Audibly Speaking: Listening to History

How should we think about the danger and possible utility (?) of “Artificial Intelligence,” that increasingly out-of-control oxymoron?  Maybe a report from the field is in order as we begin to look at this question.  This is that report from the field, or at least a beginning of one.  We may have to start early because we have no time to waste, for the sake of student learning, in getting this right.

A message from Dr. Thomas Patterson of Harvard Univerity:

“Tomorrow, Sept. 17, is National Constitution Day— marking the 239th anniversary of the signing of the U.S. Constitution. As in other years, it will pass largely unnoticed despite its significance and relevance at this critical moment in our politics.

I’m trying to elevate its visibility by encouraging people to take my free, nonpartisan HarvardX course on the U.S. Constitution (6 brief sessions).

I’d be grateful if you would share the link with your social media followers and others:

https://bit.ly/FreeCourseHarvard (pick ‘audit’ for free version)

Thank you.”

  I encourage you to take up Dr. Patterson’s opportunity! As your host on this podcast, I explain in this episode the background of the Constitution and why the American Revolution had such contrasting impacts on American and on France in the 18th century.  You will learn how the French Revolution, while catastrophically different than the American, was brought to you by the American Revolution!  –Rick Reiman

This is a tour of Chapter 6 from "The American Yawp" on The American Revolution.  You need to read the chapter after listening to this.  This audio tour is no substitute for reading the chapter.

Your host for Audibly Speaking, Rick Reiman, speaks with Gabra Zackman about her career in the ever-more-popular field of audio books and narration. Gabra had narrated over 500 books, including such titles as The Sound and the Fury, Nobody’s Girl, Catch the Devil, G-Man, and I’ll be Gone in the Dark, among many others. An accomplished actor, I ask her about how she got started in the craft, what she thinks about the parceling out of assignments to male and female readers, how she works best and what one ordinary listener (me) would like to know about the business.  If you like audio books or just wonder what this field is, you may listen to them in a new way after listening to this conversation. I hope that you enjoy it.

Tomorrow is America’s 250th Birthday as an independent nation.  Your narrator for Audibly Speaking rings in the birthday in suitable vocal style with an audio narration of that fateful document. The Declaration of July 4, 1776 was not just a statement of independence but a declaration of ideals that has changed the world.  Will we, the generation that is the heir of the founding fathers, allow its ringing words to continue shaping the world, or will the American people themselves today be the authors of its destruction? For God’s sake, and for their own sake, the American people must decide.  This narration is delivered in the style of the great Orson Welles.

On July 4, 2026, Americans will celebrate…what?  Obviously they will celebrate what they intend to celebrate.  That means American’s “Independence Day.” But what does that mean? According to the Cato Institute’s poll released today, 46% of Americans are clueless as to what it means.  The reason is clear: their ignorance of history.  This should not be surprising since Americans popularize “history” as something to be considered over and done with.  But that popular stance, and shield for ignorance, won’t work when it comes to the vital work of learning from the past to create a viable future.  For all of Americans’ pride in being American, one thing they cannot boast of is the knowledge of history without which they, and our future, are doomed.  Americans must stop relying on hunches, and learn their history, if they want the founding fathers whom they are so proud of to be more than footnotes in the national dustbin of the future.

Ai is perhaps the ruination of higher education, at least as it is currently being used by many students with a shameless push from the new barbarians at the gates, the techies who come up with this stuff and promise that it will solve all the individuals woes and help them “succeed” in school.  Well, evidently “success’ does not include learning, because there is no more effective if deadly way to squelch learning than through machine learning, where only the machine “learns,” not the luckless human who puts it through its paces.

Stephen Fry, the great British writer, condemns AI’s cost to creativity in a Youtube Video that says it far better than can I:

Fry Reads a Letter About AI

In this episode, Audibly Speaking denounces the clown car of politicians (in Florida, of course!) presuming to be the voice of history, only without any educational credentials.  Shamelessness aside, they just can’t stay in their lane.  In this episode I look at one of the mainstream textbooks in American History, The American Yawp, the work of 500 historians who have the credentials and the “receipts” of American history to portray the pageant of that history, warts and all. The main “problem,” as politicians seem to see it, is that American history contains both triumphs of fair treatment as well as outrageous violations of the ideals of the Declaration of Independence.  If we are to learn from history and avoid repeating the mistakes of the past, we must know what they were–not treat history as a celebratory buffet about which the student has to be misled with “red smoke and mirrors.” We need professional history and with The American Yawp we already have it. Pity the poor, misguided Florida students let down by their so-called political “leaders.”

Presidential Leadership 101 holds that no President should enter a war without first cultivating the support of the American people. Efforts to do so without securing public support–the Mexican War, Vietnam–have been disasters.  No president should just suddenly and unconstitutionally attack another country without Congressional consultation, approval or public education, like the Japanese did at Pearl Harbor.  In the aftermath of such an act, it became more important than ever that Trump do what he should have done before the war–explain the reasons for the war, why it was necessary, and how it was consistent with our national security interests and our ideals. Trump utterly failed to explain why with even a scintilla of coherence why the war was necessary. He promised to commit war crimes, besmirching and weakening America’s moral reputation.  He set the stage by his failure of leadership for another disastrous failure in American foreign policy.

This episode analyzes and identifies these mistakes and shows, with the “Arsenal of Democracy speech” by Franklin D. Roosevelt in December 1940, how presidential speechmaking and the cultivation of public opinion in support of a successful foreign policy ought to be done.

No one, going back to the interpretation of William Gillette in the early years of the silent screen cinema, interpreted the Sherlock Holmes character with the authenticity that Jeremy Brett brought to the role in the ITV Granada series on British television (1984-1994). That series went back to the canonical short stories and lovingly adapted them to the screen, clearing away the distortions that past (and future) representations have rained down and continue to rain on the reputation of the detective.  This new recording is my latest attempt to interpret the Sherlockian short stories in a twenty-first century podcast adaptation, with respect to the great interpreters of the past, going back to Doyle, the originator himself, and moving forward to Brett. With apologies to Jeremy Brett, here is my acting effort to portray the style of Jeremy Brett in a Holmesian short story that Brett was not to portray in the TV Series (that series failing to film ALL of the short stories). One of the best of the stories that it left out was “The Reigate Squires,” from The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes.  And so, here is an attempted corrective to that omission, in the form of a pastiche of Jeremy Brett portraying the famous detective in the real Conan Doyle short story, “The Reigate Squires.”