fateful decisions to switch Flint away from the Detroit water system and onto the polluted Flint River, as well as other very problematic decisions. But in the broader sense, I think the case of Flint is very important and I think it has some larger lessons around these questions. So, of course, first of all, in a situation of toxic or unsafe tap water, local people, local populations absolutely need a safe, immediate alternative source of emergency drinking water, that's undeniable. And in the early days, according to some of the folks I interviewed, activists and local residents in Flint organized and they demanded immediate access to distribution of free bottled water as a way to get something they could drink. However, what I say is, they actually were not demanding bottled water per se. What they were demanding was safe water. And digging into some of the details of the Flint disaster really revealed some interesting things. One is that both Michigan's governor and many of the local groups, activist groups were asked were requesting a disaster declaration from the federal government it was the Obama administration at the time. They believe that that disaster declaration would open the door for bulk deliveries of trucked in, bulk safe water in tanker trucks and in these things called water buffaloes, where residents can bring their own containers and fill up in bulk. That declaration was denied. The federal government said no, and as a result those millions, or actually hundreds of millions of bottles of plastic single serving bottled water distributed at these distribution points with people lining up in their cars or on foot for hours just to get two cases, became kind of emblematic of that crisis. And those images circulated around the world. We've all seen them that one point in one way, it's priceless PR for the industry. But I think also it's, you know, sort of more troubling because it might inculcate the notion that that is a natural or an obvious way to to access potable water. And I think, you know, one thing we could think, I'd like to think about counterfactual, hypothetical. You know, what, if the Flint crisis, for example, happened in the U.S. at a time where we didn't have the alternative of that ready availability of those millions of bottles of plastic bottled water, what if that had happened to 1980 for example? I think, obviously have to speculate, but I think more than likely what would have happened is there would have been immediate bulk deliveries of tanker truck water of course, and a lot more political pressure on the state, the local and federal administrations to stop this embarrassment and to get those pipes out of the ground, those damaged pipes and replace them and solve this problem. And I think that bottled water is ready availability, its portability and the fact that the pilot population has become accustomed to it, reduces the perceived urgency of fixing the root causes of drinking water problems. And in some ways, it can serve as a crutch for cash strapped local officials who would otherwise have to make very painful fiscal decisions around raising revenues. And the federal government has cut its contribution to drinking water infrastructure by something like 80% over the past 45 or so years. So I think that's where bottled water connects both to social justice and also to this deterioration in process through disinvestment in our public water systems.
GR: That's really interesting. If you've just joined us, you're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media and my guest is Daniel Jaffee. I wanted to give you a chance in this last part of our program to talk about some of the things that people are doing to resist these trends and also to get your sense of what you would recommend if you had a magic wand. But let me just ask you this one real specific question about water before I do that that relates back to this area. And we can be real quick on this one. We do have a spring water bottling plant in the area, it's called Nirvana Spring. And I pass it on my way to a cabin in the Adirondack foothills. They emphasize that location in their advertising, obviously. I'm also thinking of Coors beer which emphasizes that it uses Rocky Mountain Spring Water. Is there anything about proximity to mountains that makes water better or even different?
DJ: I'm not a geologist and I'm not a hydrologist, I can't really say that. I can say that in places like Europe, you know, spring water is much more important to drinkers and they're much more interested in the mineral attributes of specific springs and their relationship to them. That's not such a big element in the U.S., and that's why we have about two thirds of our water coming from tap water. And the surprise perhaps is that folks don't find that objectionable, but spring water does sell for a bit more and at least historically, there's been a bit more profit in selling it.
GR: Okay, well there have been movements against bottled water to, “reclaim the tap”. and you write about those too. So tell me about those, how successful have they been? What are some of the methods, you know, that kind of thing?
DJ: Yeah, I'm glad you asked that because that's, you know, in some ways really the heart of this book is the push back or the alternatives. And I find this resistance or this opposition in a range of different places somewhat surprising. Very briefly, I talk first about one facet, which is sort of local community efforts that have happened in very specific places where the industry is either extracting groundwater or spring water or would like to do so. And I have sort of two deep case studies, one in Oregon, in the Columbia River Gorge and one maybe in your listening region in the tip of southwestern Ontario. In Wellington County, where a coalition of water advocacy groups, indigenous activists and local residents and others have resisted for several years the proposals by Nestle and now by BlueTriton to expand its existing bottling there. But the second facet of these movements and probably the one that's much, much more widespread and might be more relevant to more people, more listeners, is just what you said, what I sort of lumped together as the reclaiming the tap facet of this resistance, of this response. And that is just a fascinating constellation of efforts by local government officials, city governments, nonprofit organizations, environmental groups, universities, university students, high school students even, to essentially revalue or re-valorize tap water and sort of rediscover the value and the importance of this overwhelmingly high quality, nearly free product, right? The average cost per gallon of tap water is something like a half a cent per gallon and there's a turning back to the tap that is really can no longer be ignored. These communities across the board, big cities and small. So we've got San Francisco and we've got L.A. and New York City, but also a range of smaller communities are installing hundreds, in many cases, of these shiny new water fountains with bottle refilling apparatuses, the bottle re-fillers. Some of them are these high tech ones that tell you how many bottles of plastic bottles of water you avoided by filling up your refilling. And they are shiny and crucially, they're attractive. And I think that attractiveness is very important. We have a couple of decades of deterioration of our water fountains. I think we've lost the public water fountain as a public resource.
GR: I just used one today! (laughter)
DJ: But they sometimes are hard to find. But what's really amazing about this facet ,and it is now, I think it's sort of fused with a lot of the energy in the climate change movements and in the movements concerned about single use plastics. And we really are seeing this interest in refilling and taking the form, especially of young people, walking around with these refillable bottles, metal bottles, not just them, their parents as well. And so people are looking for places to refill, have phone apps like the refill app that are telling them where to find them. And these initiatives are coming together and the industry is starting to pay attention. It actually does seem to be taking a bite out of bottled water sales in the U.S. and Canada and beyond.
GR: We have some of those facilities here at Syracuse University, and it's been driven, I think, by those concerns. We only got about a minute and a half left, but I want to give you a chance to put forward, you know, if you were the water policy czar, what kinds of changes would you like to make? Would you want to just ban bottled water outright? What would you do?
DJ: Well, I think at the city level and at the level of public institutions like universities and local governments where the water is clean, safe and available, yeah, a lot of cities and universities are choosing to actually ban the sales of bottled water, either on city property or on university property. And then the flip side of that is investing in expanding access to tap water. But I go beyond that. I think there are a lot of really great access points, schools are one that we haven't mentioned. Folks who are involved in their schools, PTA, school boards, that's a crucial place where we could restore availability of water fountains and refilling stations. And there's been some very cool things happening around the country along those veins. The Filter First movement is something to look up online. Well, let me say, I think there are a whole slew of things that could happen at the local or state or federal level around water justice in making sure that we don't move toward that two-tiered drinking water society that I was sort of talking about. And I think there, well, let me just say the federal level is crucial, and I think the federal government absolutely needs to reinvest at a substantial level in restoring the condition of our public water infrastructure. There is a bill right now in Congress called the WATER Act, it would dedicate $35 billion a year to a trust fund that would essentially restore the federal government's role in maintaining and supporting, dealing with some of these new chemicals like PFAS and also dealing with the affordability crisis that's getting worse. And it would deal with the problem of water shutoff. So I think people could look into the Water Act and 35 billion might sound like a lot, but it's less than the $46 billion that Americans spent in 2022 to buy bottled water.
GR: That's a good place to end. That was Daniel Jaffee, and again his book is titled, “Unbottled: The Fight against Plastic Water and for Water Justice”. And it's a real interesting way to take a lens on something fairly specific and then have broader discussions about bigger issues that come out of it. It was a really, really nice job on that book. Dan, thanks so much for taking the time to speak with me. Again, a very provocative topic.
DJ: Thanks so much, Grant. I really enjoyed talking to you.
GR: You've been listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media, conversations in the public interest.
Heather Morris on the Campbell Conversations
Oct 14, 2023
Program transcript:
Grant Reeher: Welcome to the Campbell Conversations, I'm Grant Reeher. My guest today is Heather Morris. She's an actor, dancer, producer and writer who is probably best known for her role as Brittany Pierce on the hit TV show, “Glee”. She's here with me today to talk about her work as executive producer and writer for a podcast series titled, “The Bystanders”, a dark comedy exploring the bystander effect - the notion that individuals are less likely to try to help a victim when they are in the presence of other strangers. The podcast is in its second season. Ms. Morris, welcome to the program.
HM: Oh, thank you so much for having me. I'm so excited to be here.
GR: Well, we are glad to have you. So let me just start with a really basic question. The bystander effect, how did you get the interest in the idea to work on a podcast about this particular topic?
HM: So the bystander effect obviously is something that has been studied through psychology since the sixties after the Kitty Genovese story. And if you don't know, maybe go do some research and it's very tragic, but I know there's a couple of documentaries that have since come out, you know, regarding how people felt like it was unsafe to do something. And so essentially the bystander effect, you know, the more people that are involved in an emergency, the less likely they are to help because everybody thinks somebody else is going to do it. And so, I was getting my lashes done by my great friend Jaclyn Hales, who is also one of the creators of the podcast. And so she was not even pitching me this concept, but she said her and Ash Lendzion, who are both the creators, were in the middle of writing this as a feature film. And the second she started talking about that idea that a woman gets murdered in her courtyard and nobody does anything, I was like, instantly hooked. And I was like, Jaclyn, we have to make this. And it's hard, this was maybe four years ago, but even since then, like, you know the streaming content is so saturated. And even for somebody like me who's been on a Fox TV show and who you'd think would be like, oh, of course you can get a meeting and pitch this, like it's still so difficult. So I thought, what if we turned this into a scripted podcast and this is something that we can basically do on our own? Like, we have the details at our fingertips and we can find a distributor, and we did.
GR: Okay. And so tell me how this podcast is structured. Is it like a drama with characters? Is it set up a different way? Give us an idea of what it's like to listen to.
HM: So it's a dark comedy ensemble podcast. We like to describe it as like a radio drama, essentially. It's like this 1940’s feel because there is this wonderful musical score made by Tory Cummins. And it just guides you and glides you through this whole story. It's an ensemble, so there are, in each season, because there's two seasons now, there's roughly like seven to eight characters per season. And they're known as the bystanders. And yeah, they are, the first season, they were shorter episodes, but there was more of them. There were like, 15 minutes to 18 minutes and there was eight episodes. Season two, we kind of listened to the fans because all the comments on the reviews were like, we want this to be longer. So we listened, we made them a little bit longer and we released all of them at the same time because people want to binge it. You know, they want to hear it fast. So we've tried to be smart and listen to the fans.
GR: So, you read my mind at the beginning when you mentioned Kitty Genovese, because one of the questions I was going to ask you was about that case. And when people of my generation who are much older than your generation think of the bystander effect, that is often where their minds go, that famous case. And it was, as you said, the murder of Kitty Genovese in New York City in 1964. She was raped and stabbed to death outside her apartment building. And supposedly, as reported by the New York Times at that time, a lot of people witnessed the murder, I think in excess of 30 and didn't try to help or call the police. But you mentioned these documentaries that were made about it later and one of the things that they uncovered later is that that was actually contradicted that many of them did try to call the police and some of them you know did try to do things, they didn't go out there and stop it obviously, but that that particular murder led to this notion of the bystander effect. So obviously you looked at that case and I'm just wondering what you make of that particular case in all of this.
HM: I don't know, I think because it was so vast and so outlandish, it was also in one of the like the fastest, the quicker paced cities. You know, like there was so many eyes on this and it seemed, I think to many people, like the first of its kind in this modern day world. I mean, obviously, you know, we're not a new culture, but essentially America is. It felt like a very American culture thing for all of us. Like, we just weren't exposed to things like this, especially in, like this urban jungle, right? And so I think it was new and different and weird. And so obviously the media does what they do and they shame people, and so I think a lot of those people got shamed immediately because everybody's going, well, why did nobody do anything? And that's what we like to explore in the podcast is like, why didn't people get involved? There's so many reasons why somebody doesn't get involved. And some of the reasons in the documentary was that she was a gay woman in the sixties and it was highly shunned upon. And I think some of that's valid. I don't quite see it one hundred percent true because I think people did try to get involved, but it's the same thing that we're seeing now with people videoing on their phone, right? Like people are in the middle of a subway and they see somebody getting raped and they start videotaping and I think you have to retrain your brain sometimes. Because I'm watching these things back and I'm going, I can't believe nobody did anything! Like, what?! But then if you actually put yourself in that person's shoes, like, what would you do? How could you get involved if somebody has a gun or a knife in their hand? So I don't know, there's a lot of speculation with that, that particular story, the Kitty Genovese story. But it's really hard because immediately those people got shamed. And I just don't think that that's true. I think the media likes to take things and run really quickly.
GR: You're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher and I'm speaking with Heather Morris, the actor and writer who has recently been working on the podcast titled, “The Bystanders”. So, you already got into this a little bit when you were talking about the Genovese case but, as you've gotten deeply into this and looked into the bystander effect and thought about it, what do you think are the most important things you've learned about this problem?
HM: Well, so as we've discovered writing this, you know, like with these bystanders and creating these characters and like delving into reasons why they wouldn't, we felt a deep, almost like remorseful that we've shunned these characters into feeling bad and other people do. And so when we talk about stuff like that, we are constantly trying to say, well, how can I get involved? And instead of saying you're going to do something, like really putting yourself out there and in the world and like making sure you are trying to do the best possible you can in situations like that. And even as a writer, just exploring also like in the future seasons, what it's going to be like, when somebody does get involved. You know, like those people that do get involved and then they get in trouble or they get sued or whatever happens from there. So there's just so many reasons, and not to like point the finger.
GR: Yeah, I want to get into actually two things that you just brought up, but I want to do it a little bit later I have some other questions I wanted to ask first. One of them is, you described this podcast as a dark comedy. I can see that it's dark, given the time. It's harder for me to see the comedy. So tell me in what ways you've been able to find humor in exploring this bystander effect?
HM: Right, yeah, it's like, oh my God, somebody is dying in every season?! No, it's the wittiness. It's the zaniness of these storylines and these characters. And there are a lot of character actors, especially in the first season, there's some pretty fun characters who bring humanity to it and just bring that, you know, like, “Drop Dead Gorgeous”, like how some of those characters are just a little over the top and like, but also really believable because we know people like that from our day to day lives. Like, you just can't believe people like that exist in the world. Well, that's, “The Bystanders”, as you just have these characters that the writers in season one, and then I got to be a part of the writing season in season two, we just had to hash out exactly who these characters are and their quirks, if they have a stutter, you know, why they are who they are. And then once we hired these actors, so Kathleen Turner and Luke Cook and Margaret Cho, Beth Dover, Joe Lo Truglio, all these actors in season two, these are all just hysterical actors on their own. We have Jane Lynch as well. So like, these people know what the **** they’re doing and they can jump into it…
GR: …I think we may I think we may have to edit out that work for NPR, by the way. But that's okay, keep going. (laughter)
HM: (laughter) It's for dramatic effect.
GR: Right, right.
HM: So just I mean, these actors brought our characters to life. And I think that's what makes it, you know, like that's what makes it the comedy. The subject matter is dark, but the zaniness of the characters and the situations, especially season two, our setting and the storyline is so much zanier than season one, we basically have a crazed captor who is trying to teach these bystanders a lesson in the weirdest way in a toy house. So, there's like some, “Saw” mixed in there. I don't think it's hard to use your imagination. it really is just like a wild, fun experience.
GR: So when you were talking about the Genovese case, one of the things you said was, you know, it's happened in a fast paced city. And one of the things in my prep for talking to you that I found, was some social psychologists have argued that the culture of a particular area or a particular group has a big effect on whether others will intervene to help a stranger. What do you think about that? I mean, is it, do you think maybe this kind of thing is less likely to happen in a small town where people know each other? What's your sense of that?
HM: Well, I feel like you just brought up a really great premise for season three, and I'm going to steal it from you.
GR: Feel free.
HM: Because I don't even think we discussed that. Like, the idea that a certain demographic or a certain group of people could decide the fate of somebody else. You know, like with so many serial killers, I feel like it happens in smaller towns rather than bigger towns, right? So for me, I never even thought about it that way, and I really like your point that.
GR: Well, great.
HM: That was very great, I loved it. So thank you for making a point that I don't even think about.
GR: Well bring me on as a contributing writer.
HM: (laughter)
GR: You're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher and I'm talking with Heather Morris, the actor, dancer, writer and producer best known for her role as Brittany on the TV show, “Glee”. And we've been discussing her new her work as executive producer and writer for the podcast titled, “The Bystanders”. Heather, you mentioned before in the first half when we were talking about people who do get involved often paying a price for that in one way or another, getting in trouble. And there was one very prominent recent example of that. It happened last May in New York City, it was the killing of Jordan Neely. He was a homeless man who was harassing and threatening other riders on the subway. And then this Marine veteran, Daniel Penny intervened and he put him in a chokehold, which ultimately resulted in his death. That incident split the city and also the nation, it became this national story. And people's reaction to it, some arguing and protesting that Penny should have been immediately arrested and charged, others supporting Penny for trying to help. Ultimately, he was charged with manslaughter and as of the time we're talking, he's pled not guilty. I don't know if you followed that or not or if you have any particular thoughts on that issue.
HM: No, this is the first time I’m hearing this, so you’re hearing genuine reactions.
GR: Yeah, yeah, it seems like you're pretty shocked about it. Yeah, so, you know, I mean, it just kind of underlines your point about, you know, people who do get involved. And his argument was, I was just trying to stop the guy, I wasn't intending to kill him. But, well, we can move on from that one. Let me sort of, it gets to this bigger question I really want to ask you to reflect on, which is, and you already kind of talked about it, but this bystander effect and the discussion of it, it raises these really deep questions about what our moral obligations are to each other as human beings. And this Neely / Penny incident, you know, puts that question in terms of how far those obligations extend, what are the boundary lines for, how much we should or shouldn't get involved. And I know that's a huge question, but, you know, what do you make of this at this point? I mean, what do strangers owe to each other as fellow human beings?
HM: Wow, such a moment, such a deep, it’s a deep rooted question. You know, like, I watch so much, “Law & Order: SVU”, and I try to pretend like I'm in those courtrooms because I'm like, there's just so many sides to a story. And I think if people feel entitled to a lot of opinion, which is great, it's great to have opinion. But I think what we lack is a humanity, and I've heard people say this, you know, often, especially with social media, how it heightens it, is I think people are lacking the ability to hear and reason with the other side. Like in a really complimentary way, like genuinely listening, understanding, taking either mental notes or if you need like a notepad to write it down and reflect. And also like there is something to taking a moment, digesting, not reacting right away. Some may say in my family, like my children, they're like, why aren’t you saying anything, why aren’t you talking? And I'm like, I just have to digest what's happening. And yes, it's always good to like act, react, help in any way. But I also think there's something to, you know, like digesting information, like what we just heard about this Marine. And he was trying to say, there's two sides, absolutely. He was trying to save some people because this homeless man was putting them in an unsafe scenario and his intention was not to kill. He did not go on that train that day and say, I'm going to kill somebody. Like, it's just wild. So I think if I make a point here, it's just that people need to hear both sides and weigh them for what they are. The reality of it, right? Like, the reality of the dire situation of what you're looking at from all different sides, political, humanitarian, you know?
GR: Well, you're reading my mind about where I was going to go with this because you just went there. But the question I wanted to ask you as a follow up, as is I wonder how the recent trend in social movements and conversations about different kinds of identity affect the views related to this? Because on the one hand, we could say, the recent trend in emphasizing different identities might help raise awareness of need and trauma and unfair exclusions. But on the other hand, they may also underline our differences from each other and make us feel like we are more separate from each other. I mean, you mentioned the political divisions just a second ago, for instance. And I have to admit, as I wrestle through this, I'm torn on this question sometimes about, am I being told that I am different from someone else and separate, or am I being asked to empathize with somebody else for their situation? I don't know if you have any thoughts about thinking that through. It almost seemed like that's where you were going, that we need to take a moment and empathize.
HM: Absolutely. So, I can try to touch on it slightly. I teach on a dance convention and we preach inclusion and diversity and, you know, equity. And I start all my classes out with, my name is Heather Morris, my pronouns are she / her, if I misspeak on your pronouns, please let me know, I am not the fastest learner, but I would love to know your pronouns. I'm not great at names, et cetera, et cetera. I think discussing gender identity and pronouns is not to point out our differences, but only to just understand each other right away. You know, like this is who I am and this is who I identify with. And a lot of times my kids come home from school and they share their deepest thoughts with me, you know, like the things that go on in their mind that they're never going to say out loud. But they'll point out somebody that they see that, you know, may have just transitioned or was a man and is now a female and they'll say to me on the side, like, I can't tell, is that a man or a woman? And I, you know, as calmly and as kindly as I can, I just say, does it really matter? If he's not going to disclose and if she's not going to disclose her pronouns right away, it doesn't matter. But if this is important to that person and they disclose their pronouns, because I misspoke on your pronouns, then it's obviously important to them. Case closed, move on. Like accept it for what it is and just doesn't need to be a thing. And that's I think that's the point that we're trying to make is like anybody with gender identity, like they're disclosing to you, I think they just want to tell you and they just want to move on. And it's not to say I'm different, it's just that, like, this is how I identify and that's it, you know?
GR: I think there's a lot of wisdom in that. If you've just joined us, you're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media and my guest is Heather Morris. So in this last section, I want to lighten things up a little bit, I asked you a couple of heavy questions there. And if you don't mind, I'd like to go back to your time with, “Glee”, if I could and ask a question about that. I have two very good friends who teach at Skidmore College and they are huge fans of musicals. And for whom to quote one of them, “Glee” was, “appointment viewing”. They're insanely envious of me right now, by the way.
HM: (laughter)
GR: So, tell me a couple of things about doing the show and making the show that these two devotees wouldn't know and would find interesting.
HM: Oh, man. These are questions sometimes I wish I have in advance, because then I can like think about, you know, like what don't you know about everybody there? Jeez, man, I feel like everybody knows everything. I don't know what else I can share with you that, like, people wouldn't know. I mean, we had a blast, it was an incredible experience. It was not only (an) amazing show and a great experience, but it was one of the hardest things to do in the entire world. And it taught every single one of us on that set a whole bunch about a lot of things. You know, because it's not like a regular show, it's a cool show. So there's like, singing and dancing and like, theater is live, right? You're on stage and you're performing and your beats hit right away. But like, what happens when you have to roll the camera 15 times on a dance take, right? Like, we're all drained and tired. And so I want to highlight like, it's like life. Like, there's always amazing things, but sometimes it's really tough and not in a negative way, it's just, it was hard. It was an hour-long show, there was 22 episodes a season, singing, dance rehearsals. We had a blast. We were young, we were partying together. We became a family in the best way. I hope that helps them feel more included.
GR: (laughter)
HM: I don't have any dirty, deep, dark secrets, man. Like, yeah.
GR: All right.
HM: A lot of naps, okay, a lot of naps. There were a lot of naps in the hallway.
GR: And this goes back to thinking about the transition for something like, “Glee” to a podcast like, “The Bystanders”. But if I understand your career correctly, it's visual. You know, you're a dancer, you're an actor, now you're doing this thing where people are only hearing it, right? So, how does that change how you think about what you're doing there, the creative process? Because you have to as you said, it's like a 1940’s radio program. So there must be some kind of piece of this, it's easy for me because it's just, this has always been a radio program. I've never had to think of it as anything else. So what kind of transitions did you have to make?
HM: So like as a writer, I was not involved the writing process, but I was involved like heavily on just editing the scripts we would get, the final scripts. And just going through like audio cues and stuff like that. Because it's not like TV. TV is do, don't show, right? It's all in your performance and the simplicity of it, because you're watching it. And so everything is visual, you don't even hear how somebody feels, but you can see it. And so turning that into like an audio drama, it completely changes all of your audio cues. And then the fun of it is like, adding in quirks for characters so we can differentiate between one character and another. One character wears bangles on her wrist so we know when Doctor Jane is talking, and another character squeaks her shoes. Like, there's just so many things that you can give the audience along with the musical score, because the musical score obviously guides us emotionally. And also did help with like the showing of the scene. Like sometimes you hear a dun dun dun, which was always fun to do. But my point, a lot of times when like when we were getting into the directing and stuff was, in a lot of podcasts and I won't name any, it feels like you talk, I talk, you talk, I talk, you talk, I talk, and I did not want that. Even though we were recording separately, and a lot of people, the only people we had this season recording together were Beth Dover and Joe Lo Truglio because they are a couple, they are married in real life, so they got to record together and we got to use that, which was super fun. But I wanted it to feel like everybody was in that same room. That was our biggest challenge , and feeling like it was a full scene as if it was really happening. So that was quite a challenge and really fun to do audio-wise.
GR: Well, we've only got about half a minute left. I want to squeeze one last quick question in, and that's just, what other things are you working on at present other than the podcast? I mean, what are we going to see from Heather Morris in the future, or hear?
HM: A couple of secret projects which are very exciting for me. I'm on a journey to becoming a singer once again. I have just tried to push myself within these last two years like I never have, and that is singing. I dropped singing when I was young, my dad passed away and it was one of those things that, like, I love so much, but the loss of my dad just took me and I lost singing. And so now I'm like, find that joy again, Heather, go out and get it. So I'm like doing vocal lessons and for no other reason than just to be home, I guess. Like, very cheesy, but there's that. And then there's the strike, which is trash, and it sucks and I want the AMPTP to get their crap together. But hustling, man. I'm teaching some wine and heels classes to some adults so that we can be sexy and also drink and feel empowered. I know the partners at home love it when they come home after they've taken my class. So yeah, just hustling, you know?
GR: That's great. We'll leave it there. And that was Heather Morris. And again, the podcast that she's producing and writing for is called, “The Bystanders”. Heather, thanks so much for taking the time to speak with me, it's been interesting and it's also been great fun. So thank you.
HM: Thank you so much.
GR: You've been listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media, conversations in the public interest.
Jane Spinak on the Campbell Conversations
Oct 07, 2023
Jane Spinak( columbia.edu)
On this week's episode of the Campbell Conversations, Grant Reeher speaks with Jane Spinak, an Edward Ross Aranow Clinical Professor Emerita of Law at Columbia Law School. Spinak talks about her new book, "The End of Family Court: How Abolishing the Court Brings Justice to Children and Families."