Jon Wiener: On the Radio

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After Goldwater’s defeat in 1964, all the pundits said the Republican right was dead. Eight years later, in 1972, Richard Nixon won 49 out of 50 states – exploiting the toxic resentments, cultural paranoia and racial hatreds of the era. Do we still live in Nixonland? RICK PERLSTEIN says “yes we do.” His new book is NIXONLAND: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America.
Rick will be reading Thursday, May 15, 7PM, at Pi on Sunset (next door to Book Soup), 8828 Sunset Blvd. in West Hollywood.

Plus: Politics and modern music: teenage Hitler went to the Strauss opera “Salome”; Stalin walked out on a Shostakovitch opera—a bad sign; and Joe McCarthy subpoenaed Aaron Copland (but missed the fact that in the 1930s he had spoken to communist farmers in Minnesota). ALEX ROSS will explain; he’s music critic for The New Yorker, his award-winning book is THE REST IS NOISE: Listening to the 20th Century, and his famous website is www.TheRestIsNoise.com.

News update: The new campaign slogan chosen by House Republicans — “Change You Deserve” — turns out to also be the trademarked slogan of the antidepressant Effexor.

Our podcast at iTunes is under “News & Politics” and “4 O’Clock Wednesdays.”

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JOHN NICHOLS comments on Tuesday’s primaries in North Carolina and Indiana – and talks about Obama’s problem with Democrats. Among Clinton backers in Indiana, 33 percent say they would vote for McCain and 17 percent say they would not vote. Among Clinton supporters in North Carolina, it’s even worse: 38 percent say they would vote for McCain, and 12 percent say they would not vote. Obama, Nichols writes, “clearly has a November problem on his hands.” John is Washington correspondent for The Nation and writes “The Beat” blog at TheNation.com.

Also: PICO IYER talks about the DALAI LAMA and TIBETAN PROTEST against Chinese repression of their culture and religion. Pico Iyer first met the Dalai Lama 33 years ago and has travelled with him extensively in the last few years, writing about his work as a politician, religious leader and celebrity — while “the country he was born to rule is slipping ever closer to extinction.” Meanwhile many Tibetans criticize the Dalai Lama for not supporting Tibetan independence or militant protest. Pico Iyer’s new book is THE OPEN ROAD: The Global Journey of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama.

After writing novels located primarily in the Bronx and New Jersey, New York-native Richard Price has written a new novel, Lush Life, that captures the vivacity of life and language in Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Dissent’s Jon Wiener (“The Weatherman Temptation,” spring 2007) interviewed him this month.

Jon Wiener: Lush Life involves several worlds that exist side by side on the Lower East Side today—tell us about them.

Richard Price: Right now it seems like the place belongs to young, white middle-class kids in their twenties. It’s become their Montparnasse. But there’s also a big housing project population. There are tenements that haven’t been caught up in the real estate rehabbing game, and they are filled with Hispanics and Chinese and old hippies. There are the orthodox Jews, who are in a world unto themselves down there. And there is this huge population of Fujianese immigrants, some of whom are undocumented. All these people are occupying the same sidewalks and not really aware of each others’ existence.

J.W.: What did you learn about the Fujianese immigrants?

R.P.: They’ve got it really tough. Historically, the Lower East Side had the highest population density in the world circa 1900. Forget Calcutta. And that was mostly Eastern European Jews. But the Fujianese are living just like that, cheek and jowl, while in the next building are yuppies with a floor-thru that cost two million bucks. The burden that these guys have, that nobody before them had down there, is that they have to pay somebody to smuggle them into the country. So the minute they step off the boat they are $70,000 in the hole to the snakehead who got them over. On top of everything else, working seven days a week, they’ve got to pay off a mammoth debt.

. . . continued at DissentMagazine.org

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Can Obama recover from the Rev. Wright’s latest statements? We’ll ask MICHAEL KINSLEY – he’s America’s leading liberal pundit – now a Time magazine columnist, he co-hosted “Crossfire,” wrote the TRB column for The New Republic, founded Slate.com, worked as Editorial Page Editor of the LA Times in 2004-2005, and had brain surgery for Parkinson’s Disease in 2006. His new collection is titled Please Don’t Remain Calm: Provocations and Commentaries. Kinsley is the one who said “A gaffe is when a politician tells the truth”;  and “Ambition can never be naked in a political campaign; it must be clothed in deceit.”
Michael Kinsley will be in conversation with Mickey Kaus Wed. nite at Town H all/Writers’ Bloc at UCLA’s Melnitz Hall, 7:30pm.

Also: it’s WILLIE NELSON’s 75^th birthday. From “Crazy” to “Georgia on My Mind,” he’s been a glorious voice of America. He’s also the founder of Willie Nelson Bio-diesel (”Bio-Willie”), marketing bio-fuel to truck stops; he’s co-chair of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML) advisory board; he supported Dennis Kucinich in the 2004 and 2008 Democratic presidential primaries; and he’s called for the end of the war in Iraq. We’ll talk about his music and his life with JOE NICK PATOSKI, author of WILLIE NELSON: AN EPIC LIFE.
Playlist: “Crazy”; “Red-Headed Stranger”; “Mamas, Don’t Let Your Babies. . .”; “Georgia on My Mind”; “Help Me Make It Through the Night.” Visit the official Willie Nelson website

The mainstream media ask Obama why he doesn’t wear a flag pin, but they aren’t asking McCain why he doesn’t release his medical records. McCain, who would be the oldest man ever elected president, had surgery for melanoma, a potentially fatal skin cancer, eight years ago — the scar is still prominent on his face. He has promised several times to release the records, but each release has been postponed.

It makes you wonder: is there something in McCain’s medical records that he doesn’t want you to know?

The McCain campaign’s explanation: his doctors are too busy. “The reason for the delay is because they want to gather all his doctors for a press conference to answer reporters’ questions,” CNN reported, “and May is the soonest that can be done.” Three doctors are expected to answer questions, according to the Arizona Republic.

You’d think that it wouldn’t be that hard to get three doctors together to say that the Republican candidate for president was in good health.

. . . continued at the Huffington Post.

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The Pennsylvania primary and the presidency: HAROLD MEYERSON will answer the question, “when will it be over?” – he’s executive editor of The American Prospect and an op-ed columnist for the Washington Post.

Also: RICHARD PRICE has a new novel out: LUSH LIFE, about intersecting worlds on the Lower East Side: yuppies, Chinese immigrants, kids from the projects, old Jews, and of course the cops. “Richard Price’s ear for dialogue, his ability to caputre and reproduce the rhythm, tone, and vocabulary of urban life, cannot be overpraised” – that’s what Michael Chabon writes in the New York Review. “with all due respect to Elmore Leonard, Price is our best,” he says, “one of the best writers of dialogue in the history of American literature.”
Richard Price will be speaking Saturday at 1030 at the LA Times Festival of Books at UCLA, Fowler Museum Auditorium. Tickets free but required — at Ticketmaster.com.

Plus: GREIL MARCUS talks about Elvis. His classic 1975 book MYSTERY TRAIN: IMAGES OF AMERICA IN ROCK ‘N” ROLL MUSIC is out now in a fifth revised edition. Elvis, he writes, was “a great artist, a great rocker, a great purveyor of shlock, a great heart throb, a great bore, a great symbol of potency, a great ham, a great nice person, and, yes, a great American.”

Also at the Bookfest at UCLA this weekend: I’ll be on a panel with Amy Goodman and Tom Hayden — Saturday at noon at Ackerman Ballroom — tickets free but required, at TicketMaster.com.

More stuff to read: my new piece at the Huffington Post, “McCain’s Medical Records: Why the Delay?”

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Homeless in L.A: one man’s story: STEVE LOPEZ is the indispensable LA Times columnist who writes about life in the city. Now he tells the story of one homeless man on Skid Row who he discovered was a classical violinist, trained at Julliard. Now that story is not only a book but is soon to be a major motion picture: The Soloist.
Steve Lopez will be speaking Thursday, 4/17, 730pm: Town Hall Writer’s Bloc — Writer’s Guild Theatre, 135 S. Doheny Dr., Beverly Hills; Friday, 4/18, 8pm: Vroman’s Bookstore, 695 E. Colorado Blvd., Pasadena; Sunday, 4/27, 1130am: LA Times BookFest, UCLA.

Plus: This weekend is the 50^th anniversary of the Ash Grove, the legendary music club on Melrose that was burned in 1973 – Sandy Carter will explain–he wrote the music column “Slippin’ and Slidin’” for Z Magazine. This weekend will feature a series of glorious concerts at UCLA: Fri. night, 4/18, Royce Hall: Dave Alvin; Ramblin’ Jack Elliott; Mike Seeger, Roland White and Ry Cooder; plus Culture Clash; Sat. night, 4/19, Royce Hall: The Freedom Singers, John Hammond, Taj Mahal, The Watts Prophets; Sunday 4/20, 11AM, Schoenberg Hall: Gospel Concert, with The Eddie Kendricks Gospel Choir, Bernice Reagon and the Freedom Singers, Michelle Shocked.

Also: Osama Bin Laden is part of a generation of wealthy Saudis full of contradictions in their relationship to American popular culture—and American business. That story is told in The Bin Ladens: An Arabian Family in the American Century by STEVE COLL – he won the Pulitzer Prize for his last book, the bestseller Ghost Wars, on the secret history of the CIA, Afghanistan and Bin Laden.
Steve Coll will be speaking at 7pm in the ALOUD Series at the downtown LA Public Library, 5^th and Flower streets – the event is officially “Sold out—Standby Only.”

Ten years ago, Barack Obama went to a lecture by Edward Said, the prominent Palestinian intellectual. Should that be page one news now? The LA Times thinks so – they ran a story on their front page on Thursday on the event, headlined “Campaign ‘08: Allies of Palestinians see a friend on Obama.”

Obama’s attendance at that speech is news today, of course, because of the Jewish vote. The Times made that clear when it quoted Abraham H. Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League, who expressed “concern” about Obama’s “presence at an Arab American event with a Said.”

Said, who was University Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University before his death in 2003, is identified by Times reporter Peter Wallsten as “a leading intellectual in the Palestinian movement.” It would be more accurate to call him “a Palestinian and a leading American intellectual.” The author of more than a dozen books, his 1978 book “Orientalism” became the founding work of the new field of cultural studies, and is now assigned at hundreds of colleges and universities and has been translated into more than 30 languages.

. . . continued at TheNation.com

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Until now, BARBARA EHRENREICH says, “Americans seemed to have nothing to say about their ongoing economic ruin except, “Hit me! Please, hit me again!” then on April 1, truck drivers started standing up—in New Jersey, Ohio, and Illinois – challenging the high cost of diesel fuel.
READ the Truckers’ website; READ Barbara’s report at TheNation.com.

Also: the Pulitzer Prize for non-fiction was awarded yesterday to UCLA historian SAUL FRIEDLANDER for his book on the holocaust, The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945. He talks about the cooperation of “bystanders,” the passivity of elites in occupied Europe, and the victims’ initial blindness towards their fate, and then their willingness to follow orders. He also draws extensively on individual voices – perpetrators, collaborators, victims. (originally broadcast July 11, 2007.)
READ my Q&A with Saul Friedlander in Dissent.

PLUS: Israel, Palestine, and a tenure battle at Barnard College: a story about the campaign to block tenure for anthropologist Nadia Abu El-Haj, born in America of Palestinian parents.
She wrote Facts on the Ground: Archaeological Practice and Territorial Self-Fashioning in Israeli Society. In 2006, she came up for tenure at Barnard; JANE KRAMER of The New Yorker reports that “No one in her department doubted she would get it.” But in August 2007, a petition entitled “Deny Nadia Abu El-Haj tenure” was posted on the Internet.

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HOWARD ZINN says the American empire has run into problems lately–but not for the first time. His classic People’s History of the American Empire is out now as a graphic book, co-authored by cartoonist Mike Konopacki and historian Paul Buhle. It’s narrated by Howard himself and begins on 9-11, then moves back to the history of US expansionism and to Zinn’s own story of growing up in the tenements of Brooklyn.
READ Zinn on “What the Classroom Didn’t Teach Me about the American Empire” at TomDispatch.com
WATCH the ANIMATED YOUTUBE VIDEO narrated by Viggo Mortensen.

Also: OBAMA and Rev. Wright: KELEFA SANNEH visited Barack Obama’s now-famous church, Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago and reports on its background and its senior pastor, Reverend Jeremiah A. Wright, Jr. “Mainstream acceptance,” Sanneh writes in the new issue of The New Yorker, “is what Wright has volubly disdained; he prefers to cast himself as a rebel preacher, telling the hard truths that most black churches avoid.”

PLUS: SUSAN CHOI’s novel A Person of Interest explores the personal and political repercussions set off by a campus bombing reminiscent of the Unabomber and the Wen Ho Lee case.
Publishers Weekly called the book “haunting”; Booklist called it “mesmerizing”; and The New York Times called it “beautifully written.” Susan’s last novel, American Woman, told a story about a seventies terrorist group involving a Patty Hearst-like figure; it was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize for fiction.