Ronnie Dunn, half of the former bestselling country music duo Brooks & Dunn, has a singing voice that’s echoed through many a truck stop and stadium. And Dunn loves himself some Soviet art.
You read that right. Soviet art. This summer, I went to Nashville to interview Dunn for PRI’s “Studio 360.” “I’ll show you my Gerasimov,” he said with a drawl, as he strode up his mansion’s staircase in cowboy boots. “That one’s a Timkov.” The balladeer showed me wall after wall of impressionistic landscapes, portraits and sketches. And then he turned the interview on me: What was Moscow like the last time I went? How’s the traffic? When did I learn Russian, and why?
“Wow,” I thought after I collected my jaw off the floor and said goodbye. “He’s got the Thing. He’s got it bad.”
I should know. I’ve had the Thing most of my life. The Soviet Thing: an addictive mixture of wonder and disgust evoked by all aspects of that communist empire.
The Thing used to rule whole sectors of our military, academia and media. Of course, it suffered a pretty bad blow 20 years ago this month, when the Soviet Union finally gave up the ghost. But it’s still powerful, maybe now more than ever, as an unacknowledged absence in American life. We live in a country with a USSR-size hole in its soul.
Like Ronnie Dunn, I come from Texas, a place where people used to run for city council on their anti-commie credentials. Better Dead Than Red could have been our state slogan. The summer of 1984, after making his possibly-not-accidental gaffe that he’d begin bombing Russia “in five minutes,” President Ronald Reagan descended on my hometown for his joyful renomination. The Dallas RNC was a festival of Cold War hard-assery.
In that atmosphere, rebellion was easy: just pop open a textbook and learn the Cyrillic alphabet. That’s what I’d been doing at the only high school in Dallas to offer Russian. I figured I’d become a foreign correspondent like the guys whose names graced the USSR sections in bookstores: Harrison Salisbury, David Satter, Hedrick Smith. Go to the Soviet Union, decode mysteries, publish fat tome. Easy!
And then I actually went there. Inspired by the Юs and Яs I was tossing off, my grandparents booked us on a five-city group tour of the USSR. The summer of 1985, we boarded a plane for Leningrad.
I found everything I wanted — a world apart, bleak but exotic. Our first hotel room overlooked an unfinished construction pit filled with dirty water. Television showed factories, Mikhail Gorbachev and ballet. Outside the windows of our tour bus, the grim signage flattered my primitive Russian: a book store was called BOOK STORE; the restaurants, RESTAURANT. We were the wards of Intourist, the state (and only) tourism agency, and our guide was chirpy and sweet in English. But I could spark apparatchik contempt in her face whenever I mangled her native tongue, which was often.
The Soviets paid their flat-footed American tourists (code name, “Dear Guests!”) way more attention than we deserved. Every meal was an alcohol-laden banquet, in between which Intourist arranged endless cultural displays and/or “exchanges” with wincing local journalists. Away from our minders, people swarmed us. In Yerevan, friendly Armenians invited us to parties, wheedled us out of Eurythmics cassettes, and — in the case of the young ladies — tried to get into our pants. In Kiev, a sad college student approached me to practice English. I was obsessed with finding propaganda souvenirs, so he took me to a lonely shop, sighing as I snatched up GLORY TO THE WORKER posters.
When I got back to Dallas, I missed all that Soviet attention horribly. Then I realized that it was still all around me, if fainter. After all, the Soviets had missiles dedicated to my hometown, a place that, if you asked me, had nothing better going for it than some new parking ramps downtown. Our parking ramps could be the start of Armageddon! They were special. Yet they also remained unexploded.
The Soviets engaged us on our favorite terms, ideological. In the shining light of their competitive fixation, anything we did right was a moral victory. Just watch this archival footage of Richard Nixon debating Soviet Premier Nikita Krushchev in 1959. Nixon is bragging about color TV cameras. And he’s having the time of his life.
Middle Eastern terrorists are disorganized; the Chinese have an annoying habit of making all our stuff. The Soviets stood apart but hated us like pros. How can you ever get over an enemy like that?
The Supreme Soviet voted itself out of existence on Dec. 26, 1991. I don’t recall caring any more than the rest of America. We won. Not only was the USSR a has-been, but it had also devolved into 15 countries whose names I wouldn’t have recognized except that I’d been to some of them. I’d stopped studying Russian years before — the trip had the perverse effect of making me realize the language was actually hard. But then immigrants from former Soviet lands started showing up. They were Afghanistan War veterans, artists, just ordinary guys overstaying their visas. They told me little scraps of jokes in Russian that I could understand. They introduced me to underground Soviet rock I could’ve heard in 1985 if I’d had a clue.
And so I started studying Russian again. In 1998, I made the first of many trips back to the former Soviet Union, to Yerevan. The party town I remembered had been replaced by a dark maze of casinos and starving dogs. In Kiev, Nike — or was it Adidas? — emblazoned the window of the old propaganda shop. I was finally a correspondent, not of static mysteries, but of breathless, murky, heart-rending change. But my bosses didn’t know exactly where I was. “What did you learn in the USSR?” the CEO of a major-market public broadcaster asked when I returned.
What better sign that we miss the USSR than our total refusal to learn what that mess of nations is called now? Sometimes I’ll meet smart, usually trilingual kids in a former Soviet republic — say, Moldova — who’ll ask what story about their country interests Americans. How can I tell them the truth, “None”? If Moldova wants half a nanosecond of our attention, it might pick a better name, such as that of its biggest shopping center, Malldova. Then get back in the news-from-confusing-places line behind its 14 siblings.
What we crave is menace, and only Russia occasionally fits the bill. (Bonus — still easy to find on a map!). True, its citizens just seem to want ordinary things like matching towels, fair elections and the rule of law. But fortunately, Russia’s leaders don’t (they prefer matching jet décor). If anyone misses the Cold War more than we do these days, it’s Prime Minister Vladimir Putin. When he goes head-to-head with Sen. John McCain, it’s just like old times.
Yeah, old times. Dangerous. Surreal. And all the more so because we can’t even remember what it was originally about. We only know that at some point, something bad made us feel good about our place in the world, and now it’s gone.
By the end of my interview with Ronnie Dunn about Soviet art, he was openly regretting it. “I kinda don’t want the secret out, to be honest with you,” he said when I asked if he could share his passion with the country music world. Oddly, though, he keeps talking about it. He just doesn’t link to any of these stories on his website or fan pages. I don’t blame him. Many of his fans are as politically conservative as he is, and I imagine he has a healthy respect for the limits of what they can absorb. Collecting art might be sissy. Collecting Soviet art? There’s still room for something traitorous in that vintage hobby.
In his latest New Yorker piece, David Remnick writes, “This month, Russians will commemorate the twentieth anniversary of the collapse of the Soviet Union with almost universal silence.” Remnick has an A-league case of the Soviet Thing, but for once, he’s wrong. Whether they’re singing old protest songs or penning obscene new ones, Russians have been talking about today’s anniversary constantly. How could they not? They lived through the bizarre nightmare of the USSR. We’re the ones who haven’t woken up yet.
On the world’s largest landmass, he’s almost as well-known as God, and he goes by the same initials. But outside of Russia, Boris Grebenshikov has to get by with comparisons. He’s been called the Russian Bob Dylan, the Russian David Bowie, even the Russian Brian Ferry. With a smoky tenor voice, at times poetic, angry and seductive, Grebenshikov does have something in common with all of the above. But few rock stars have been to hell and back as many times as he has.
Nine years ago, Grebenshikov burst onto the Western scene in a way that no Russian singer had done before or since. It was at the end of rock’s “We Are the World” feel-good period, and BG became the designated perestroika poster boy. Long-haired, brooding and fluent in English, Grebenshikov appeared on the front page of the Village Voice and in the pages of Rolling Stone, New York and Mother Jones, and was the subject of “The Long Way Home,” a documentary by filmmaker Michael Apted (“Coal Miner’s Daughter,” “Gorky Park”). The film shows Grebenshikov’s struggle to record his album “Radio Silence” with Dave Stewart of the Eurythmics. With most of its songs in English, “Radio Silence” was to be Grebenshikov’s big Western debut.
Despite all the hype, “Radio Silence” unfortunately remained true to its name. Now, when Grebenshikov travels in the United States, it’s almost as secretly as the illegal concerts he once played in the Soviet Union. His shows are only publicized within the country’s Russian immigrant community, and most of his music is only available by mail order, in Russian bookstores or in RealAudio on the Web. Before the start of a recent U.S. tour, Grebenshikov sat backstage at a Chicago nightclub smoking and strumming a guitar. Gone were the American promoters and journalists, replaced by a jet-lagged and nervous but devoted Russian entourage. Grebenshikov was still unmistakably a rocker — he’d chopped off most of his hair and dyed the remains blue, the same color as his eyes. But at 44, he also looked older and wiser than most veterans of the genre.
“I see myself primarily as an artist working within the confines of the Russian language,” he says. Within America’s English-only rock empire, those confines make fame impossible. But they’ve helped Grebenshikov, of late, to produce some of the best work of his 25-year career.
As a youth in Leningrad, Grebenshikov spent most of his time tracking down smuggled copies of Led Zeppelin, Jethro Tull and anything else he could get his hands on. “I heard the songs of Dylan, the Beatles, Mick Jagger, and wondered why no one in Russia was writing like that,” he said.
He bought a guitar, and soon he was incorporating the standard blues chords of American rock ‘n’ roll into his Russian folk songs. The result was music that was, by Western standards, unusual — and by Soviet standards, utterly immoral. Calling themselves Aquarium, Grebenshikov and a group of friends began performing in apartments and warehouses, sometimes escaping through the window when police came to break things up. They used the instruments they had on hand — a cello, a flute, bongos, a few guitars — to create the “poetic rock” sound Grebenshikov sought. Using primitive equipment, they recorded illegal cassettes and sent them out into the world, where they were dubbed hand-to-hand across the Soviet Union’s 11 time zones. Fans began making pilgrimages to Grebenshikov’s communal apartment, where they left reams of legendary graffiti in the stairway: BG was an angel, a savior, even Bog (God) himself.
All this was in spite of the fact that Grebenshikov’s songs were often indecipherable. That’s the irony of his language barrier in the West — Russian audiences often don’t understand what he’s talking about any more than American audiences do. In “Sonnet,” for example, one of Aquarium’s early songs, he croons the poetry of his early childhood friend Anatoly Gunitsky in soulful, minor notes accompanied by a haunting cello line:
The dancing goblet looks like a hook
Around which diamonds are strewn
But I didn’t kiss you even once
My disgusting, legless friend.
After dismal sales and a depressing tour in the West, Grebenshikov eventually went home and fell back in love with Russian language and music. Through the early ’90s, he wrote a series of simple, hypnotic songs that needed no translation. His recent concerts in America drew Russians of all ages, including a younger generation that doesn’t remember his underground days. Instead of scrawling graffiti in his stairwell, fans now write long testimonials to BG on the Web.
But, like the country he once aspired to conquer, Grebenshikov has a serious aversion to looking backwards. He’s declared an end to his “Russian folk” period and turned to other genres, especially blues. His 1997 album “Lilith” was recorded with members of the Band, and although some of the songs fall into generic rock ruts, Grebenshikov does at times reach a funky new level of expression. More recently, he’s released a charity album of Tibetan Buddhist mantras, “Refuge,” with percussionist Gabrielle Roth.
After being a student of Western rock for years, Grebenshikov may now have something to teach pop fans everywhere. When he performs in Russian for audiences who don’t understand his language, he says, there are still certain moments that captivate everyone, regardless of their native tongue.
“There are things that are universal enough that every person who listens to it will perk up their ears,” he says. “Nobody looks at it broadly enough to create that type of music consistently. But I know that it exists.”
I was not ready to be a student of the world, but there I stood in the ancient heart of European learning, picking up platters of melba toast and putrid herbal balls. All night I’d been running in and out of a roaring, candlelit hall, doing whatever the person in front of me did. I was lost in an army of hired servants, clearing the appetizer and serving the fish, clearing the fish and serving the roast — and pouring gallons of wine at the same time. The guests, apparently alumni and faculty of this distinguished Oxford college, had shown great appetite until we’d brought in this palate-cleansing dish, artlessly called “green butter.” Now they’d broken away from their tables, clotting the aisles with an exuberance that terrified me.
“Ohhh, who did it?” a man in a tuxedo moaned. “None of us! It just wafted over!”
I’d come to Oxford a couple weeks earlier through a work-exchange program, the kind that lures students to Europe with the promise of legal employment, a virtual vacation abroad. The invitation extended only through the first six months after graduation, so I’d flown across the Atlantic right out of college. Years before I had briefly visited Oxford and longed to return to its confusing spoke of streets, yellowed stone and dew-covered pastures. After majoring in English, and seeing as many BBC documentaries as I could, I figured I knew everything there was about life in England — especially that it could be awful, in a fortifying sort of way. Of course, I had no idea.
Work-exchange programs exist because students, it is thought, need to learn about life in foreign lands — therefore students, of all people, deserve special dispensation from the world’s complex immigration and employment laws. But there is one problem with the equation. Of all travelers, students are probably the least equipped with the sense of humor required to survive in countries with bad food and double-digit unemployment rates. I needed a few more years on the job market to offset the very earnest effects of my education. Landing fresh and green in England, I did not find England, or myself, funny at all.
Back in the banquet hall, the sleeves of my white catering shirt were stained with red wine, green butter and sweat. During a break between courses, I milled around with the other waiters in the kitchen. “They just eat till they frow up,” one woman muttered. “It’s disgusting.” I found myself talking with an American my age who was headed to Glasgow the next day to study political science. Lucky bastard. I told him about my new day job, filing and typing for an academic program that studied the plight of refugees. He pointed a half-eaten piece of melba toast at me. “What is the definition of a refugee?” he demanded.
I shivered with joy. Here was an invitation to the sort of pointless intellectualizing I’d relished just weeks before on my own campus. “From what I can ascertain, it’s anyone forced to leave their native country for any reason,” I said.
“How about, then, the Jewish diaspora in relation to the present state of Israel …” he started, but couldn’t finish because it was time for me to clear the coffee and serve port and sauterne.
I got nine pounds for my three hours of banqueting — money I desperately needed as I waited for my end-of-the-month paycheck. I hadn’t been able to shake an obvious association between British currency and weight. Nine pounds seemed like a lot of money, a hefty sack of change that could help me do all the British things I wanted to do: see plays, ride trains, buy Yardley soaps. It got me, instead, less than a week’s worth of cheese-and-pickle sandwiches. I begged the temp agency for more banquet jobs just for the variety the leftovers gave my diet.
I’d also heard other work exchangers say they planned to stay longer if they could find under-the-table work at a pub or restaurant. Six months were the limits of our horizons, stamped on our passport, registered with the police and Her Royal Highness’ Secretary of Employment. Staying wasn’t an option anymore, I just didn’t have the special something to make it in England’s underground food-service economy.
In Dorset-on-Thames, I drew the wrath of a demonic headwaiter by getting fingerprints on the polished silverware. I broke a glass before a pubful of thick-headed Welsh golfers. I could not uncork bottles. At Magdalen College, my hands trembled as I poured coffee before smirking portraits of Addison and Steele. I had been assigned to stand at the college president’s door and open it when his guests arrived, but they’d remained, perplexed, on the other side while I tugged and tugged at the unyielding oak slab. Finally, the president had swept by and pulled it open with a flick of his wrist. The wrought-iron handle turned just like a doorknob, I marveled. How modern.
At my day job, meanwhile, I cataloged articles about Ethiopian Jews starving themselves from woe; about Mozambican children forced to see their parents murdered; about outbreaks of pellagra in Africa caused by incompetent aid administrators. “More refugees,” the secretaries in the crowded academic office would sigh with every coup d’itat abroad.
“Home” was not much relief. I lived for a while in a house with a Pakistani family of nine, who squashed themselves together so I could have my own room. Though they made a tidy illicit profit, I felt bad about taking up so much space and hid in my room, listening to BBC Radio and reading “Emma.” Really, I did not read novels anymore, I freebased them. Sometimes a violent thwacking would disturb my junkie stupor. It was either someone breaking into a car by the factory next door or my drifting neighbors on the canal doing aerobics atop their houseboats.
Each day I’d walk to work through a graveled alley by the railroad, the sort of patch of nowhere that could be anywhere. If I squinted a great deal, and blocked out the sight of Gothic spires, I found I could imagine myself at home in Texas, listening to trains rumble across the flat landscape. It seemed the most pathetic thing of all, to be homesick in the very country I’d dreamed of when I had been home and thoroughly sick of it. But the alley still lured me. One morning I was nearly blindsided by a little boy running out his back gate with a school bag. “G’bye, Mum!” he shouted and sped on, dodging puddles full of sky. I saw every smeared gray foot of the road in front of me clearly for the first time. To the boy, this was the most familiar place on earth, I realized. It would always be the center of his private map of the world.
It was then, somehow, that I finally got the hang of England, the dampness, the brown food, the wretched wages. I had no more banquet jobs to help me get by — a perky agency representative said I seemed frustrated by catering. But I lost my frenzied urges to see every manuscript in the British Museum and own every Laura Ashley dress on the rack. I did the washing and watched the telly.
Soon frost rimmed Oxford’s every cobweb and gargoyle, suddenly giving the winter mornings a radioactive nostalgic glow. During my last week, the temp agency called me and asked, out of the blue, if I could do another banquet.
The dons at St. John’s College were dining with American oil men. I arrived to find the wait staff almost outnumbering the dozen or so diners. We cleared some plates, poured some wine and then had very little to do. The head butler, a serious-looking man in a green frock coat, scowled at us and strode out of the kitchen. I waited, with a familiar sense of ineptitude, to be dismissed.
But the butler reappeared with a 15-year-old bottle of Beaujolais. He poured us each a glass. “Plenty more where that comes from,” he said. “Cellar goes all the way back under St. Giles.” The St. Giles Road outside was as wide as a city block.
The butler sipped from his glass, flashed us a poker face and pushed through the swinging doors back to the dining room. He had been laughing all night long without cracking a smile. The Beaujolais tasted mellow and sweet, and the kitchen staff would not let us stop drinking until long after the banquet was over. Oxford was frozen and empty when I finally stumbled home over streets I’d never known were stuffed with wine.
DES MOINES, IOWA — michelle Flagstad remembers the rainy afternoon in May when her job became illegal. She had her curlers in her hair, getting ready for the commute from her home in Des Moines to her workplace in Ames, when her boss called. “We’re closed indefinitely,” the boss said. Why? “Go out and buy a newspaper.”
From the headline story, Flagstad learned that Iowa Gov. Terry Branstad had just signed a bill making nude dancing in non-alcoholic bars a crime — and that’s exactly what the 21-year-old English major at Drake University had been doing two nights a week to put herself through college. Years ago, the state had invoked its liquor-licensing authority to require at least G-strings and pastie coverage at premises serving alcohol. But four establishments — including Blondie’s, the bar where Flagstad worked — got around the restriction by selling no booze at all. And that was the way that Flagstad wanted it.
“I can handle a sober proposition [from a patron] better than a drunken one that goes on and on,” she says. But these nude “juice bars” infuriated conservative lawmakers, who wrote legislation outlawing any glimpse of “the genitals or female breast nipple” of entertainers at all places with a sales tax permit — unless that person, in the judgment of the state, qualifies as a theatrical performer.
But Flagstad has not lost her job yet. The Iowa Civil Liberties Union won an injunction against the new law until Tuesday, when a constitutional challenge to the law will be heard in federal district court. “Nude dancing almost always occurs in a private forum where only consenting adults see it,” says Randall Wilson, legal director of the ICLU, which has filed the challenge on behalf of three juice bar owners and a dancer. “The government’s interest in stopping it is non-existent.”
But other state and local authorities don’t see it that way. Battles like Iowa’s are going on across the country, and they’re not limited to the provinces. Employees, patrons and owners of more than 100 sexually oriented businesses in New York City, backed by the New York Civil Liberties Union, are suing to overturn a new zoning ordinance that would confine their activities to a few industrial areas and wetlands. The zoning ordinance affects the human body as well: It forbids both men and women from exposing their genitalia (especially if the men are in a “discernibly turgid state”); and in a move that would make New York more prudish than Iowa, it bans the sight of a female dancer’s breasts at any point “below the top of the areola.”
Proponents of nudity restrictions argue they’re not out to crush freedom of expression among consenting adults, only to protect neighborhoods, women and children. “Special places for nude dancing create specific harmful effects,” says Scott Bergthold, director of legal affairs for the National Family Legal Foundation, a Phoenix agency that helped craft Iowa’s anti-juice bar dancing law. “Those include prostitution of female dancers and an increase of indecent exposure, rape and assaults on police officers in the area.”
Civil libertarians say the evidence supporting such claims is flimsy and inconclusive. They also point out that the courts have demanded higher standards when it comes to censoring forms of expression. “If I make a contentious speech in a public park, the state can’t just ban it because they don’t want people to riot,” Wilson says.
Both the Iowa and New York cases may end up converging at the U.S. Supreme Court, and it won’t be the first time the Court has considered the First Amendment rights of nipples and pudenda. In the 1991 case Barnes vs. Glen Theater, the court ruled that while nude dancing deserves a measure of constitutional protection, states could require G-strings and pasties in the interest of “societal order and morality.” But the 5-4 decision (with three concurring opinions and a solid dissent) was so confused, says Marjorie Heins, director of the ACLU’s Arts Censorship Project, that civil libertarians can still challenge state restrictions on nudity in court.
Meanwhile, juice bar dancers and owners in Iowa are bracing for the worst. One club in the appropriately named town of Mount Joy attempted to sidestep the impending law in May by changing its name from the Southern Comfort Lounge to the Southern Comfort Free Theatre for the Performing Arts. Local law enforcement raided the place as soon as the ink from the governor’s pen had dried. “The dancer was female,” wrote the arresting officer, “and she did not have any clothes on.” If the courts uphold the law, Southern Comfort’s manager could face a year in jail and a $1,500 fine.
Michelle Flagstad can’t figure out how a G-string over her nether regions would preserve the safety and morality of Iowans. She says it would do nothing to protect her if Blondie’s becomes the sort of place the state does allow, where near-naked dancers prance before drunken men.
But as one who’s had plenty of time to observe the prurient interests of Iowans, Flagstad can understand why everyone from the governor to her patrons seems obsessed with what is really a small patch of her overall physique. The sight of it may not be a big deal to her, or to most women, she says, “but to men — it’s all the difference in the world.”
Ira Glass may be producer and host of the hottest new show on public radio, but he can’t score a free lunch. Taking a break from our interview in his cluttered office at WBEZ in Chicago, the creator of “This American Life” eyes the sacred stack of sandwiches for volunteers manning the pledge drive phones. Could he, maybe, have one? The volunteers shake their heads no — a refusal for which Glass, whose hour-long program drew over $8,000 in pledges the night before, has only a low-blood-sugary shrug. There are no gods in public radio.
Still, this hasn’t kept Glass’s program from attaining a cult following among both public radio listeners and his colleagues in the field. Now heard on 137 stations nationwide, the show features material — long-form documentaries, monologues, fiction, found tape — rarely heard these days on the lower end of the dial. The premise of the show is simple: Each episode centers around a single theme, something that in a bizarre way evokes the gamut of American life. The cruelty of children. Fiasco! Frank Sinatra. An eclectic group of writers and artists — from monologist Spaulding Gray to Salon music columnist Sarah Vowell to TV-harper Danny Drennan to New Yorker writer Malcolm Gladwell — “take a whack” at the theme (though Glass admits he’ll often come up with a theme just to fit a piece of writing he especially loves). The flexible formula allows “This American Life” to accommodate a dizzying array of voices. One week, you might hear poetic producer Scott Carrier interviewing polygamists in the Utah desert. Next week, it’s wicked essayist David Sedaris describing his boyhood quest for the criminal who wiped his ass on the family’s fudge-colored towels.
But even the best writers and performers can fall flat on the air — the key to the show’s success is Glass himself, a 19-year veteran of public radio who worked his way up from intern to award-winning reporter at National Public Radio. Glass’ perky delivery prompted Current, a newsletter for public broadcasters, to dub him “the public radio listener’s favorite nephew,” and most writers cant help but point out the way his horn-rimmed, boyish looks belie his 38 years. But his casual demeanor also conceals (a little less successfully) the mind of a serious and shrewd perfectionist.
Glass has an obsession with avoiding the typical back-and-forth, sound-bite stories that make up much of public radio’s sound. Instead, he looks for characters, scenes and transformation. “We reject a lot of stuff,” he says, citing a “beautiful” radio essay by assistant producer Nancy Updike that didn’t make the cut recently. “There just wasn’t enough of a narrative arc.”
Within his “traditional” notion of story, though, Glass says he’s constantly trawling for surprises. The Frank Sinatra episode — one of his favorites — originally started with a musicologist telling the story of how Sinatra got his persona, but typically, Glass rejected the segment at the last minute. (“I thought, this sounds like the fucking Discovery Channel,” he muttered in a phone interview after the show came out last February.) Instead, Glass started the program with a freakish 1962 recording of Sinatra, at first crooning beautifully, then launching into a racist barrage of jokes about Sammy Davis Jr. “Your jaw just drops,” Glass says. “And that’s the first four minutes of the show.”
“This American Life’s” relentless irresistibility hasn’t been lost on the bigwigs in the broadcasting world. This summer, the program got a prestigious Peabody Award and a $350,000, three-year grant from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. And after a bidding war with NPR, Public Radio International won the rights to distribute the program — a remarkable battle for a show so young, and one that, in part, made “This American Life” the buzz of this June’s Public Radio Conference in Chicago.
The buzz isn’t an accident, if you ask Glass. Over the past year, he’s promoted the show incessantly, and now that it’s started reaching a critical mass of stations, he says he’ll do whatever it takes to keep it on the air. Is an episode too racy for some program directors? He’ll send them another program to replace it. Is a station manager obsessed with fund-raising? Glass has been known to hit up potential underwriters, and he already offers some of the funniest and most effective pledge breaks in radio (“Look in the mirror, my friend,” he wheedles in one. “Look in the mirror. You are listening to a pledge drive. You have a habit“).
As someone who works in public radio, I know how important these little team-effort touches can be for the success of a program. But more important is the psychological boost “This American Life” has given the ranks of a creatively depressed system, simply because it’s good radio — the very well-produced, hypnotizing fare we’d all like to be doing if we had the budget and the time. “It has what drew many people to work in public radio in the first place, those in-the-driveway stories,” Doug Fabrizio, news director at KUER, Salt Lake City, says (and it’s true — we want to mesmerize commuters so badly we’ve developed a shorthand expression for it).
Ironically, Washington, D.C., is the only major market where the show doesn’t air — but “This American Life” tapes make the rounds at NPR each week, says “All Things Considered” producer Ellen Weiss. “Ira has a gift for hearing,” she says of her former reporter. “He’s definitely influenced us.”
I hope that influence will result in more than just a surge of “This American Life’s” Brian Eno-esque ambience on “Morning Edition.” What Glass really offers the inertial public radio system is a model for creative survival. As a reporter, he tells me, he tried to give editors what they wanted, just as he now tries to meet the needs of the stations that run his show. But he builds that cooperative framework in order to allow room, a great deal of room, for his own vision — a word he characteristically tries to retract as soon as it’s uttered.
“Not even my vision,” he equivocates. “That makes it sound so grand.” But sometimes a mixed metaphor is the right one. It takes vision to make good radio.
LIFE must be hard for the business pundit these days. Imagine the dilemma: Your businessman readers are delicate creatures, like crack babies who must be soothed and told constantly that they are loved. But that’s OK, because, for the most part, you do love them. Your real problem is that, like all who roam the wide columns of the op-ed page, you’ve built your career on the clever put-down, the righteous retort and the chewable insight. After a long day of crushing Big Labor or signing trade agreements with Asian communists, your readers want to snuggle between the sheets of the Lincoln Bedroom and chuckle as you, Business Pundit, tear another straw man limb from limb.
But what’s left to destroy? Your clients have joyfully triumphed over just about everything, leaving you with a serious glut of bile. How many more pieces can you write about those pernicious government regulators?
Riding to the rescue: George Soros.
Last I’d heard, Soros was the billionaire philanthropist who awed the business press and ruined many an afternoon tea back in 1992, when his currency speculation sent the British pound tumbling. Not any more. George Soros is now a “crackpot,” a “fool,” a man who’s gone on an “appalling foray into the realm of ideas” and come out with a “preposterous” and “damaging” argument that’s nonetheless “gibberish,” “drivel,” “nonsense” and (get your dictionary ready) a “rodomontade of sloppy thinking.”
What’s the deal? Soros’ cover piece, “The Capitalist Threat,” in the February Atlantic Monthly, that’s what. His article has set off a series of delayed-reaction explosions inside the heads of business pundits everywhere. In the 12-page essay, Soros, who endured both fascism and communism in Hungary, argues that laissez-faire capitalism is now the world’s most serious threat to the “open society” — that being the kind of society in which we all respect each other and admit our own fallibility. Capitalism, Soros says, justifies its existence by appealing to market economics — it’s as much a voodoo science as Marxism. It just makes more and more people wretched while telling them it’s their own fault.
At least, that’s my take on “The Capitalist Threat.” For a better explanation, you really should ask Soros himself, because, I’m sorry to say, the man can’t write his way out of a paper bag. Littered with incomplete arguments, passive verbs and infuriating vagueness, “The Capitalist Threat” is more memo than manifesto. The Atlantic’s editors must have either been afraid of Soros or entirely apathetic, since the article, with a few additions, is merely a reprint of a personal statement that’s been sitting around the Soros Foundation Web site for more than six months.
Perhaps that explains how the Economist got the jump on “The Capitalist Threat” and managed to send its volley from London a week before the issue even hit the stands. “Palindrome repents,” sniggered a Jan. 25 headline (Soros spelled backwards is … Soros — get it?).
“It is hard to know exactly where to pick this apart, so numerous are the errors,” sniffs the author, who, like all writers for the Economist, can only be known as Sir.
Sir’s disgust took more than a month to migrate to America, but it’s now taken hold with vigor. In the past couple of weeks, pundits in Forbes, Fortune, the Wall Street Journal and Newsweek have all blasted the billionaire. Even twentysomethings must not remain ignorant of Soros’ heresy: Karl Filippini, a columnist for the new Web-zine JournalX, promises to bring his demographics closer to death with a whole series on the subject.
Apparently, Soros is not just wrong to call capitalism a dangerous and deluded system. He’s also a megalomaniac. In the March 17 Fortune, economics columnist Rob Norton (the man who expanded my vocabulary with the word “rodomontade”) growled that “Soros is not content to be a billionaire and philanthropist. He wants to be known as a thinker, a philosopher of economics and history and society — even as a seer.”
In the Wall Street Journal, meanwhile, Swiss investor David de Pury complained that Soros was picking unfairly on “today’s bogeyman … the excess of capitalism.” And Newsweek columnist Robert Samuelson offered up a perky anti-Soros vendetta of his own — an attempt to prevent “ordinary readers” from being seduced by Soros’ “rubbish.”
“The very illogic and obscurity of Soros’ diatribe may, ironically, enhance its appeal,” he wrote. “It panders to a fashionable anti-capitalist chic.” (Samuelson fails to explore the question of whether the chic anti-capitalists have their own ready-to-wear collection and, if so, whether it’s assembled in Bangladesh.)
But just who is this amorphous enemy to whom Soros has betrayed the free market like some latter-day elderly-male version of Mata Hari? Described variously as “lefties,” “the hard left,” “a newspaper near you” and “Subcommander Marcos,” these are the people who (the business pundits imagine) are now cackling with glee over their grubby copies of Atlantic Monthly.
Or not. I’ve paged through every leftist publication I could find, and none have even mentioned Soros’ tract. In fact, it looks as if, but for the attention of the business press, “The Capitalist Threat” might have sunk without a trace.
In fact, I was hard pressed to find an enemy of capitalism who’d even read the piece. Robert Schildgen, managing editor of Sierra, and the Progressive editor Matthew Rothschild both admitted they had the February Atlantic lying around the house, but they hadn’t quite brought themselves to read it.
One lefty who had checked out the piece is the Nation Institute’s president, Hamilton Fish III. But then, Fish happens to know Soros personally.
George is not a traditional leftist, Fish admits. Rather, he’s simply a humanitarian who’s very concerned about the way a growing number of people in America, from prisoners to legal immigrants, are being disenfranchised.
I have to point out that none of that comes up in “The Capitalist Threat.”
“The article wasn’t intended as a social commentary,” Fish says. “It’s an individual effort to explain a personal and evolving philosophy” — an effort that is, he admits, a bit “academic.”
Therein lies the sadness of the Soros spectacle. As a man endowed, by all accounts, with unusual amounts of money, intelligence and compassion, Soros is in a rare position to lead the media into a wide-ranging debate about capitalism. But as long he’s allowed to indulge in long-winded lectures, he’ll remain simply a chew-toy for detractors and useless to anyone else.
If, however, the billionaire is still evolving, perhaps he’ll admit to his fallibility and hire himself a few decent writers. That at least would help to narrow the gap between rich and poor right away.
(Credit: Albert Campbell via Shutterstock) 