Living in the USA

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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

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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.”

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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.

No show today on KFPK — preempted.

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It’s the fifth anniversary of the start of the Iraq war. For comment and analysis we’ll feature VICTOR NAVASKY – his new book is MISSION ACCOMPLISHED, Or How We Won the War in Iraq: The Experts Speak. Samples: “Military Action will not last more than a week” – Bill O’Reilly, Jan. 23, 2003. “I couldn’t imagine somebody like Osama bin Laden understanding the joy of Hanukah” – George W. Bush, at a White House menorah lighting ceremony, Dec 10, 2001. Victor of course is publisher emeritus of The Nation.
READ Victor Navasky in today’s LA Times op-ed page

Also: TOM ENGELHARDT talks about what we’ll be saying a year from now, when the war will still be going strong – even if Obama is elected, Tom points out, he will have been in office only two months in March 2009, and is unlikely to have removed significant numbers of troops by that point. Tom edits the indispensable TomDispatch.com.

Plus: LOUISE STEINMAN’s memoir begins with the fundamental rule of her childhood in the 1950s: “never mention the war to your father.” Then, after his death, she discovered nearly 500 letters he wrote during the Pacific War – and a mysterious Japanese flag. She set out to uncover his story and the story of the flag. Her book is THE SOUVENIR: A Daughter Discovers Her Father’s War. Louise is curator of the ALOUD series at the LA Public Library and co-director of the Los Angeles Institute for the Humanities at USC, and she writes for the LA Times, the LA Weekly, and other publications.

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Evangelical politics is taking a sharp, surprising turn – away from a war on liberalism and toward doing something about poverty and the environment. BOB MOSER explains – his story “Who Would Jesus Vote For?” is on the cover of the new issue of The Nation. Bob has been covering Democrats in the South for book to be published this summer.

Plus: novelist PETER CAREY has won two Booker prizes: the first for Oscar and Lucinda, which was made into a movie starring Ralph Fiennes and Cate Blanchett; the second for The True History of the Kelly Gang, which sold two million copies worldwide. Now he has published his tenth novel, His Illegal Self, which tells the story of Che, a seven-year-old whose parents are part of the Weather Underground.
More Stuff to read: my Q&A with Peter Carey

Also: The Comintern had front organizations – and so did the CIA. The story of the CIA’s funding of supposedly independent cultural groups and magazines—and how Ramparts magazine exposed the secret funding in 1967– is told by HUGH WILFORD; his new book is The Mighty Wurlizer: How the CIA Played America. “By turns hilarious and horrifying” — Kirkus reviews. Hugh Wilford teaches at Cal State U. Long Beach.

More stuff to read: my new piece at the Huffington Post, “How the Spitzer Sex Scandal Could Help Hillary”

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Hillary won the popular vote in Texas and Ohio — but she can’t win a majority of elected delegates, no matter what happens in the remaining primaries (as Jonathan Alter has pointed out).
Can we understand what happens next? Yes we can! — with help from HAROLD MEYERSON and JOHN NICHOLS: Harold writes for the Washington Post op-ed page and is executive editor of The American Prospect; John is Washington editor of The Nation and writes “The Online Beat” blog at TheNation.com.

And to get away from Clinton, Obama, and McCain for a moment:
THE WORLD WITHOUT US: ALAN WEISMAN asks what would happen to the earth if humans vanished: how would nature respond if it were suddenly relieved of the relentless pressures of human activity? Weissman’s book is a major international bestseller, translated into 27 languages, with 2 million copies sold worldwide; It’s the #1 Nonfiction book of the year for many critics.
Watch the great YouTube video: “Your House Without You”

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Samantha Power is a foreign policy advisor to Barack Obama and Pulitzer-Prize winning author of A Problem from Hell, the ground-breaking work on genocide and humanitarian intervention. She was also an early opponent of Bush’s plans to invade Iraq. We’ll talk with her about Obama, Iraq, and her new book Chasing the Flame: Sergio Vieira de Mello and the Fight to Save the World – Vieira de Mello was killed in Baghdad, by a suicide bomber in 2003.
READ my new piece at the Huffington Post, “Samantha Power: Obama and Me”

We’ll also be featuring THE POWER OF NIGHTMARES , the BBC documentary that has never been released in the US. It argues that much of the threat of terror is a fantasy. J. Hoberman in the Village Voice called it “the most widely discussed docu agitprop since Fahrenheit 9/11,” and said “The Power of Nightmares takes a similarly confrontational stance toward Bush-world disorder. But . . . it’s more complex and seductive.”

More stuff to read: my new piece at the Huffington Post, “Republicans for Obama: How Significant?”