KPFK 1-28: Elmore Leonard

ELMORE LEONARD, the mystery writer whose books include Get Shorty, which was made into that great film with John Travolta as a mobster who wants to become a Hollywood producer, live in-studio, talks about his latest, Mr. Paradise.

Also: KATHA POLLITT, columnist for The Nation, talks about the Democrats after New Hampshire: Katha says “I still like Dean.” www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20040202&s=pollitt

And: Twilight of Empire: Responses to Occupation is a gorgeous book that includes essays by Mike Davis, Viggo Mortensen of “Lord of the Rings,” and Jodie Evans of Code Pink. co-editor MARK LEVINE talks about the book — and what?s happening in Iraq today.

Web extra: Bush is down in the polls: Newsweek reports that “a 52-percent majority of registered voters says it would not like to see him re-elected to a second term. Only 44 percent say they would like to see him re-elected, a four-point drop from the last Newsweek Poll.” And “A Kerry-Bush match-up would have Kerry up by 49 percent to Bush’s 46 percent.”

Radio Nation 1-23-2004: Marc Cooper on the primaries

7:00am: After Iowa: Can John Kerry beat George W. Bush in November? And is Howard Dean finished? Marc Cooper reports from Des Moines. (originally broadcast Jan. 21)

7:15: Nation film critic Stuart Klawans talks about two movies that indirectly illuminate the war in Iraq: “The Battle of Algiers” — Pontecorvo?s unforgettable 1966 epic of terrorism and counterterrorism — and “The Fog of War,” Errol Morris?s fascinating and controversial interview with Robert MacNamara. (originally broadcast Jan. 14)

7:30: war and masculinity — what does it mean to be a man? The answer to that question has changed over time, but it?s always involved warfare. — and it’s the subject of a new book by Leo Braudy of USC: From Chivalry to Terrorism. (originally broadcast Dec. 3.)

7:45: two days in October 1967: in Madison, Wisconsin, anti-war demonstrators were marching against Dow Chemical, maker of napalm; in Vietnam, the US army Black Lions battalion was about to lose 61 men in a V-C ambush; and in Washington, LBJ asked his advisers, “How are we ever going to win?” Pulitzer-prize winner David Maraniss tells the story in They Marched into Sunlight: War and Peace: Vietnam and America: October 1967. Philip Caputo reviewed it for the New York Times. (originally broadcast Jan. 14).

Joan Didion: Where I Was From – interview 10/29/2003

Listen to this interview HERE
Joan Didion talks about her memoir Where I Was From.  It’s about California: Combining history and reportage, memoir and literary criticism, and explores California’s romances with land and water; its unacknowledged debts to railroads, aerospace, and big government; the disjunction between its code of individualism and its fetish for prisons—and about her family and their place in California history.
interview conducted at KPFK in LA Oct. 29, 2003.

We Still Live in Nixonland: The Nation

“Nixonland” – that’s Rick Perlstein’s term for the political world where candidates win power by mobilizing people’s resentments, anxieties and anger, where politics destroys is victims. Perlstein’s new book is Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America.

Jon Wiener: Do we still live in Nixonland?

Rick Perlstein: Yes we do. I don’t mean that the political anxieties and passions today are as great as they were in the late sixties. But the way Richard Nixon used the sixties to define the ideological contours of American politics is still with us. On right wing radio today, they keep talking about how snobby and elitist the liberals are — just like Richard Nixon did.

You are suggesting there was a time when the Republican Party did not win power by mobilizing resentment and anger.

In 1960, there was a strange creature called the Liberal Republican. When Richard Nixon ran for president in 1960, his platform wasn’t all that different from Kennedy’s.

A key turning point in the history of Nixonland is the invention of the “hardhat” as a political figure, which coincided with the rise of the flag as a partisan political symbol. We can identify that moment precisely: the riots on Wall Street following the Kent State killings in 1970.

On May 8, 1970, anti-war students rallied at the statue of George Washington in Lower Manhattan to protest the war and the Kent State Killings. Then 200 construction workers from the area marched in on their lunch break, wearing hard hats and carrying the American flags that topped off building sites. They complained to the cops that flags were not flying at Federal Hall. The reason in fact was that it was a drizzly day and the flag is not allowed to be flown in the rain. But they decided that the kids had taken down the flag, and started beating the protesters. Crowds of people from Wall Street cheered them on.
. . . continued at TheNation.com