Campbell Conversations

The American Dream is a touchstone for this nation, but is it now out of reach for many citizens we used to regard as middle class? This week, Grant Reeher speaks with Batya Ungar-Sargon, an opinion editor for Newsweek. She has a new book about workers in America, titled "Second Class: How the Elites Betrayed America's Working Men and Women."

Program transcript:

Grant Reeher: Welcome to the Campbell Conversations. I'm Grant Reeher. The American Dream is a touchstone for this nation. But is it in danger of dying? My guest today is Newsweek opinion editor Batya Ungar-Sargon. She's written a new book about workers in America titled “Second Class: How the Elites Betrayed America's Working Men and Women.” Miss Ungar-Sargon, welcome to the program.

Batya Ungar-Sargon: Thank you so much for having me. It's such a pleasure and an honor to be here with you and your audience.

GR: Well, we are really glad you were able to join us. So, let me just start with the real basic question. Briefly, if you could, how did you get the idea to write this book now?

BUS: It's a great question because everybody told me not to write it, but it seems to me like the most important issue of our time, I think the 2024 election is going to be decided by the working class. The issue of class has become increasingly important in America, and yet we don't talk about it at all. And we certainly don't hear from working-class Americans. It strikes me as though they have been almost deplatformed. The voices we hear in the media are almost exclusively now the college-educated, and it has become increasingly clear to me over the last five years that the real divide in America is actually not left versus right, that most Americans are actually kind of somewhere in the middle. The real divide is the class divide that separates out the college-educated from the working class. College-educated Americans over the course of their careers on average, make $1 million more. They have much more access to home ownership. They are much healthier, they live much longer, and their lives are insulated from the kinds of precariousness that plague working-class life today and I really, really wanted to tell that story in the words of working-class Americans. So that's why I wrote “Second Class.”

GR: Well, I want to get into some of the things you just raised there, particularly as they might relate to, political issues, but, well, let me let me stick with this for now. So you gave a hint of this at the end, but what was the process that you use to go about researching and writing the book?

BUS: I wanted to interview people whose lives were interesting enough to carry the story and carry the narrative and keep reader’s interests, but also who represented larger trends in the working class. I mean, we're talking about the majority of the country, 100 million workers, right? So I went to, Joe Price, who's a professor at Brigham Young University, and he has, a team of graduate students. And what he'll do is he will rent them out to journalists who are less familiar with the data side of things, like me, you know, English majors like me. And what I asked them to do was to look at the American Census Survey. I asked them to compare 2000 to 2020 so that I could have a sense of emerging trends, and I asked them to give me a kind of bird's eye view demographic breakdown of the working class. Who is the American working class? What are the races? What are the ages? What are their homeownership rates? What, industries give higher, homeownership rates than others because homeownership is so important to the American Dream. I wanted just the pure data, and they gave me this amazingly delicious spreadsheet with all of the data that I was looking for. The breakdown by the numbers, by industry, by region, etc. and I used that to guide my search for the characters in the book so that I knew that I was looking for people who were representative of larger trends.

GR: Well, it's interesting, and the book works that way because you do, you weave in both, data and graphs along with these stories. So it's a nice combination of things. You say at the beginning of the book that you were surprised about the view toward hard work, that you heard from almost all the people that you spoke with, and that that really intrigued me. And I wanted to ask you why first of all, did that surprise you? And then secondly, what was the view toward hard work?

BUS: It surprised me because I think that we in the knowledge industry caste, as I've come to think of it, tend to think that nobody could possibly want some of these jobs. I spoke to janitors and cleaning ladies and, bellboys and, barbacks and waiters and, certified nurse's aides who spent, you know, a 12-hour night shift changing the diapers of the elderly. And I think in our caste, we think no one could possibly get any dignity from this job. Nobody wants to clean toilets for a living. And therefore, we think it's okay to, you know, outsource these jobs to illegal immigrants or offshore them, you know, manufacturing or what have you to China and Mexico, as we did for so long. And I think that's why I was so surprised by it. But what I found was to a person, people get immense self-esteem and dignity from their work, whatever their jobs are. And what makes some of these jobs undignified are the conditions and the wages. It's not the work itself. The people I interviewed, and you'll read this from them in the book, in person after person. They saw work as a spiritual inheritance that they got from their parents that they were unbelievably proud of. They remembered seeing their parents get dressed for work every day, and they felt so proud to be connected to that. And I do think there's something uniquely American about this, this kind of Protestant ethic of work, right? That's tied into a capitalistic vision that we admire enterprise. We admire effort. And the problem is, is that these people work so hard, and yet their efforts are no longer equal to securing them the most modest version of the American Dream, and a secure and stable life for themselves and their children.

GR: And I want to go back to the title of the book. How is it, then, the elites, I mean, you've given some hints about this already, but how is it that elites have betrayed the working class and probably the middle classes as well? Betrayed in what way? It's a pretty strong word.

BUS: Yeah. So we tend to think of the economy, or at least we talk about it, in the chattering classes, in the political classes, as though there's some sort of inevitability to the way everything turned out. You know, obviously globalization was going to happen. These are just the winds of progress pushing things forward. But the truth is, is that a lot of the things that happened in the economy that resulted in the downward mobility of the working class, which turned them into second-class citizens, as I argue, was the result of very intentional policy, often by Democrats, actually, in the name of progress, perhaps, you know, unintentionally, bad. But, you know, essentially what happened was we created an economy that is extremely rewarding if you are in the knowledge industry and you go to college and extremely punishing if you work in a working-class job that we actually still totally rely on to survive. And that is where the unfairness of this comes in and where I tried to keep the anger out of the book. The book is mostly in the voices of the working class, but it is an outrage that we did this because we do still rely on their work. They do work so unbelievably hard in physical labor. And yet, through a series of policy choices, whether it was President Bill Clinton signing NAFTA into law and shipping 5 million very good manufacturing jobs overseas to build up China and Mexico's middle class, or President Barack Obama, who defunded vocational training leading to this massive dearth of skilled trades in the United States, and also the closing off of a very sure avenue to the American Dream for working-class Americans or even President Biden effectively decriminalizing illegal border crossing, which has resulted in millions and millions of people entering the country, which has an effect on a of direct downward depression of the wages of the working class, because that is who these illegal migrants compete with when they find work. These were all policies that contributed to the situation in which working-class people can no longer be assured of a stable life, despite working so hard.

GR: I'm Grant Reeher, you're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. And my guest is Batya Ungar-Sargon. And we're discussing her new book. It's titled “Second Class: How the Elites Betrayed America's Working Men and Women.” I wanted to follow up with you on that, and thinking about some of the policies that might also contribute to that, and you mentioned some interesting ones there from those administrations. Three, that struck me in thinking about this were a little more simple in a way, but we've had since 1980 three sort of big rounds of tax cuts. one during the Reagan administration, another one, during George W Bush and then the last one during Donald Trump. And, while those put more money back in everyone's pockets, they certainly seemed to be more favorable toward that uber elite financially and economically, that class or would you put those and in that same sort of group of different kinds of policies that that might have exacerbated this?

BUS: You know, the high watermark for working-class wages was 1971. That's when they started to sort of stagnate and drop off. And the share of the GDP that is held by the billionaire class, you know, the Uber Uber rich has not significantly changed since the 70s. What has significantly changed is where in the 70s, the largest share of the economy was in the middle class. Today, over 50% of the GDP is held by the top 20%. So this college credentialed, you know, multiple degreed, top 20%. The professional class is actually the ones who have, secured the big shift in GDP. There's been a middle-class squeeze. So a lot of working-class people were squeezed downwards, but a lot of upper-middle-class people were squeezed upwards. And that has been where the real shift in GDP has happened. And that's why I think, you know, the tax cuts really don't, they didn't have as much of an impact. And the reason for that is that working-class Americans don't believe that what has changed for them has been an insufficiency of redistribution from the top to them. They don't actually want redistribution, which comes back to the first question you asked me about the dignity of work. They don't feel entitled to the taxes of people who make more to them, them and they don't want them. They find it kind of insulting. What they want is higher wages, better health care, affordable housing, opportunities for their children. And you can't really, tax cut your way or tax your way to any of those outcomes. Higher taxes and the redistributive model is actually very good for the poor, for the dependent poor, but it doesn't really help the working class. In fact, the opposite. They often see those taxes as their taxes. And when you look at the tax cuts, I mean the Trump tax cuts are very good example of this. It's true that the rich overall got more money, but the percentages of tax cuts, the highest were for the working class and the middle class. And so working-class people felt that those tax cuts put money back in their pockets as well, and they don't have the kind of resentment towards them that the, the, the sort of credentialed elites do.

GR: Interesting. And on that point, in a way, you have a lot of interesting graphs, in your book and this is radio, so it kind of makes it hard. I can't share them, but I did I did want to ask you about one of them that relates to what you just said, and I'll describe it. You've got a graph of the rise of three things since 1965, corporate profits and then per capita GDP, which you were just, referring to, and also the productivity of labor, in other words, for a given amount of effort, how much does that labor produce. In all those three they kind of follow the same line. They've risen pretty similarly, and they've significantly gone up since 1965. And then you have a fourth line, which is the real average wage, and that one is mostly flat. And it really is an arresting way to kind of show who's getting better off in the last 40, 50 years of this economy and who's not. And I don't know if you wanted to comment on that. You've already spoken to it. I think, but.

BUS: I, only to say it is an outrage and it is an outrage that sort of neither party really had, an answer to because, you know, like I said, the, you can't really redistribute your way to higher taxes, right? I mean, to higher wages. Right. That's not a thing that the left really has had a response to. I mean, unions are a big theme in the book. And of course, unions secure higher wages for working class Americans. And yet the vast majority of the unionization efforts today are in the kind of, white collar spaces, you see journalists unionizing and nurses and not, not, not, white collar, but, certainly, you know, on the higher end of, of the working class, you know, people who who are, you know, they're called desk unions, right? This is where a lot of that energy is. Working-class Americans are not more likely to see in unions, a great champion or a way to that higher wage. And I think a lot of that has to do with the union's reversal on immigration and the Democrat's reversal on immigration. So I'm sure your listeners remember, you know, in the 90s, it was the Democrats who believed in securing the border and massively reducing the number of immigrants entering the country because they understood that the only real way to raise wages is to limit the supply of labor. Right? It's a simple supply and demand. If you bring in 10 million people, and they are way more likely to be employed in, cleaning, in landscaping, in elder care, the wages in all of those industries are going to plummet because there are simply so many more available workers. And one of the best ways that you can actually help wages that working-class people know firsthand, right, is through limiting the supply of labor, through reshoring of manufacturing, through a lot of these policies that actually, President Trump, really made a centerpiece of his campaigns. And working-class people notice that. And the thing that I would say, I guess, to people in our class who feel a little bit suspicious of this, maybe people will say, well, maybe the working class are wrong about what's good for them. They're just xenophobic. They don't like immigrants. To that, I would ask, what is the likelihood that a person who has $50 in their bank account and, you know, four children to feed and, a car to fill up with gas to get them to school and back, that somebody like that is wrong about which economic policies put money back in their bank account. I mean, what is the likelihood that somebody living on a shoestring budget is wrong about what policies have an impact on them? To me, it just seems so unlike from times in my life where I was living on a shoestring budget. You just know. I mean, the winds, right, they impact you in such an immediate way. I think it's worth trusting these people about which policies have helped them. And by the way, I interviewed people who were Democrats and Republicans in the book. Very little distinguish them when it came to policy, because they saw both parties as effectively having abandoned them. And that's why they're not polarized. They don't hold it against people who vote for the other party. I mean, it would never occur to them to hold it against somebody because they have very little spiritual investment in the political system, because it has done so little to help them.

GR: You're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher, and I'm talking with Batya Ungar-Sargon, the opinion editor of Newsweek, and we're discussing her new book, which is titled “Second Class: How the Elites Betrayed America's Working Men and Women.” You know, I wanted to ask you about this concept of the middle class and one of the things that has historically marked ideas about the middle class in America is how many Americans think they're in it. And, you know, yeah, you can get poor people who say, I'm middle class, and then you get people in this top group that you've been referring to, that think of themselves as middle class. Do you, did you get a sense that that is part of the change, that you noticed that self-identification in that wide swath is now narrowing it? More people are recognizing, hey, I'm not there anymore, or I'm looking down on this from my more elite status. Do you get a sense of that?

BUS: Yeah, I definitely did. I think, you know, it's so hard for us to remember this, but there was a time when, you know, being a janitor, being a manicurist, being, a person who, you know, sat and watched over elderly people. People who did those jobs were middle class. Like, it's so hard for us to remember that there are people still in Las Vegas, a town where you cannot employ illegal immigrants because the casinos are so tightly regulated, women who and men who clean hotel rooms in Las Vegas make a living wage. They make $26 an hour. That's definitely not the case in most of America and it's really mind-boggling when you start to realize that, you know, the kinds of jobs that we think of as poor people jobs today, there was a time in America where these jobs, you know, people had had health care, people could become homeowners. I mean, still today, 50% of people who clean homes for a living are homeowners. And that's because there are still many places in America where, you know, you could be pretty poor and still afford a home in much of Red America, by the way. And so when you think of housing as a crucial component of the American Dream, it's really Democratic cities and metro areas that are really have dropped the ball on this due to zoning laws. And there's a big chapter on that in the book. So I think, yes, there has been a shift in how working-class people see themselves. I did have the experience where I would talk to people and I could tell over the course of my interview with them, or the course of the few days or week I spoke I spent with them that they had started to see themselves as working class as a result of the conversations that we were having when before they didn't really have a language for it. That happened with a number of people, and now they will email me, you know, articles and, you know, there was this sort of thing that happened where a class consciousness started to emerge, you know, in, in the people that I was, you know, spending so much time with. I definitely think that as, as the American Dream and a middle-class life has become increasingly out of reach, people, people would use the word lower class to talk about themselves and their situation and that was also very heartbreaking.

GR: Yeah, well, on that point, I was curious of all the people that you spoke with, was there one person that you carry with you now more than anybody else that was either like the hardest for you to hear their story, or perhaps their situation made you more angry than some of the other ones that you could just briefly talk about.

BUS: You know, I was actually much more angry than any of they were, which was one of the most heartbreaking things about it was a lot of working-class people blame themselves. They don't have this concept of like, they're so patriotic and they still love this country so much and believe in this country. And, a lot of them, they didn't really have a language for the kind of like, you know, class rage that I sort of felt on their behalf many of them, felt that Trump was a champion for them. And even many of the Democrats that I interviewed admitted to me that he put money in their pockets. And there's something outrageous about that, you know, they're that somebody who has $51 in their bank account might potentially have to vote for someone who they think is more likely to take that money away from them. You know that there's this it's an outrage that the Democrats have lost the majority of working-class voters in this country, and that's increasingly working-class voters who are Hispanics and who are Black men are now turning in in a big way according to polling towards Trump. And I know it's very hard for people who are Democrats to hear that but it's such an outrage that people who used to see the Democrats as their champions now view the Democrats as the party of these over credentialed elites and the dependent poor, and they don't see themselves reflected and their interests are actually in tention with both of those groups. Right. As we spoke about earlier, if you think about it, you know, the over-credentialed college elites are the consumers of low-wage, illegal labor. And so hiring illegal immigrants actually puts money back in the pockets of people who have a college degree. While it is effectively wage theft of working class people who used to be able to have the American Dream if they were a janitor, if they were a hotel cleaning lady, if they were a line cook, and really no longer can because of policies put in place, by the Democrats. And, I, I want to stress it would be so easy for the Democrats to get these voters back. And I can talk a little bit about that, if that's of interest.

GR: Yeah, yeah. Let me just remind people who were who we're talking to. If you're just joining us, you're listening to the Campbell Conversations. I'm Grant Reeher, and my guest is Batya Ungar-Sargon. And we've been discussing her new book, which is titled “Second Class: How the Elites Betrayed America's Working Men and Women.” Yes, that's exactly where I was going to go. So I'm glad you brought that up. Which is okay, so you've painted this problem for the Democratic Party. So, so and this problem can be traced back to 1980, at least. There was a famous focus group done on Macomb County, Michigan voters, in that era where this kind of thing that you're talking about came through loud and clear. So what is what can the party do? What can they what can they do to get these folks back?

BUS: So it's actually a lot easier than I think many people realize because they don't speak to working-class people. And so working-class people are a cipher to them. They assume that they project all of this onto them, this white rural rage. Right. That was the latest book describing it. To me, this is just an alibi, right? To let themselves off the hook for having abandoned these workers. But it would be very easy to get them back. And the reason I know this is because of this, the vast majority of people I interviewed, whether they vote Democrat or Republican, they agreed on the policies that would help them. So you ask me for examples, I'm going to talk about two women that I interviewed, Linda, a big Trump supporter from West Virginia who drives an Amazon truck. And Amy, a certified nurse's aide in Florida, is married to a woman and, voted for Biden. These women agreed on almost everything. So Amy told me this is the gay nurse's aide. She told me she thinks parents who take children to, a drag show should be put in prison. She told me she thought that it should be unbelievably difficult to transition, she was very upset about funding to Ukraine. She did not understand why we were funding that war. She worried that immigrants were going to take American jobs, and she felt that they had lowered the wages for people who were working class. She was very worried about health care. Every year she spends all of her savings on these unbelievable premiums and deductibles that her terrible health care plan has. And she'll never be able to afford a home. Linda. her number one issue, she would say, is the price of groceries. She is very upset about homeless veterans and homelessness in general. This is the Trump voter, right? She's extremely pro-gay. And when a family member kicked her nephew out of her home for being gay, she welcomed him with open arms. These are women you're going to meet in the book. She loves that Trump is pro-gay. She loves that he courts unions. She loves working for Amazon. And she also is not a homeowner. She lost her home with her husband when his factory was shipped to Mexico in 2000. So these two women, you could create a policy and agenda that would both of them would vote for how? Okay, well, what are their top issues there?

GR: I got, I got I got to interject here. We're getting low on time and I want to squeeze one thing in. So if you could make that point quickly let me ask you my final follow-up.

BUS: If a candidate came out of the gate and said, we're going to significantly limit the number of immigrants coming into this country and back health care from the government's point of view, make it impossible for people to have bankruptcy-related to medical expenses. That person could get 60% of the vote tomorrow.

GR: Wow. Well, let me just what I heard and what you just said, and we'll have to end it here is that one of the things that the Democratic Party then might do is emphasize class in the way that you are talking about it, and perhaps de-emphasize some of the social identity issues that they have been pushing. Would you agree with that?

BUS: I would agree with that. But it's even easier than that. If they took a hard line on immigration, they would turn this ship around tomorrow because they have the health care piece and the Republicans don't.

GR: Gotcha. Okay. We'll have to leave it there. That was Batya Ungar-Sargon. And again, her new book is titled “Second Class: How the Elites Betrayed America's Working Men and Women.” I highly recommend it. It's a good read. It's substantive, but it's very interesting and readable as a story. So, Batya thanks so much for taking the time to talk with me.

BUS: Thank you so much for having me. God bless you.

GR: You too. It's been, you've been listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media, conversations in the public interest.

Black feminism is usually regarded as a relatively newer dimension of racial justice movements. This week, Grant Reeher speaks with Jenn Jackson, a Syracuse University professor, and author of "Black Women Taught Us," about early Black feminists, as well as contemporary ones.

Program Transcript:

GR: Welcome to the Campbell Conversations. I'm Grant Reeher. My guest today is Jenn Jackson. Professor Jackson teaches political science at Syracuse University, focuses on the politics of race and gender and racial justice, and has written a new book for a general audience titled “Black Women Taught Us: An Intimate History of Black Feminism.” Professor Jackson, welcome to the program.

JJ: Thank you so much for having me.

GR: Well, it's a really it's a really wonderful book. So we're glad to have you on. So let me just start with the beginnings of this book. I understand the book has an interesting origin story. Tell me how you got the idea to put this together, what it was based on.

JJ: Yeah. So, you know, I have been writing for a long time. Actually, before I came to academia, I was already a journalist, so I had already written for, you know, Ebony Magazine and Marie Claire and Washington Post. And by the time I got through graduate school, I had an editor approach me who at the time was at Live Write. And she's like, you know, I think you have a book in you. And at the time, I was like, I, I'm still in graduate school. If I have a book in me, it's going to be a dissertation book. But we sat down and we talked actually after I got the position at Syracuse University and she said, well, what are you thinking about? And at the time, I had really been getting excited about my Black feminist politics class that I was teaching every spring at Syracuse. And I told her that it was exciting to me because I never myself had taken a Black feminist politics or Black feminist day class in my history. And when I told her that, she was shocked, she was she was amazed that I could teach this. Having never been formally trained myself. So I told her about what it was like being an engineering major in undergrad at University of Southern California, searching for a class like this, and none were offered. When I graduated, I went to go work at Disney, and I was a, what was called a workforce analyst. And I used statistics to, staff, the hotels and staff, the food and beverage locations. And I encountered a lot of racism. I encountered a lot of, misogyny. I encountered a lot of, experiences that I wasn't familiar with. And I hadn't, again, hadn't taken that class, so I didn't have the language to understand it. As an engineering major, you don't take a lot of classes, to understand culture and people. And so I called my mother on the phone back then, and I said, “Mom, I don't know what's going on here. I don't know how to navigate this.” And my mother was a voracious reader who, read everything Dean Koontz, Stephen King, James Patterson, Danielle Steele and Alice Walker and Terry McMillan and she said, “Go to Borders bookstore,” which is what it was called back then. “And find, find the section where you can pick up Alice Walker and Terry McMillan. If you find that section, you'll find whoever you need.” And she was right, I. I went to Borders and when I walked into Borders, I saw those books. But I also saw the book “Sister Citizen” by Melissa Harris-Perry, who happened to just be a political scientist. And this book just happened to be published with Yale University Press. And the book was talking about the Sapphire, the Jezebel, the mammy, the stereotype about black women that have been rooted in slavery. And this theory called The Crooked Room and The Crooked Room theory, suggests that for some people, especially for black women, we walk through the world and we feel as though we are walking at an angle that we just don't fit. But what she said is that The Crooked Room theory says, actually, it's the world. The world that is at an angle. It is the rooms we're walking into that are full of stereotypes, that are full of these ideas of who we are allowed to be, that make it hard for us to exist. And because it resonated so much with me in my job, right. I was working in this place in Orange County, one of the most conservative counties in the country. and I was experiencing anti-Blackness for the first time, having grown up in Oakland, California, around such diverse people. I had never experienced this type of vitriol. And I'm in this bookstore and I was crying into this book, because I was like, oh my gosh, I, I feel seen, you know, I feel this is reflecting my life. And I picked up that book and I began reading everything that she cited in that book. And the first thing I picked up was, bell hooks’ “Feminism is for Everybody.” The next thing I picked up was Audre Lorde’s “The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House.” And the third person I found was Cathy Cohen, who's a political scientist at the University of Chicago. And that was the day I decided it was time for me to leave Corporate America and do something different. I chartered a three-year plan to get out of Disney, to go back to school. and within a year or so, I was pregnant with my, second child. And I went to Cal State Fullerton, terminal master's program in political science at night, after school, after work, I finished that degree program in two years with honors, and I loved it. It was one of the most invigorating and exciting things I had ever done. and they invited me back. They said, you know what? You, you belong here. Do you want to come back and teach statistics? And I said, sure. I love math, so I taught statistics, and then the next semester I taught Black politics. And that changed everything. That changed everything. I knew that I would, I wanted to teach methods. I wanted to teach, about Black politics and gender and and political history. And I applied to graduate school. I got into Chicago and I worked with Cathy Cohen, and that's that's the the journey to academia. And it all started with, “Sister Citizen.” So that's what the book is about. The book is about that journey of kind of becoming a Black feminist and searching and having that desperation of walking into that bookstore that morning and wanting to find these stories and theories that would help me understand the world around me, and not only finding them, but then changing my entire life to move into a new career and a new way of being that would allow me to do that for a living.

GR: That's a great story, because the book does incorporate memoir and your analysis of these Black feminist, activists and authors. You're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher, and I'm speaking with Syracuse University political science professor Jenn Jackson, and we're discussing their new book, “Black Women Taught Us.” So I'd like to play a little, game of sorts with you if we can. And I'm going to list the people for the benefit of our listeners, that you discuss in each chapter of your book.

JJ: Yeah.

GR: Each chapter, although it's not only about that person, is primarily about a Black feminist. And then what I'd like to do is I want to pick one and ask you to discuss what you learned from that person. And then when you're done with that, I want you to pick one. You pick anyone you want other than obviously the one I picked. And then you tell me about that one.

JJ: Okay.

GR: You've got chapters on Harriet Jacobs, Ida B. Wells, Nora Zell Hurston, Ella Baker, Fannie Lou Hamer, Shirley Chisholm, Toni Morrison, the Combahee River Collective, Audre Lorde, Angela Davis and bell hooks. Well, first of all, what a lineup. I mean, that's, but picking one is obviously hard, but I'm going to pick one. I'd like to I'd like you to tell me a little bit about what you learned from Angela Davis.

JJ: Absolutely. Angela Davis was so, growing up was so critical to my life, in ways that I didn't actually know until I was about 15. Growing up in Oakland, California, I grew up in the birthplace of the Black Panther Party. So for me, those the ethics of the Black Panther Party of, self-actualization and self-defense were always incorporated into who we were. I found out later in life that my mother was actually one of the children who benefited from the free breakfast program that the Black Panthers put on. My father was a Black Panther. He changed his name in his 20s, when he became a Black Panther. And so these things were always embedded in my life. And I opened the chapter talking about, in high school when I, I cut all my hair off and I was going natural, and my mom told me, “You look like Angela Davis.” And I said, “Well, who is that?” And she told me for the first time who this woman was and what she did and that she happened to just teach down the street. And my mom said at UC Santa Cruz. And that put me on a path to learn more about who Angela Davis was. What's important about Davis's life is that, Angela Davis grew up in Birmingham in the era when it was called Bombingham. You know, she knew the four little girls who were blown up in the in the Baptist church, on the corner whose, stories we hear so often who have been re-enacted in film and for her, that experience, that experience with terror, shaped a lot of her ideas about anti-racism and what it means for us to be fearless and consistent in our struggle, against racism. So I learned I've learned a lot from Angela in that I've seen her. I'm lucky that she's actually still alive. She just turned 80. and I've had multiple opportunities to actually interact with her, over my career. And I've seen her speak about the intersections of anti-racism, gender struggle and abolition. And she's always been very clear that this is an anti-capitalist struggle. This is an anti-institution struggle. This is a global struggle. And I've been very gracious to learn from someone who not only sees this as a kind of theoretical project, but because of her experiences as a child, because of her exposure to violence and vitriol and hatred. She also understands the real-world consequences and the ways that so many Black folk, encounter violence in their lives that her, the, there's an imperative here, right? So her work is not just about the theory, it's about the imperative of keeping Black people alive. So I talk a lot in the chapter about why it's important to think about abolition, not just about, you know, ending prisons and police, but also about returning care to communities. Right? When we think about Davis's central claim that we have to stop investing ourselves in the prison industrial complex, she tells us the first place we do the disinvesting is in our own minds, right? The ways that we live in communities. And we see prisons on the side of the road, and we drive past them as if there's nothing there, because we've normalized, the incarceral state in our own communities. You know, that's where she wants us to start. What does it mean for our communities to care for themselves, to have the resources? To and I equate this a lot to college campuses. Right? College campuses have, DPS, they have Department of Public Safety, but they also have a Title Nine office. They have, therapy services. They have gyms. Right? They're microcosms of the world, but they have all these services available to make sure this community is intact and that the people who are there are safe. And I always think to myself, why can't we think about our own communities and neighborhoods in the same way? And that's really what abolition is about. And I learned that from Angela Davis.

GR: You're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher, and I'm talking with Syracuse University professor Jenn Jackson. They're an expert on race and politics, and the author of a new book titled “Black Women Taught Us: An Intimate History of Black Feminism.” Well, so I picked my pick before the break. Yeah, I gave you the break to think about your picks. So who do you want to talk about out of out of all of these wonderful, Black feminists that we could talk about?

JJ: Yeah. I mean, I think I've been really spending a lot of time thinking about Zora Neale Hurston’s life recently. And it's been resonating with a lot of, readers because a lot of folks don't know how difficult her life was. Zora Neale Hurston died of malnutrition in 1960. She was a prominent figure in the Harlem Renaissance. But because, male writers like Richard Wright didn't think that her writing was, relevant at the time, they didn't think that her, capturing of Black people was fair. So she wrote in dialect. She would write in African-American dialect. And she was really serious about capturing the exact way that people spoke. And what they said was that she made, Black people seem foolish and that she made, them seem as though they were uneducated. And so she was shunned and, what this ended up doing was kind of making her, writings, they went out of print. She kind of had to, she returned home. She had a hard time feeding herself. And when she returned home, to the South, she withered away. She withered away. And it wasn't. We wouldn't have had, Zora Neale Hurston works like we do today if it wasn't for Alice Walker. So Alice Walker discovered Zora Neale Hurston and she fell in love with her writing. And then she realized, wait, I don't know, I can't find her works anywhere. She said, where is this woman? What happened? And she found out that, Zora Neale Hurston was buried in an unmarked grave. So she went down, down South, down to Florida and she went to the community where Zora Neale Hurston was buried, and she posed as Zora Neale Hurston's niece and told them that she was looking for her aunt. They took her all of the neighborhood, you know, all of the community, you know, it was all word of mouth. And eventually, she got to the graveyard, and the graveyard was grown over, it was, she said there was, grass that was waist high and you couldn't see anything. And she's in this field and she's near, near crying because she's like, I don't know if I'll find Zora Neale Hurston. And she was using landmarks. She's like, okay, there's a fountain there and a tree here. And she's trying to figure out where Zora is. And she calls out and says, “Zora, I'm here, are you?” And she stepped backward, and at the moment she stepped back where she stepped down into a six-foot hole that just happened to be Zora Neale Hurston's grave. And that moment is so important because and I talk about this as the reclamation of Black women's labor. Right. Because so often, and we know the statistics that help us understand that Black women are paid less for their labor. There's a disproportionate effect of unemployment, when, you know, for instance, during the Covid-19 crisis, when, jobs were removed, it was often Black women's jobs that were removed first. Right? So we know that there's the kind of quantitative side of the labor that is also, not taken seriously. But what I'm talking about here is the labor that folks like Zora Neale Hurston offer in their lives, for communities, you know, that is erased in just a generation, right? If there are no children, if there are no grandchildren, if there are no nieces and nephews to continue that story, to continue that archival work and that memory that, that can just that, that history can go away that quickly. And I, I bring that into the book because I want folks to understand that when we talk about the contributions of Black women to our theory, to canon, to thinking about mass movements, you know, this work isn't new, right? This isn't this isn't work that just started, right? Ida B. Wells was writing in 1892 to, you know, Angela Cooper was writing in 1892. We have been thinking about Black feminism for generations, right? For over a century. and unfortunately, people still have this idea that Black feminism just started in 1989. So it's really important, as we think about folks like Zora, that we understand that it's not that Black women haven't been doing the work, is that so often it's erased. It's forgotten, it's misremembered.

GR: Wow. Yeah. So, even with that lineup of people that you profiled, you must have considered some other people that didn't make it into the book. And I was just wondering, which was the hardest one for you to leave out and why.

JJ: Yeah. Yeah, I love that question. There were two, actually. There were two that I still to this day, I'm like, you know, one was Pauli Murray. Pauli Murray was an incredible, lawyer and activist whose, intellectual work was critical in the Brown v Board of Education decision. Without Pauli Murray’s vision a lot of the legal wins of the NAACP in the 20th century would not have happened. Also, Pauli Murray was a, kind of genderqueer, androgynous person who struggled over the course of their whole life with understanding how they could fit into these movements, given that they also were not sure about what their gender identity was and how they wanted to show up. And so their life, really is, you know, it's resonant for me as a gender queer person. But I also think it's so important because these movements have been primarily masculine. We always had these charismatic male leaders. And while Pauli was so central to this work, they were sidelined because they were still read as a woman and still read as someone who didn't belong in the room. The other was Marsha P. Johnson. Marsha P. Johnson was a Black trans woman who, was critical in the Stonewall Rebellion in 1969. Her work to ensure that Black, queer and trans people at the height of the AIDS crisis in New York, she created the street transvestite activist revolutionaries along with Sylvia Rivera. They are kind of the folks who started this house culture of, we're going to build homes for people who are on the streets. This is the culture of house mothers and house fathers, house family. The concept of chosen family is really rooted there for, young queer and trans people. There's also data that shows that young queer people are the most likely to end up houseless in high school, and in their early adolescence because of the fact that people find out that they are queer and so she was actively working against that, by providing housing. The problem with Marsha P Johnson's story is that so much of it is undocumented. There's still questions around how she passed away. You know, it's a very sad story. and there's so much more left to be told.

GR: If you're just joining us, you're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. And my guest is Syracuse University professor Jenn Jackson. I wanted to move away from your book specifically, to a little more general question and it's about, reparations for African Americans, because I know you have some thoughts about that issue. So my first question is, and I know you could talk about this for hours. So if you could, you know, I'm going to I'm going to make it hard for you to try to be brief on this, but first of all, do we really need reparations? And if so, how would you imagine it being carried out?

JJ: Yeah, I love this question. you know, I think need is an interesting framing. I think that I think that, I frame it more through a lens of accountability. I think that we've seen examples of this around the world. You know, Germany is an interesting example. South Africa is another example. We've seen rotational reparations happen and they happen quite easily where the government says we are accountable for the harms and we should do work to ensure that this harm doesn't happen again and I think in terms of what models I've really found to be effective, I, I go straight to, the current Chicago model that is thinking about the Birge trial and the torture justice work that happened. So for folks who don't know, John Birge was a, police chief who used his position to, isolate and torture predominantly Black and brown men, for years in Chicago, they would have these blackout centers. They would have these places where they would literally and they would violate and harm, people. And there was no recourse for a very long time until activists, organizers, lawyers came together and said, we've got to do something about this. And then this happened around the 2008- 2015 moment. And what was so critical about this is they use their resources in communities, they use art, they use media they visited the UN, and they said, you know, this is a human rights violation that the government needs to answer for. And they won. They won, large sums of money to pay, folks who were harmed. There were a lot of folks who were in prison because after being tortured, they had been compelled to offer these, false, testimonies that a claim that they had committed crimes that they didn't commit. So they worked to actually free some folks from prison who weren't supposed to be there. This is the work of reparations, right? It's not just the funding side. They built the Chicago Torture Justice Center, which is just a center that's meant to offer, psychological support, educational support, community support in response to these harms. Most of what reparations is and should be is the, again, care for communities It it falls right under abolition. Right. So people think that reparations has to just be cash payouts. But it's not just cash payout it’s actually rooted in restorative justice. Which means whatever the harm is, whoever the victims are, they get to identify what the solutions will be. So if they want psychological support, if they want community justice, they whatever they need so that they can get back to a place of citizenship, of feeling whole, right? That's what reparations should look like. So this included a whole conversation about teaching about torture, justice in schools, local schools, so that young people know the history of their community. Right. That's what reparations should look like. It should be about truth-telling and being accountable for the actual history, the truth in the fact of history that has occurred, and then responding to the needs of those victims who have been harmed.

GR: So just to clarify, and this is very, helpful to me in my understanding, because so much of this conversation often gets stuck on the notion of general tax revenues being taken in and then redistributed on a broad basis to an entire race or ethnic group. You're talking about things that, in my mind, sound more specific and targeted to the problem.

JJ: Correct, I think the local model is a better, I think it's a really good model.

GR: Okay. we've got about three minutes left or so, and, I wanted to squeeze two questions in if I could. They're they're both big ones, so. I'm sorry about that, but, I want to I want to go back to your book, and then I want to ask you a big-picture question at the very end. So back to your book. The last chapter is titled “I Taught Myself Patience.” That's very intriguing. Tell me briefly about that.

JJ: I, I wrote that chapter because I want this book to, assuage folks fears that they have to have a handle on their Black feminist journey right now. I talked to a lot of young people who feel this sense of urgency around organizing, around movements, around education, and they feel that the the times require that they be experts. And what I've been telling young people is that that's absolutely not fair to yourself. give yourself time to learn. This book is meant to be a starting place, a beginning. And in that chapter, I provide a whole list of other folks whose works you can engage with who are not necessarily a chapter in the book, because I want folks to understand that they have to find their place, and it's not necessarily right now.

GR: Well, your life is kind of a demonstration of that patience in a way. So, just about a minute left my last question. Big picture, the future of the conversations that we're going to have in this country about race and race relations. Where do you think they're going long-term? I mean, if I if I brought you back on this program in 20 or 30 years, God willing, if I were still alive, what would what would we be discussing?

JJ: You know, unfortunately, I just taught my students about this yesterday. I think a lot of history repeats itself, and I think we're in a pendulum-like moment right now. We see the pendulum swinging back to a moment of conservatism. I think we're making incremental progress, but I hope that in 20 to 30 years, books like mine won't be so rare. I think it's so strange that this is the first of its kind. I hope to see many, many more of them on the shelves and many more people engaging with this work in a in a wider way. I want people to understand the facts of history, and I want those to govern society as opposed to this current moment where it's a lot of, vitriol and tropes and caricatures. It's, I'm hoping we move away from that.

GR: Yeah. Me too. Well, that was Jenn Jackson. And again, their new book, which, by the way, is a great read if you haven't already concluded that, is titled “Black Women Taught Us: An Intimate History of Black Feminism.” Jenn, thanks again for taking the time to talk with me. Very insightful. I learned a lot. Thank you.

JJ: Thank you.

GR: You've been listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media, conversations in the public interest.

On this week's episode of the Campbell Conversations, Grant Reeher speaks with Pratap Bhanu Mehta, the Laurence S. Rockefeller Visiting Professor for Distinguished Teaching at Princeton University. In India, he's served as President of Center for Policy Research, a New Delhi-based think-tank and as the Vice Chancellor of Ashoka University. He's the author of the book, "The Burden of Democracy."

Program Transcript:

GR: Welcome to the Campbell Conversations. I'm Grant Reeher. My guest today is Pratap Bhanu Mehtar. He's the Lawrence Rockefeller visiting professor for distinguished teaching at Princeton University. In India he has served as president of the Center for Policy Research, a New Delhi-based think tank, and as the vice-chancellor of Ashoka University. He's an expert on Indian politics and democracy. And he's with me today to discuss the state of political affairs and the state of democracy in that country, among many other works. He's the author of “The Burden of Democracy.” Professor Mehta, welcome to the program.

PBM: Great to be here.

GR: Well, we're glad to have you. So let me just start by maybe taking you back in time a little bit, and then we'll come forward. But what kinds of challenges did Indian society pose for the original achievement of democracy?

PBM: So I think there were principally two challenges. One, India was an extraordinarily poor country, one of the poorest countries in the world. And one of the most illiterate. And frankly, in the 1950s if you had asked anybody in the world, can a country this poor and this unlettered could sustain democracy? The answer would have been an unequivocal no. I mean, India did not meet any of the preconditions of democracy, as you know, from the, you know, democracy literature and in that sense, it was a gigantic leap of faith that we can actually have political democracy before we've had a minimal degree of economic development. India reverses the traditional sequence of democratization. I think the second big challenge was it's also a country of enormous diversity, linguistic diversity, religious diversity, social diversity of a kind of, almost, you know, a bewildering variety and to craft and consolidate a modern nation-state out of this building, building diversity was an extraordinary challenge. And particularly when if you look at the record of other attempts to do this, they weren't very heartening. I mean, every society has had to go through its process of incredible violence, exclusion, ethnic cleansing. So, you know, again, in the 1950s, people used to publish books with titles like “Can India Survive?” Based largely on the fact that this diversity is not meant to exist, coexist, at least by conventional yardsticks.

GR: One of the things that, occurred to me when I was thinking about that question I wanted to get your reaction to it is the degree to which the society, in addition to being incredibly diverse, as you just explained, also was hierarchical as well. And, you know, there's even a caste system or there was a legacy of that. Talk a little bit about how that challenged the achievement of democracy.

PBM: You know, so I mean, you know, the caste system is in a sense the single biggest blot in a sense, on, on India. I mean, it's a deeply oppressive, almost totalizing hierarchical social system, or at least had become one. And I think almost every modern Indian leader understood that if you want to forge a modern nation, you cannot do it when you have such a deeply oppressive social system at the heart of it. And just to I mean, you know, it's a kind of familiar fact, but caste actually governed people's lives. As Ambedkar once said, it was a division of persons. It was not just a division of labor, who you can marry, what you can eat, where you can sit, which professions, you will possess and it was an it's an extraordinary edifice of indignity. There's no other way of describing it. Right. And, the modern Indian Constitution, actually puts forth the idea of, we are free and equal citizens bound together by fraternity. So there was this incredible contradiction between the stated aspirations of this Constitution and what our social structure was. Now, one of the choices India made, and this was the interesting choice, is in many contexts, these social structures are uprooted through revolution, violent revolution. Right. India made this choice or political circumstances that it adopted a nonviolent ameliorating path to overcoming this hierarchical structure. And the hope was that the introduction of political democracy itself would, over time, weaken the hold of this hierarchical social, social system. And I think the different ways of telling that story. But some people think that glass is half empty. Some people think that glass is half full. but this is certainly a work in progress. And India has a long way to go to this, on this.

GR: And I wanted to explore with you just where it is on that path and what are the challenges. But let me ask this more general question first, and then we'll then we'll get into that. You've talked about how India is different from a lot of the other democracies in the world, and its story of democracy is different. What is do you think the importance to democracy in the world generally of India's democracy? Does it matter for democracy?

PBM: Oh, I think it matters in two ways. I mean, one, of course, it matters, because, you know, this is one-sixth of humanity, right? So them living under a democratic system is the biggest triumph, democracy. In fact, the future of democracy is going to be decided in India. But there's a second way in which it matters. Actually, I think, and particularly I think for, I think listeners across the world. Right. Which is, there’s been lots of competing models of regimes across the world, right, 1920s, 30s, you had communism, fascism and even now you have a competing model in China, which is a kind of one-party state, increasingly more authoritarian. And in the developing world and elsewhere, there was always the sense that, you know, 20, 25 years ago that democracy was not a great option for developing countries because you end up like India, kind of low growth, you know. Yeah, sure, it's it's an open society. But it's not a model of successful social or economic development. If India proves and as it had begun to in the, you know, still on the pathway to that, you can actually get decent growth, 6 to 8% growth just to use an aggregate GDP number, you can actually build out a half decent welfare state. Not perfect by any means, but certainly, you know, impactful enough. Think of what it does to the global debate about what democracy does to empower citizens and make give them a dignified life. And actually, I think sometimes I actually find colleagues in China actually understand this, that the success of India's democracy and the power of its example. I mean, you know, President Biden says the power of the US is the power of its example, or at least was historically. I mean, you know, this is like times for that.

GR: You're listening to the Campbell conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher, and I'm speaking with Princeton University professor Pratap Bhanu Mehta, and we're discussing politics and democracy in India. So I think most of our listeners will know relatively little about India, but they may also know, of the current prime minister, Modi, Prime Minister Modi. Tell us just briefly how this gentleman rose to power, what was his path?

PBM: Okay. so, I'm actually a little surprised. I think people know more than we think they do. And particularly in this day and age, the Prime Minister Modi is an extraordinary figure in modern Indian history, there's no question about him. He is a self-made politician who rose from humble circumstances. He likes to describe himself as a [inaudible]. He's actually from one of India's backward castes. Not the lowest cast, not the ex-untouchables, but still a cast that was relatively low down. the hierarchy. He joined a Hindu nationalist organization, the RSS, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, at a very young age. And basically has dedicated his entire life to that organization. So this the RSS is a almost 100-year-old organization that was created to consolidate Hindus into a self-conscious political identity, and it's the main organization that spearheaded nationalism. He gave up his family ties very early and so there's there's a big mythology around that because, he was married at a very young age, but gave up all on this story, all attachment to family and home to dedicate himself to the cause of nation. And after years of toiling as an RSS worker, he first comes to prominence in the state of Gujarat and he comes to prominence in two ways. One in 2002, there is a major riot in the state of Gujarat. A series of events leading up to it. There was a there was a train, carrying Hindu activists, and one of the coaches was set off on fire. And there's still a lot of controversy around exactly the circumstances under which that coach caught fired. But as a response, as a retaliation, there were riots all across the state. depending on your estimates, almost 2000 people died. Mr. Modi was Chief Minister of Gujarat. And many people believe that he and the BJP had active complicity in producing those riots. There were certainly, at the very least, sins of omission. I mean, whenever there is a major riot in an Indian state and the state refuses to or delay stopping those riots, you can pretty much assume at least some kind of complicity. So. So it keeps the negative sin of omission is clearly there. There is a big debate about the sin of commission, right? I mean, who was exactly orchestrating this? But, but that actually catapulted him to national prominence. And many hardline Hindu nationalists began to see him as the strongest defender of Hindu interests, precisely because he'd actually innate allowed this violence. Right. So it was that violence, rather than being a kind of black mark against his career, at least for his core constituents, became a point of attraction. But the second thing he did in Gujarat, and that's the combination he brings to the center. Gujarat is an economically very dynamic state. A large part of India's kind of business success comes from the state of Gujarat, it houses some of India's most prominent businessmen. And he managed to create the buzz around Gujarat, around his ability to be very pro-business, create the kind of modern infrastructure that business requires. Now, again, just to get the facts on the ground, Gujarat actually doesn't do very well on a couple of other indicators, like health and education or social indicators. But this image of a kind of efficient chief minister who wants to modernize India, right, through the creation of infrastructure, he had this kind of flagship project in the city of Ahmedabad creating this kind of modern riverfront where they essentially kind of channel the water [inaudible]. But, you know, but, you know, it makes for a kind of magnificent sort of infrastructural vista, at least, you know, visually. So this combination that he's a militant defender of Hindu interests and he's a pro-business modernizer that became known as the kind of Gujarat model which he then managed to sell at a kind of national stage very, very effectively.

GR: It's beginning to sound familiar. You're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher, and I'm talking with Princeton University professor Pratap Bhanu Mehta. He's an expert on Indian politics and democracy. So you were talking about this Hindu nationalism and how Prime Minister Modi really embodied that and then erode that, in addition to other aspects of his political appeal to the top in Indian politics. He is generally, I think, seen as a force that has threatened democracy in India. In broad outline, would you go along with that, or is it more complicated story?

PBM: I think a broad outline, that's true. But I think there's there's this there's some nuances, I think, which are I think important. So first of all, when we say threatening democracy, we have to acknowledge the fact that so far at least, elections in India have been free and fair, and his appeal is genuinely popular and his political victories are genuinely politically earned. Even the opposition up till this point has not, you know, challenged the election results. And it's important to his self-image that he sees himself as a genuinely popular leader, and he's remarkably good at actually one aspect of democracy, which is electioneering. I mean, he there's no political leader in the world who takes elections as seriously as he does. Right? I think the worry about him as posing a threat to democracy, in part, is a kind of anticipatory body, which is to say that as Hindu nationalism gets more consolidated in structures of government, it is beginning to show signs of both authoritarianism and exclusion of minorities. Right. So the challenge for India is that while elections are still robust, in between elections, civil liberties are weakening considerably. So, for example, clampdowns on freedom of expression, the use of state power to target political opponents. And just recently, in the last week or last, last month or so, the chief minister of Delhi has been arrested. Now, there again, nuances to that case, but it's beginning to send a signal that this is not a government, even when it's popular, that's actually going to let the opposition now freely organize and mobilize and it also poses an anticipatory tactic, because we know that once you have been in power and have targeted your opponents, you know, through using state power, the existential stakes for you losing power potentially become all that much greater because you might fear targeting. So I think Indian democracies now entering that zone where it will be that democratic commitment to free and fair elections is going to be tested but certainly the clampdown on civil society, freedom of expression, the erosion of independent institutions, what happens between elections as it were, in the kind of non-electoral space? I think those threats are now increasingly serious.

GR: As you speak, of course, it's impossible not to think of the analogies to the United States and many of the things you've said. It's not a 1-to-1 match, but there's obviously a lot of overlap, and I wanted to get reflections on that. Do you think that there are lessons or insights for the United States situation where you have, you know, a pro-business, populist leader that is emphasizing themes of nationalism and some would say Christian nationalism, Christian white nationalism? As an outsider looking at us, you're living in the United States, but you're not originally from here, what do you think the insights or lessons are?

PBM: So, I think there's there's kind of one interesting similarity and one difference. Let me begin with the difference first, which is I think the United States, I think the worry is much more polarization. Right? Which is, two blocks roughly of similar size. Right. 45% vote on the one side, 48 or something percent to the other side, something like that. Right. I mean, whoever comes up with and that polarization actually producing a kind of gridlock, or at least preventing America from doing the kinds of things that it needs to do to solve its pressing social problems. But the distribution of social power across political parties is still relatively balanced. And that provides, at least for now, a certain kind of check and balance. I think with India, the challenge now is actually the concentration of power at one end of the spectrum. So, imagine if one of the two parties or if it was a right-wing party, kind of, let's say an authoritarian Republican Party were to, you know, kind of dominate American politics to the point that you just could not even imagine anybody challenging it. What would, in a sense, you know, your views in like, a democracy look like? So one is I think there's difference between kind of polarization and concentration. But the similarity that I see is, I think the following, which is, that both in both countries there are sections of the population that might be tempted by ethno-nationalism. Right. Again, it's sometimes hard to be precise about how widespread that attraction is, partly because nationalism now itself can speak as a coded language. You know, in some ways it re-articulates itself as something else. so there can be genuine arguments about immigration. There are arguments about immigration that I actually, frankly, just ethno-nationalist arguments. It's sometimes difficult to parse those things out and I think, you see this in both countries. But insofar as there is a kind of attraction to ethno-nationalism, and, and ethno-nationalism defines itself also against a similar set of targets. It's impatient with liberal elites who they think are not just too out of touch. It's impatient with checks and balances because they think checks and balances come in the way of creating the unity of the people, or taking the strong actions that it needs to take to make the country great. Right. I mean, we don't want all these courts we doing different things in Congress. And the natural pluralism of society becomes a kind of hindrance, not an asset. Right? That's the core. Right. And that temptation then leads to the curbing of their independent power, whether it be universities, whether it be media. I think that tendency is quite strong in the US. It's still checked a bit because there are countervailing powers. But I don't think it's something that should be in a sense, complacently, I think, taken for granted and I think the third I think element of kind of ethno-nationalism, which is we are in this moment, in world history, where, every country wants to put their interests first. Again, nothing new about it. All nationalisms do it. Historically, every country has put their interests first. But I think now we are at a vision of the world where we see the world in a zero-sum game. It's America first, India first, China first. And that optimism of the last 25, 30 years that you could see geopolitics and the nature of our economic development in non-zero-sum games in non-zero-sum terms. I think that optimism is waning and once that optimism wanes, it does make the way for a kind of politics of exclusion and closure you know, that, that might not. I think we consonant with the kind of open, free American spirit that we were used to.

GR: If you've just joined us, you're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. And my guest is Indian politics expert Pratap Bhanu Mehta. When you were talking there, I was thinking of two things that I want to ask you about at the end before we have to stop. But one of them is in the one of the things I worry about as a political scientist looking at the United States is that zero-sum mentality for domestic politics. But it's very interesting to think of it in terms of the international realm as well, and how those two things might work together. But before I wanted to ask you a question that’s related to that. Let me ask you a question about your own experience if you don't mind. And, you know, you don't have to get deeply into this if you don't want to. But my understanding is that the kind of limitations on academic freedom that you're beginning to see in India, that's that's something that that you, you personally have experienced. Is that correct?

PBM: Yes. I mean, I mean, to put it very in a sense, pointedly, there is direct pressure from government on academic institutions to rein in academics who are critical of the government. Could be on a range of issues, not just academics. I mean, there's there's a group of thinkers who have actually been targeted and put in prison. I just mentioned a couple of them just to give examples on and tell to me one of actually India's finest Dalit scholars. He was kind of the government accuse him of, fomenting in some sense, his left-wing insurgencies really kind of surcharge in this evidence now that, evidence was actually planted on his laptop to make that possible. So, yes, I mean, and lots of Indian universities increasingly cannot hold seminars on subjects of national importance. For example, you cannot hold a seminar, on Kashmir in most Indian universities. Either there'll be direct pressure from government or increasingly the government will use or at least support vigilante groups, sometimes, unfortunately, even student groups, to obstruct and block these seminars. Appointments in public universities deeply vetted ideologically. So, so, yeah, there's a whole range of, you know, ways in which are increasingly, unfortunately, becoming familiar in the US as well, in which academic freedom is under jeopardy in India.

GR: So as I listen to you, I also am thinking of, a very famous, political writer, Alexis de Tocqueville.

PBM: Yeah.

GR: Oh, you know, was, a Frenchman who had important observations to make about the American system. And you're kind of reminding me of that here in a modern context. And I wanted to draw on that. We've only got a couple of minutes left, but, I wanted to ask you. Okay, so give the United States political lessons. What should what should Americans be most what should be on the top of their mind politically as they think about their future here? And what should we be most on guard about? How should we and are there things that we need to be doing differently or thinking about differently? If you could give us this advice.

PBM: So, I mean, it's very presumptuous, but okay. But here's two quick points. One, and this I very strongly believe in that almost any tinge of ethno-nationalism in politics, that's a story that never ends well. Even though you might not see violence immediately, it does something to relations between citizens. That's, I think, deeply troubling for democracies, and particularly one that, you know, we kind of celebrate, I think the United States kind of I mean, this was this democracy, the sense of lightness of being was always one thing that we wanted to associate with the United States, not the kind of the heavy heaviness of ethno-nationalism. The second thing I will say, which is a lot of what gives ethno-nationalism links in politics, is actually the governance failures of liberal establishments. So in India, it's also, you know, the credibility of the liberal establishment imploded on its own account. Right. And, while we focus on, you know, ethno-nationalism, white supremacism, pluralism, populism, at the heart, there are serious governance challenges, housing, health, daycare costs. And if you want to preserve liberty, you have to be able to demonstrate that you are up to also meeting these governance challenges. Otherwise, the bad guys would have an opening.

GR: Well, we'll have to leave it there. I could talk to you for hours about this topic that was Pratap Bhanu Mehta and if you'd like to learn more about India and democracy, check out his book, “The Burden of Democracy.” Pratap, thanks again for taking the time to talk to me has been extremely insightful.

PBM: Thank you, it's been a real privilege.

GR: You've been listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media, conversations in the public interest.

On this week's episode of the Campbell Conversations, Grant Reeher speaks with returning guest Brian Taylor, a Political Science Professor at Syracuse University. He's an expert on Russia and security, and brings us an update on Russia's war with Ukraine.

Program Transcript:

GR: Welcome to the Campbell Conversations. I'm Grant Reeher. My guest today is Syracuse University political science professor Brian Taylor. Professor Taylor has been on the program a couple of times previously to discuss the war in Ukraine. And he's back with me today to bring us up to date on that war. He's an expert on Russia and security and has written about both Putin and the Russian military. His most recent book is “The Code of Putinism.” Brian, it's good to see you again.

BT: Great to see you, Grant. Thanks for the invitation again.

GR: Oh, yeah, you bet. So. Well, before I start asking you questions, actually, I want to publicly give you credit for saying the very first time that we spoke and the war was just getting started and it hadn't really gotten underway, that you said then that you expected Ukrainian resistance to be fierce and lasting. Most of the other experts at the time were expecting Russia to roll over them without much resistance. So well done on that. We'll continue in that vein. So, so, as my first question, though, just briefly bring us up to speed on what's been happening in the war in the past six months or so. Just a real thumbnail sketch.

BT: I guess I would say we haven't seen a massive amount of change in the war on either side in the last six months or so. About nine months or so ago, nine, ten months. Ukraine launched, a long-planned and long-expected counter-offensive across several points of the front line. And I think it's fair to say in retrospect that this counter-offensive was largely unsuccessful, for reasons we can get into, if you want, but it was largely unsuccessful. The amount of territory that Ukraine was able to take back was pretty small. On the other hand, we should say that Russia has not made major advances either. So some people have referred to the war as a stalemate. It's not quite a stalemate because there's still lots of things happening, but the movement of the front line has been pretty small and pretty minor over the course of, I would say, even the last year. The one other thing I might add, the one part of the battle where we've seen a bit more change, perhaps, is actually in the Black Sea, where Russia had pretty much tried to blockade Ukraine from shipping grain and other goods out of the Black Sea, and Ukraine has successfully fought back against those efforts, and they have managed to sink, around a third of the Russian Black Sea Fleet, even though Ukraine itself doesn't have a proper navy through the use of drones and missiles and other technologies. And so they've reopened that shipping route for them, which has a big impact on global food prices and things like that, but in general, not a huge amount of change. And the final thing I would say, I guess, is that Russia is on the front foot now because Ukraine is running out of ammunition, especially artillery and this has to do with the hold up on the U.S. military assistance package in the US Congress over the last half year.

GR: Yeah, I wanted to get into that a little bit later. Briefly tell us why the Ukrainian, counter-offensive wasn't successful. Was it bad planning or something else that was going on?

BT: I would say it was a series of things. Probably the most basic thing is it is extremely difficult in modern conditions, with the amount of visibility of the battlefield to the combatants on both sides to make a major breakthrough. And it's especially difficult to do that without air superiority. And, Ukraine actually was able to successfully prevent Russia from established, establishing air superiority in the early phase of the war. But certainly, Russia still has the more powerful air force than Ukraine. And so that meant that advancing Ukrainian units when they tried to break through, didn't have any air cover. And normally the U.S. military, for example, in a similar type of conflict, would have established air supremacy by that point. The second thing I would say is that Russia pretty successfully established defensive lines in depth with fortifications, mines, trenches, those sorts of obstacles that made it very hard for Ukrainian armored units to make much progress going forward. So it turned much more into an artillery and infantry fight. And the movement was just very slow. And eventually, Ukraine exhausted itself in its attempt to push forward in several different directions.

GR: So has the level of Ukrainian resolve to resist Russia changed at all, in your view, or is it still as strong as it was at the beginning?

BT: If you look at, public opinion polls, Ukrainian public opinion still remains very much committed to victory. People say that they believe in victory and victory to the Ukrainians means expelling Russia entirely from Ukrainian territory. Currently, Russia is occupying about 17 to 18% of Ukrainian territory. So based on the survey data, Ukrainian resolve seems to be roughly the same. Anecdotally, people say the mood in Ukraine is less optimistic than it was a year ago, that people had high hopes for, the offensive of summer of 2023. And there is, of course, some disappointment that they were not able to reconquer more territory. There's also a major debate taking place in Ukrainian domestic politics now about mobilizing additional troops because they, like the Russians, have taken heavy casualties. And the question is, how are they going to, put into the field an army that is capable of conquering back the territory they've lost and holding the territory they currently have?

GR: Now, what about on the Russian side in terms of the public? The last time you and I spoke, you talked about the kind of information that Russians were getting, how they might view the war. Have there been any major changes there about the factual information that they're getting, or do you have any, any evidence or even hunches, as a Russia expert, that their views might be changing in any significant way?

BT: In terms of, excuse me, in terms of the information available? Not much has really changed. Anyone who consumes state media or even legally available private military or private media in Russia today will be getting a very slanted view of the picture. If they go on social media or go look for independent media externally, then they can get a different picture. But, many people are pretty passive media consumers, and that's not true just of Russians, but of many people around the world, obviously. So I think the picture people are getting hasn't changed that much. But on the other hand, it won't be lost on the average Russian that a war that was supposed to be over in weeks is now already in its third year. And based on the independent survey data we have, the picture seems to be, a slow, a very slow but somewhat steady decline in commitment to the war. More people talking about the need for a settlement, talking about how if Putin went for a settlement, that they would support him in that, while at the same time, the majority seems to think they can have that settlement without getting, without having to give back any of the territory they've illegally annexed from Ukraine. So it's kind of a mixed picture. I think when we talked a couple of years ago, I may have said this, but the picture seems to be about 20% of the population are hardcore war supporters willing to do everything for victory. About 20% are hardcore war opponents, and the majority in the middle tends to go along with what the regime, is saying and at least offer kind of passive support, but not enthusiastic support. And they seem to be willing to end the war if that's what Putin says that Russia should do.

GR: You're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher, and I'm speaking with Syracuse University professor Brian Taylor, and we're discussing the war in Ukraine. Well, let's talk about Putin for a minute. You've written on him. He was recently reelected. I guess I guess that's the term we'll use. There was an election of some sort to another term as president of Russia. First, just for someone that grew up in the Cold War, are there any important sort of functional differences between Putin's level of control over the country and, say, the older general secretaries of the Communist Party? Help me understand how, what this guy is as an authoritarian leader.

BT: The main difference, I would say, is that in the Soviet Union, it was a single-party state in which the institutions of the Communist Party, with the support of the KGB and other associated institutions, had control from the top down to the bottom. But there was a set of regularized, institutionalized structures that knew what their roles were and carried out those roles. Putin's Russia is not a single-party dictatorship. It's a personalist dictatorship where power flows from one man who sits in the Kremlin, and that means the institutional constraints on him as a ruler are actually weaker than the institutional constraints that the post-Stalin rulers would have faced. In that sense, he's somewhat more like Stalin, not in the level of repression, which is very high, but not Stalin levels high. But Stalin also, in some sense elevated himself above the party. whereas under Khrushchev and Brezhnev's this system became more regularized, with routines that people followed and sort of informal rules about how the system worked. And now it's much more about Putin, his staff in the Kremlin, what's called the presidential administration, his cronies who have informal influence over him, which means the constraints are weaker. But it also means in some ways, the execution side is weaker than it would have been under the Soviet Communist Party. If you weaken institutions, they don't constrain you, but you also can't necessarily rely on them when you're trying to get things done. So that's how I would describe the difference. The one final point I would add is there was a recent study by an independent Russian media organization that said the level of repression in terms of people being either arrested or sentenced or fined for quote-unquote anti-state activities is as high now as it was under Khrushchev and Brezhnev, and by some measures even higher. So it is quite a repressive, authoritarian regime, and it has become much more so over the last two years.

GR: So you were making some comparisons with Stalin there. Stalin essentially died in office. Do you think that's going to be the case with Putin? Will he have this position and this authority until he passes on?

BT: So Putin is now 71. He's been in power in one form or another for more than 24 years now. And personalist dictatorships in which the ruler is that old and has been in power that long, the typical outcome is that they die in office. That is the most likely outcome if we just base it on comparing this type of ruler to other types of rulers around the world of a similar profile, of similar age and similar time in power. In the post-Cold War era, the second most common way those people, leave power is through some sort of popular uprising. And then third would be some kind of elite conspiracy or coup. So those are the three most common scenarios in order. I think if we had to bet, we should probably bet with, you know, the majority odds, which says he'll be in power until he dies. But we also know that personalist regimes like this are pretty unpredictable and can collapse quite quickly, even though they look very formidable at the time, you know, and the stress that the war is putting on the economy and the political system means I wouldn't put a whole lot of money on that bet, even though that's the way I would bet if I was forced to.

GR: I gotcha, and you could probably dispatch this question pretty quickly, but I'm assuming, then, that this recent reelection doesn't really affect Putin's calculations in the way that we might think it would happen in a Western context of, okay, “I've been reelected, I have a mandate,” or I think that's just is that just completely irrelevant to his thinking?

BT: I actually don't think it's completely irrelevant to his thinking. I think in some ways it is more or less irrelevant. It wasn't a real election, you know, when you call it a special election operation or something like that. But it wasn't a real election, obviously. And the data is clear on that. There was massive falsification and fraud taking place and massive coercion to get people to vote the right way. But Putin has interpreted it as far as people have reported, as if showing that the country is united around him. So I think it gives him an extra boost of confidence going forward. That's maybe the one change.

GR: You're listening to The Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher and I'm talking with Brian Taylor. He's a political science professor at the Maxwell School of Syracuse University and an expert on Russia and security. And we've been discussing the war in Ukraine. Before the break, we were talking a bit about Putin. Let me ask you this other question about what's inside his head, as far as you can tell. How much do you think he, in thinking about the conduct of the war and his decisions about it, how much do you think he is concerned with what the United States will do in reaction to the actions that he takes, or the Western world more generally? How does that factor into it for him?

BT: I think it's a huge part of the calculation for him. I think it's important for people to understand that for Putin, he is at war, not only with Ukraine, but in some sense with the United States and the West. And he sees this as a more global conflict because the U.S., NATO, other allies are supporting Ukraine, he sees it as very much kind of Russia against the Western world. And so one of his key objectives has been to try and divide the West, try and slow down the supply of Western military assistance to Ukraine. He has said quite openly that he thinks Ukraine would be unable to continue to fight without Western assistance. And I think his calculation now is that after the initial setbacks of the invasion two years ago, he and Russia sort of regrouped and went into full mobilization mode, mobilizing manpower, mobilizing military power, putting everything towards the war where they're spending upwards of 7%. Some people have estimated as much as 10% of GDP on the war effort. In contrast, the response from the U.S. and its European allies has been relatively small in terms of restarting military production lines and those sorts of things, supplying Ukraine with armaments and equipment and economic assistance. Obviously, a lot has been done, but in comparison with the way Russia has mobilized, for, one might say, total war, the U.S. and Europe has barely sort of started moving forward, in that. And so I think Putin believes, and maybe there's some evidence for this, that the U.S. and the West in general will eventually lose interest, and then he will have a free hand in Ukraine.

GR: This is, really, almost a perverse question on my part, but I want to ask it because as you were talking, it occurred to me, if we in the United States were to put like a Cold War lens on this conflict and remember back to the way that the United States kind of effectively outspent the Soviet Union and really caused them to hurt their own economy by staying up with us in terms of spending on a military that they could not afford as easily as we could, would it not be, at least from a strategic point of view, somewhat in the Western interests, to keep this war going and keep spending Russia down and keep making him, in a sense, more and more, contingent in his in his position? Or is that I mean, that has enormous ethical implications for what we're doing to the Ukrainian people and nation. But it just struck me if from that lens, I don't know if that question's making sense or not to you know, but.

BT: I guess I wouldn't describe the situation in that way, because the Cold War was a Cold War, and it went on for decades. And now we're talking about an extremely hot war. The hottest wars in Europe since World War II, in which hundreds of thousands of people have been killed or wounded, and it goes on day by day. Just last night, Russia sent a massive missile and drone attack against Kyiv, the capital of Ukraine. So the scenario is different. The Cold War scenario was, over time, the collective economic and technological might of the U.S. in Western Europe was going to outstrip that of the Soviet Union and its satellites. Now we're talking about a full-blown massive conventional war in which if the West doesn't step up to help Ukraine, defend itself, then Russia will try and grind down Ukrainian resistance, and that will radically change the security situation in Europe and will lead to increasing demands for more U.S. military assistance to the rest of Europe, more U.S. troops in Europe, and that sort of thing. So I would frame the conflict quite differently than the Cold War.

GR: Right. No, I see what you're saying. Well, so you've mentioned this a couple times. I did want to come back to it. In fact, you said it right at the outset, the need, for, U.S. support and Western support for the Ukraine militarily and that you cited as Ukraine's biggest challenge right now is that artillery, ammunition and other things are beginning to to dry up. So what would happen then if, if the United States government didn't provide this aid that Ukraine needs?

BT: I think it would make it much more difficult for Ukraine to continue to resist Russian offensives. I think Europe would try and do what it can, and Europe actually is providing more assistance than the U.S.. I think there's a bit of a misconception about that. So Europe would do what it could, but there are certain things that the U.S., as the world's largest economy, with the world's most powerful military and the world's largest military industrial base can provide that Europe can't provide right away. Things like just the number of artillery shell shells, air defense missiles to protect Ukrainians, cities, those sorts of things. So the fight would get much more difficult for Ukraine. But if the West, not only the U.S. but, Europe sort of withdrew from the conflict, I don't think that'll happen. But if it did, this does not mean Ukraine will stop fighting. It'll just mean the nature of the war will become more like an insurgency, rather than, sort of old World War I, World War II style conflict if Ukraine simply runs out of, you know, artillery and systems like that.

GR: If you're just joining us, you're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. And my guest is Russia expert Brian Taylor. Well, I wanted to ask you how the Israeli-Hamas war has affected the situation in the United States in particular. Has it changed the way that the war in Ukraine is perceived? I mean, obviously, it's taken some of the attention away from Ukraine, but beyond that, has it, has it reframed it for this country in any important way?

BT: It's an interesting question. I mean, I think the Biden administration initially wanted to go with a message that helping Ukraine and helping Israel are part of the same fight against sort of authoritarian, you know, political actors, whether it's the Russian state or Hamas in Gaza. But, the, the course of the, you know, Israel-Hamas war has almost sort of flipped that argument. And now, I'm getting a bit outside of my lane here. But the way Israel is fighting in Gaza, bears some resemblance to the way that Russia is fighting in Ukraine. And there's a political argument in the U.S. political discourse more globally that actually, you know, we should think of the side that needs protecting as the Palestinians and Ukrainians rather than the Israelis and the Ukrainians. So it's muddled the debate in a way that I don't think the Biden administration anticipated after October 7 when clearly everyone's sympathy was with Israel after the horrible Hamas terrorist attack. But given the course of that war, it looks a lot more complicated than it did back in October. And so the politics of it have become difficult. Specifically, on the issue of the Ukrainian assistance bill that's been stuck in the House. There's a faction of the Democratic House that doesn't want to vote for that bill because it includes not only assistance for Ukraine, but assistance for Israel. And so, the left part of the Democratic caucus in the House is also opposed to this military assistance bill for very different reasons.

GR: We've got about, three minutes left or so. I want to try to squeeze in 2 or 3 more questions if I can. This is a big one, but, I wanted to get your take on it. One of the things that you sometimes hear coming from the Right in the United States, regarding this war, is this notion that historically, Ukraine isn't really a nation. And you know what? What are we helping to defend in this kind of thing? Just how true is that historically, I mean, outside of the carving up of the region that occurred after World War I and World War II and is Ukraine a nation? That seems like a dumb question, but.

BT: Ukraine is 100% a nation. Ukrainian is a separate language from Russia, from Russian. Ukraine has a separate culture and identity, and the Russian invasion of Ukraine, first in 2014 and then again in 2022, has made that even stronger and more clear to Ukrainians. I know we're running out of time, but I do want to make one fundamental point that the history, although Putin likes to talk about it a lot, is in some sense irrelevant. Many borders came about accidentally over the courses of centuries, but the current international order is based on the notion of acceptance of the territorial integrity of states in their given borders. Russia recognized these borders multiple times. The UN recognizes these borders, so there's no legal argument about Ukraine's separate status.

GR: I think that's a good point. We could have lots of conversations about the rest of Europe if we were to apply that logic to it. So, I know that the predictions are dicey in this realm. You've kind of, I think, suggested where you think this might be going, but it seems like the war can't go on forever. Maybe it could, but you know, it can't. What's the ultimate arrangement that you think comes out of it in a minute or less?

BT: It's really hard to predict. At the moment actually, I don't see any scenario for a settlement because the two sides positions are completely separate. Russia wants to destroy Ukraine and control Ukraine, and Ukraine wants to keep its independence. So I don't think we should think about this so much as a question of this or that piece of territory. It's a question about political control. Putin wants to dominate Ukraine. He thinks it's an artificial state. I've just said why it isn't. Ukraine thinks they are a real state, which it is. And so in some sense, it either ends with Russia establishing that control that it's seeking, or Ukraine being given the tools to defend its sovereignty.

GR: Okay, we'll have to leave it there. That was Brian Taylor. And if you'd like to learn more about Russia and Putin, check out his book, “The Code of Putinism.” Brian, thanks again for taking time to talk with me. I always learn so much when I speak with you.

BT: Thanks so much, Grant.

GR: You've been listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media conversations in the public interest.

On this week's episode of the Campbell Conversations, Grant Reeher speaks with Robert Mann, a professor who holds the Manship Chair in Journalism at the Manship School of Mass Communication at Louisiana State University. Prior to joining the Manship School in 2006, he served as communications director to Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco. He's also the author of, "Becoming Ronald Reagan: The Rise of a Conservative Icon".

Program Transcript:

Grant Reeher: Welcome to the Campbell Conversations. I'm Grant Reheer. Super Tuesday has come and gone. And some things are clear. And others maybe not so much. To help me sort this out. My guest today is Robert Mann. He's a professor at the Manship School of Communications at Louisiana State University, and prior to that, he was press secretary or communication director for a number of notable Louisiana elected officials, including Governor Kathleen Blanco, Senator John Breaux, and Senator Russell Long. He's also the author of “Becoming Ronald Reagan: The Rise of a Conservative Icon.” Professor Mann, welcome to the program.

RM: Thank you. Grant, it's wonderful to be with you this morning.

GR: Well, it's great to have you. So let me just start with a very basic question. Our listeners are certainly aware of the big news items that have come out of Super Tuesday. But what were your main takeaways from these presidential nominating contests?

RM: Well, I guess that the that those who said and I had a lot of friends you probably did too, or you knew people who really doubted that all evidence to the contrary, that it would be a rematch between Trump and Biden. I think, you know, I had friends like you probably do who just didn't think it would end up that way. That's something would intervene that, that Trump wouldn't actually go through with it or that Biden would, would drop out and that just didn't happen. And it, I, I kind of expected that that's what would would occur. But I think that what's interesting to me is going to be to see in the coming weeks when those people and I think there were a lot of them, on both sides, but particularly among independents who just didn't believe that it would be a Trump/Biden rematch, began to absorb the, the reality and how that shakes up the polls if it does.

GR: Yeah, yeah. And there are some interesting polls that suggest that substantial majorities of the country, not only don't want to see either of them be president, but don't even want to see either of them run again. But now they are running again. So, as you point out, the reality is that.

RM: Yeah, it's, you know, it's this weird thing because you see in the press a lot of the, the national press, The Post in the, in the New York, Washington Post, New York Times, you see these stories about how people are so dissatisfied with their choices. And yet, you know, Biden wins almost every primary with 85, or 90% of the vote. And Trump romps to victory with, with a, with a little bit smaller percentage because he had actually had some serious challengers this time around. But the vast majority of of activists in both parties seem to do want these two candidates to, to be their nominee.

GR: Well, I, I've read that there were also some notable, results that emerged down ballot. Obviously got less attention. Well, I just was curious if anything in that regard caught your eye.

RM: Well, I think what's happening in North Carolina with the with the Republican nominee, Mark Robinson, lieutenant governor, who, is now the Republican nominee for governor, who I think the Democrats wisely sat on a lot of his I think to say there were controversial statements is is a vast understatement. Appalling, disturbing statements about the Holocaust and particularly about, that he would prefer women weren't allowed to vote. This probably ensures that North Carolina will have another Democratic governor. But I think in a state that Biden only lost by about half a point in 2020, that this puts this potentially puts North Carolina, really in play. And, and, you know, maybe complicates, you know, Trump's, calculus a little bit because, I think they were counting on North Carolina being in their column. And, that could allow Biden to, you know, that could give Biden a little more breathing room in a place like Arizona or Nevada.

GR: Yeah. That's interesting. So, so now that we're at the stage we're at and you had the observation that you started with, but I wanted to see if there was anything else you'd want to add to that when I asked this question. And that's for our listeners and mostly we're in upstate New York, although we do get folks listening in from other places. But what do you think is the most important thing our listeners should have at the front of their minds at this point in the election cycle? Is there something you think they should be remembering or keeping their eye out for when they're watching these candidates or the parties?

RM: Well, I you know, I tell people that that you really need to you really need to tune out the polls. If, you know, for people on both sides, there's a lot of freaking out going on right now and particularly among, I guess, Biden supporters. But, but but maybe Trump supporters are a little overconfident. And I think maybe some Biden people are a little underconfident, and they're reading a lot into polls that will that will change a lot. And I think based on Super Tuesday, I think we're going to see some realignment. And, I just feel like that the polls at this, at this stage of the game are not really, especially the national polls, if you're looking at a you're looking at a national poll, I think you're just kind of wasting your time. You're just inviting, yourself to to contemplate scenarios that are unlikely to happen. And they probably aren't even, realistic. And so I would say people on both sides, if you're if you're a Trump supporter or you're a Biden supporter, focus on ways you can help your candidate, not ways you can freak out about your candidate's chances. And, you know, I think also that one thing that I've been thinking about the last few days is that we've we've got to have a more serious conversation in this country among political reporters and among political professionals about polling and, and how we cover it, how we use it, how the media uses it to create news, which I think is not the best use of their time. But I think we really need to reassess what we do with polling in this election and going forward.

GR: I think it's it's been a problem for a long time. But it's a good point. So given that your experience was mostly on the Democratic side of the aisle, nonetheless, I wanted to see if you're getting a feeling in Louisiana, of any kind of like, sense on the ground among Republicans. You know, you talked before about how people really were discounting the possibility that this would be a rematch of 2016. But it is, and so or it looks like it's almost certain to be. So are you getting any kind of feelings in Louisiana among Republicans that Republicans up here might not be getting the same sense of?

RM: Well, you know, so Republicans in Louisiana. So first of all, I think your listeners need to understand that, Louisiana had its statewide elections last year. We're one of three states that have governor and legislative races in off years. And so, a lot of the political activity that would be happening in other states and a lot of the influence that a presidential campaign would be having on a statewide election just doesn't happen in Louisiana. We elected a Republican governor last year, and a supermajority in both houses of Republicans. So Republicans are feeling really ascendant. The presidential campaign doesn't touch us, really, in ways that it might in a swing state. And so, you know, Republicans are really feeling the roads right now. I mean, the governor just convened two special sessions and passed some pretty bold legislation, and is going to continue to do that. They're on a romp, they're feeling their oats. And, there is just, you know, I think that the presidential election is something that people care about. But I think in Louisiana, it's something they feel like they can't do anything about, because their votes are in the bank for doing it. Our electoral votes are in the bank for Republicans in every election.

GR: You're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher, and I'm speaking with Bob Mann, a professor at Louisiana State University's Manship School of Communications. So, Bob, I moderated a panel up here in New York of, academics last week. It was before Super Tuesday, and my last question to them, it was a bottom-line type of question was at this point in the election cycle, I didn't want to ask them to make a prediction because political scientists and social scientists don't like doing that. But at this point in the election cycle, who should be more worried, Joe Biden or Donald Trump? And to a person, they all said Donald Trump. Do you concur with that? And why?

RM: I do, I do, and I think if you look at from a standpoint, the standpoint of resources, of money, from the standpoint of, you know, the issues, particularly how abortion and reproductive rights is cutting against Republicans and every special, almost every special election, since the Dobbs decision. And if you look at the, the sort of the legal peril of the two candidates, one and Biden, who is, you know, the Republicans keep stepping on rocks trying to impeach him and to some extent, the, you know, the prosecutions against Trump are a little bit in trouble and delayed and all that. But there's still, I think, a bigger problem for Trump, there's a story that I saw yesterday that the Democrats are about to dump, the Democrats, the Biden campaign and its super PACs that are helping the Biden campaign, are about to dump early $700 million in television buys across the 7 or 8 battleground states. That's an enormous amount of money, especially this early. This is not to say that it will work. This is not to say that money is the magic potion that just wins campaigns. It doesn't always translate into a winning campaign. But, the the question you ask is, who would I rather be? And I would rather be sitting in the Biden chair than the Trump chair at this point in the campaign.

GR: There's something I've been mulling for a while now, and I wanted to get your take on it. it's the first time in our modern history that we've had, two presidents, each with two four-year records to compare. And an election hasn't happened for a very long time. Now, granted, one is the sitting incumbent and one is the challenger, but they both have full presidential records. Do you think that will affect things? And if so, how would it affect the dynamic?

RM: Yeah, that's a good question. They are sort of running as these two incumbents in a way, and, they're so well known. I think the Trump people think there was a I saw that, that, a Washington Post columnist, tweeted the other day that the Trump people believe that there is no new information that voters need to have about Trump, that it's all baked in and that the negative spots that Biden is going to dump on Trump rain down on Trump will have no, effect. I don't believe that. I think that I think you and I both know that voters have very short memories when it comes to politics, and that there's a lot about Trump, that they don't remember a lot about Trump's agenda. If he's elected, that they don't know about. I think there's still a lot of room for the Biden campaign to educate about Trump. And so where I'm going with this is that, you know, Trump wants it to be a referendum on the incumbent, which is what every challenger wants it to be. Biden wants it to be a choice between these two, these two presidents and that. So if you want to know who's going to win the race, I think you just need to one way to look at it is in late October, are people going to be looking at this, this election as a choice or a referendum? And I think that'll it'll tell you how it's likely to go.

GR: And, are you following the vice presidential sweepstakes on the Republican side of this at all?

RM: Well, a little bit. As much as you as it can be followed, which I think is kind of I think it's kind of funny, funny in a macabre sense to be watching these. A lot of these Republican, former challengers and other people sort of swirling around Trump, you know, doing the bootlicking, trying to, you know, put themselves in contention for this, for this job. It's you know, I think Trump clearly wants someone who will be totally subservient to him and would I mean, he's looking for more subservience than he got from Mike Pence, if that can be believed. He's looking for someone who'll be much more loyal to him. Who will be willing to, if need be, to violate the Constitution in a way that Mike Pence wasn't willing to do. So, you know, I think it's going to be just a race to the bottom in that sense. It's not going to be a this is not going to be a pretty sight. And also, you know, you got to realize that and, you know, in both campaigns, the running mate is really supposed to be the hatchet person. And so you're also I think Trump is also looking for the sort of the dirtiest fighter that he can find. It's kind of hard to believe that Trump is looking for someone who's more of a gutter politician than he is, but I think that's what he wants.

GR: There's some, extra interest in it, I guess, up here in this area of the country, because Elise Stefanik seems to be on that list, and she's a member of Congress from a little bit further north of here. But nonetheless, she looks like she would fit the role of the attack person pretty well. I mean, that's what she did during the first impeachment, for sure. Any thoughts about her?

RM: Well, you know, yeah, I think she's, you know, she's clearly angling for the job. And, one observation I have about her is that, you know, it could be that Trump is looking for someone from a state that, that would, you know, that's in play. I mean, you know, New York is not going to vote for, it's not going to give its electoral votes. Elise Stefanik on the ballot is not going to make any difference in how New York votes. So that is you know, I think presidential candidates have gotten away from that because I think they realize that except maybe for Lyndon Johnson, you can't find an example of a running mate who brought his home state along, but that still may be a consideration for Trump in a very close race.

GR: You're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher, and I'm talking with Bob Mann. He's a professor at Louisiana State University's Manship School of Communication, and he's the author of “Becoming Ronald Reagan: The Rise of a Conservative Icon.” We've been discussing different things coming out of Super Tuesday's primary elections and looking beyond. So, I mentioned this panel that I had moderated up here in Syracuse. Another thing, that we got into a discussion with was, was whether Democrats, are essentially stuck at this point with Kamala Harris as the vice presidential nominee. It seems to me they are. But my panelists had some disagreement about that. It does seem like the White House is trying to feature her more in recent weeks and expand her portfolio in different ways. What's your sense of this issue?

RM: Well, I would not use the word stuck because I think she's she's more of a of an asset than, than a lot of people realize. You know, there are some, polls if we are just told, people just disregard polls, but there are some polls. It suggests that there maybe there's a little there's a little, you know, the support among African Americans and other minorities is a little bit soft this year. And I think to, you know, I think to, to, to throw, you know, a woman minority overboard a few months before the election would be a, a really bad move on Biden's part. And I think all the people around him understand that even if he wanted to cast her aside, which I don't think he wants to do, but even if he did, that would be I think it'd be a really bad political move for him. But I think she could help. And I think she, she's a she is she is a very, I think a very effective communicator. She's, I don't I just don't see the downsides that a lot of people see in her. I think the people who, who cast a lot of aspersions on her and who denigrate her are people who have trouble with, and I'm not saying everybody, I'm not trying to. I'm not. But I think a lot of people just don't like a I hate to use the word, but an uppity black woman. And I think there's a lot of that. And I see it around in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, among, not very tolerant white people who are just offended by the, the idea of a, of a black woman being in a position of power. And I think that sort of bleeds over. So, you know, I like her, I think she's a, she's an effective, a messenger, for, for Biden, for the campaign. I think she's been a good vice president. It's the fate of every vice president to be denigrated in some way and to be dismissed even by some of the president's own people.

GR: Yeah. No, I, I had used the word stuck because you're the, you're the, fullest throated endorsement of her potential help in the election that I've heard so far. Even among Democrats, they seem to view her as a liability in that may be because they are looking at those polls that you referenced. I wonder, do you think, let's say that President Biden should have some significant health issue that is, you know, patently obvious and can't be spun in any way health-wise, age-wise between now and the convention, do you what do you see happening in that instance?

RM: Well, first of all, let's say I think is I think I think if two people if either of the two candidates are likely to have, health issues, it's going to be the guy that eats Big Macs for lunch every day.

GR: Fair enough.

RM: So I just find it frustrating that there's an inordinate amount of focus on Biden's health when we've got this obese pre-dementia patient running for president on the other side who you know I just find it I just find the maddening that we're focusing on one one candidate's age more than the other. But if something happened to, I think if something happened to Biden, I mean, I think Kamala Harris would be the nominee. I mean, it's just there's just no way this late in the game that the Democratic Party is going to change two horses. Yeah, it's going to be Joe Biden and Kamala Harris through October and into November, no matter what anybody wants, because that's just it's just inconceivable that the Democrats would go in another direction this late in the game. If you wanted another candidate, if you wanted another vice president, if you wanted another presidential candidate on the Democratic side, last year was your time to get that this year, it ain't going to happen.

GR: If you're just joining us, you're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. And my guest is Louisiana State University professor Bob Mann. So, with about a third of the program we've got left, I wanted to, take some time and explore your thoughts about Ronald Reagan since you since you wrote, a very, very interesting book on him just a few years ago. And, obviously, he's been brought up a lot in the Republican debates, so far. And, and it's even the case that Democrats, mentioned him sometimes, often when they're criticizing the current state of the Republican Party. So let me just ask you, just a flat-out question to start with, is, is Ronald Reagan still relevant in the Republican Party right now?

RM: No, no, Ronald Reagan is, Ronald Reagan is in that sort of Mitt Romney, John McCain, category where, you know, he, a traditional conservative, who bases his, his appeal on his optimism and his patriotism, quote-unquote, patriotism, whatever. You how are you to define define that. That is just Ronald Reagan was not an angry person. Ronald Reagan was not a person who trafficked in personal invective. Ronald Reagan was not a was not a candidate who demonized immigrants. In fact, quite the opposite. Ronald Reagan celebrated America, you know, Trump denigrates this country, calls it a sick country, calls it a bad place to be. You know, he runs down this country in a way that Ronald Reagan would couldn't imagine. So, you know, if Ronald Reagan showed up on the scene today, he would meet the same fate that people like, you know, Mitt Romney, and then Nikki Haley and, and John McCain have met in that party. They're just no longer welcome. It is no longer a party that that they would be that they would even recognize. And I think they would be among the Never Trumpers who have left the party, at least for the time that Trump has control of it.

GR: Yeah. And you put your finger on something with that answer that I wanted to explore a little bit more deeply. Which is, is this a stylistic issue? Most of the things that you just listed as differences seem to me to be style and personality and for lack of a better word, character, with the exception of the immigrant position. Is there a policy difference here, or is this a type of politician in a way, of being a Republican?

RM: Well, I think to some extent I think to well, I think to some or maybe even a large extent, it is about it is about style and approach. But I think that's also very important. I don't, I don't think that it's, it's a, it's necessarily a superficial thing. And here I'll give you an example. when, when Trump won most, most almost all the Super Tuesday states and Haley Nikki Haley decides to suspend her campaign to essentially drop out. Trump attacks her, starts, you know, calling her names and sort of exalts in this victory in a, in a, I think, a very, ugly, counterproductive way, you know, beating his chest. Biden, by contrast, welcomes the Haley voters into his fold. That is what Ronald Reagan would have done. That's what Ronald Reagan did do. He saw politics as, he saw politics as addition, not subtraction. And so, yes, it is stylistic in a, in a large degree, but it is the essence of politics, I think, to know that if you're gonna win elections, you got to add people to your coalition. You can't throw people away. You've got to find room and make room for them and appeal to them. And, I have a million disagreements with Reagan when it comes to his policies. I didn't, don't admire what he did, but I do think that he understood politics, in a way that Trump doesn't. I mean, I don't mean Trump doesn't understand politics. What I mean is he sees politics in a completely different way. And I think that that way of seeing politics is not ultimately going to serve Trump well. It hasn't gotten, you know, a majority of the, you know, he didn't get the he didn't win the popular vote. And the Republicans have lost every major election since then because of those politics, I think.

GR: Yeah. So, you mentioned that Reagan wouldn't do too well today if he was trying to get the Republican nomination. He'd go the way of other folks. But I wonder how what you think, having written a book about him, what Reagan would be saying about Trump, would he break his 11th amendment if he was confronted with “The Donald?”

RM: Well, I don't think he would understand Trump. I think he would, it would just be inconceivable that a politician would or a Republican would, would do that. I mean, I just so a lot of my book was, was about, you know, Reagan's growing awareness of, you know, growing political awareness and his evolution from a, from a liberal Democrat to a conservative Republican. And one thing that I noticed in the book that, you know, Reagan, Reagan had sharp criticisms of the policies of the, you know, of John Kennedy and, and others, other Democrats, but he never made it personal. He, he made he really focused on, on policy or when he or when he did make it personal, it was it was usually about a, you know, sort of a, an anonymous person. He never picked people out and attacked them personally. And so I think that I think that he would just not understand and think that that was just really counterproductive politics to attack people, attack people personally. He didn't want to be seen as that kind of person. He thought it wasn't a he thought it wasn't an effective way to win elections. But I think he was, you know, I think he was largely, he was largely correct. And so I think he would not he would not admire and, and recognize the really, really ugly, mean-spirited Republican Party that Donald Trump has, has brought into being and helped come into being. You know, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan has beared some of the blame for this in some ways. But I don't think he would recognize his party today. I just don't think he would recognize it at all and a lot. And the reason I say that is a lot of the people who I think are Reagan Republicans don't recognize their party and they've left it.

GR: Well, we've only got a few seconds left and I've got to end just an absolutely silly question for you, but I can't resist it. So I'm going to ask it. You are Bob Mann, and you actually hold the Manship chair at the Manship School of Communication. So Mann holds the Manship chair at the Manship School. Is that ever weird?

RM: It is weird. And, you know, what's weird about it is, that I don't, I just have an endowed chair. I'm not the chair of the department. I'm not the dean of the school. But because of that, so many people think that I run the place around here like, I get a lot of emails that I shouldn't be getting.

GR: Well, we'll have to leave it there. That was Bob Mann. And again, his recent book is titled “Becoming Ronald Reagan: The Rise of a Conservative Icon.” And if you're interested in learning more about Ronald Reagan and understanding how he developed the ideas that he did, it's a really great read to help you understand that better. Bob, thanks so much for taking the time to talk with me. I really appreciated this.

RM: Thanks, Grant. It was a pleasure.

GR: You've been listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media, conversations in the public interest.

On this week's episode of the Campbell Conversations, Grant Reeher speaks with Tim Palmer. A prolific nature writer and photographer, Palmer has won awards from the National Wildlife Federation, the Sierra Club and American Rivers. They discuss his new book, "Seek Higher Ground: The Natural Solution to Our Urgent Flooding Crisis."

Program Transcript:

Grant Reeher: Welcome to the Campbell Conversations. I'm Grant Reeher. My guest today is Tim Palmer. He's a prolific nature writer and photographer and has won awards from, among other places, the National Wildlife Federation, the Sierra Club and American Rivers. He's here with me today because he's authored a new book titled “Seek Higher Ground: A Natural Solution to Our Urgent Flooding Crisis.” Mr. Palmer, welcome to the program.

Tim Palmer: Thank you. Grant, it's great to be here with you today.

GR: Well, that's good to have you. So let me just start with a real basic question. How did you get the idea to write this book? Now, on on flooding. What, what's the story behind it?

TP: Well, it goes way back. I was a victim of flooding in, get this, 1972, and some people in your area may remember the Hurricane Agnes flood. It was the most damaging flood in American history up to that time. And I happened to live at ground zero in north central Pennsylvania near Williamsport.

GR: Okay.

TP: And, my home was almost flooded. Not quite. It went up to the, the next step would have got us in. It's a front entrance. But my neighbors were flooded and, you know, seriously damage. And I helped them and became engaged in emergency services. I was also working as the county planner at the time on the planning staff. I was the environmental planner. So as soon as I got back to work, I had the job of not just questioning how we could help flood victims, but how we could prevent this kind of disaster from occurring again. And that was the seed.

GR: Okay.

TP: I worked as a planner and then I started writing full-time. And this has been a long time ago. I've written many books about rivers and river conservation since. But the flood issue has always been very close to my heart and in my mind. And then we came to global warming and the floods are getting way worse. So I think you can see that's unfolding now.

GR: Right. And it's interesting that you mentioned, Hurricane Agnes. I remember that as, as a kid, I grew up in the Washington, DC area, and I can remember that came through. We weren't flooded in our neighborhood, but the main, artery, road was. And that had never happened before. And, my dad and I went down there to just to see it and look at them, watch them trying to clean that up. So I remember that hurricane very well. So, so. Well, give me a, a recent, brief history, if you could, of flooding in the United States, let's say, since 1972, since Hurricane Agnes, you mentioned global warming and the fact that these have gotten worse. But, you know, are there any general trends a little a little more specific than that, that that you think are important for our listeners to know?

TP: Yeah, yeah, quite a few of them actually. But the, you know, for years and years, we basically tried to deal with the flooding problem by attempting to stop the floods from occurring and doing that by building dams. So we spent billions of dollars. The Army Corps of Engineers alone built 400 flood control dams across the country. In spite of all that effort, flood damages continued to grow worse and worse and worse. The fundamental reason is people kept building more and more and more in the flood plains. So even though the Corps was working as hard as they could to stop floods, we still had floods. More and more people were subject to damage. And now we have the dangers to have dams failing and that kind of thing. The other essential approach was to build levees, not to stop floods from occurring, but to keep them away from us. And, you know, levees fail and levees overtop. And Wilkes-Barre again, the Hurricane Agnes flood, 100,000 people, dam flooded because the levee failed. so these two essential approaches were not working in terms of limiting flood damage. And so, yeah, as a planner, you know, I was immersed in this issue, no pun intended, but it was evident to me that we had to simply quit developing more and more on the floodplains and instead protect them as open space. It's the most dangerous, most expensive place to develop with all kinds of not just private cost, but public costs. And secondly, we had to help people relocate out of the danger zone wherever they were willing to go. So this dual approach to me made way more sense. You get rid of the problem that way. And, so I kind of worked on those lines as a planner. We got zoning accepted in all 52 of our local municipalities. We launched a buyout program. I left the planning career, began writing full-time. This is 32 books ago, but the flooding issue has also been one that has interested me greatly. And as the data has come in on global warming and its effects on floods, this to me just augmented the importance and the urgency of understanding this subject better and understanding the path that we must follow if we're trying to get out of the jam that we're in today with this.

GR: Yeah. You just you just gave us a glimpse of sort of the, the central, positive argument of your book of what, what we ought to do instead. And I want to explore that with you a little bit later. But let me just stick with this other thing first, and I'll come back to that. Now, you talked about this. There are two things going on in creating this problem. And your focus is mostly on the United States. I was just wondering, have you have you looked around the world, similar patterns, anything there that, that strikes you?

TP: Yeah, I have a little bit Grant. But, you know, the flooding issue in the United States is so enormous. And I had a limited number of words for my book with the University of California Press. So I didn't really get into that very deeply. But I did look at in a few sections, I addressed that worldwide, the problems are even more serious, because there's even less activity in trying to regulate development or help people move. Take Bangladesh okay, exhibit A, millions of people, many millions of people subject to flood hazards, and they live at sea level, you know, so they not only have river flooding, but they have the rising sea level issue to deal with and the projections for the numbers, the increasing numbers of people subjected to flood damage worldwide are truly mind-boggling. And I have I cover that in the book. My main purpose in doing that is, is not so much to inform about the world situation or figure out what other countries need to do, but to point out how important it is that we try to lead the way. We have ability, we have the knowledge, we have the talent, we have the staff, we have the history to come to grips with this problem. If we just get over the political hurdles involved, we have the ability and all of what's needed to show the world a better way. But you know, we're not doing it. And so pointing to the direction we must follow, you know, in the United States was my primary goal, even in terms of addressing the problems of the rest of the world.

GR: You're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher and I'm speaking with Tim Palmer. He's a nature writer and photographer and the author of the new book, “Seek Higher Ground: The Natural Solution to Our Urgent Flooding Crisis.” So you mentioned that global warming has obviously made this problem worse, but also where housing is being located, and decisions about that have made the problem worse. This may not be terribly important to try to figure out which which one of those two things has been more of a driver, but I am sort of curious. Did you come to any consensus, that is, which one is the worse culprit? Global warming and the change in climate or where we're putting these houses in the first place?

TP: Well, where we're developing is the fundamental problem here. Since the beginning of time, there've been floods. It's part of the hydrologic cycle. It's the way nature works. We wouldn't even have valleys to build in if it weren't for floods swarming that landform in time. And so, you know, we've always had floods, we've never been effective in, in helping people to build in the proper places and making it harder to build in the improper places. And so it's it's a matter the global warming issue is a matter of more urgency now and a matter of degree. It's simply telling us that, hey, this has always been a problem, and now this problem is getting way worse. Unless we do some really effective reforms right away.

GR: One of the things that you do spend some time talking about in the book is our system of, flood insurance in this country. And, it hasn't it hasn't worked. Well, you argue so. But first, if you can do this briefly, I know it's a very complicated subject, but briefly, how does the system work for those who have never considered having to get it or, you know, dealt with this?

TP: So flood damages are more severe and serious than fire damages to a home. They're more of them. They're more costly. It's more widespread. Yet we all have fire insurance, you know, but we don't have flood insurance. One reason is it's too expensive. The insurance industry is well-informed. They know that selling flood insurance is not a money-making job for them. So it costs way too much for people to afford. So nobody bought it. The floods keep coming, the federal agencies and very enlightened people involved in them back in the 50s and the 60s recognized this. And so they came up with a brilliant formula here, and that was that we can, we should offer subsidized federal flood insurance so that all these victims of floods were already living on flood plains through really, perhaps no fault of their own, so that they can afford insurance. But the deal is to do that, the local municipality needs to zone the flood plain so that the damages don't continue to become worse and worse. Okay, so it was a two-part bargain that was that was developed here. And then after the Agnes flood, it was realized that almost nobody had flood insurance and that Wilkes-Barre mentioned Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, where the levee failed in 1972, 100,000 people were evacuated and flooded. Two of them had flood insurance, two, even with the federal program. So the people in charge at that point had the additional brilliant idea that we should tie this to the federal insured mortgage system so that if people wanted a federally backed mortgage, which virtually all of them are, the community had to be enrolled in the flood insurance program and thereby zone the land that is subject to hazard. So that was passed, and I was a county planner at the time, and I think I speak for many in saying that, that we thought we had come across the bridge here and that we were going to solve this problem in the long term because, number one, we won't have much more development in the flood plain. Number two, what development is there will eventually phase out because of the flood issues, but it didn't work out that way. What happened instead was largely owing to the influence of the development industries, banking, real estate, home building, the federal process became somewhat, I think, active. And when the actual regulations came down and when the money was appropriated and all those kinds of things, the program ended up being watered down way too much to be as effective as it should have been. The restrictions on development were not tight enough. The mapping of floodplains was not effective enough. The target of a 100-year floodplain is not big enough. Now. The floods are way bigger than that. And, you know, and the money that that made available for this just just didn't do the job. So what we need to do now is, and what we've needed to do from day one, is reform that program to be more effective. And there are good practical, real ways of doing that.

GR: Well, we'll get into some of those in the second half. It's interesting when you started telling me that story, first thing, I'm a political scientist, first thing that popped into my head is the politics of the zoning must have been out the wazoo. And of course, that is exactly the story you told me. You're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher and I'm talking with Tim Palmer. He's a nature writer and photographer, and he's with me because he's recently written a new book titled “Seek Higher Ground: A Natural Solution to Our Urgent Flooding Crisis.” And we've been discussing this book. So I can see what you said before the break there, that as we have also done more of this development as floods have gotten worse, and at the same time you have that political and economic dynamic. It's basically, if you'll excuse the pun, I'm sure there's a lot of these in this topic, but a perfect storm for a problem. So how would you change just the flood insurance plan? I know you've got a larger argument to make, but just in terms of this flood insurance plan, how would you tighten that up? I mean, how can you push back against that kind of influence?

TP: Yeah, just another footnote on the issues of the program. It's worse than I described. It's so bad that insurance, in many cases has become an incentive to build on the floodplains, because now taxpayers are shouldering the burden of the damage, you know, rather than just the individual. So, you know, this whole story is a great illustration of the law of unintended consequences. So how would you fix it? Well, there's this is a big subject of course. There's an organization called the Association of State Floodplain Managers that has a whole agenda on how FEMA, the Federal Energy, Federal Emergency Management Agency, and the Congress should reform the program. But let me just highlight a couple of things. It should be really easy to do. Okay. One is that people can get payouts from the insurance program after damage without limit. There are limits on the amounts, but number of floods are unlimited. There are actually homes that have been flooded and paid by taxpayers for flood damage 18 and 20 different times. There are many places that have been paid more than the entire value of the house, and these are called repeatedly flooded properties. And, they make up 1% of the policies in the federal flight insurance program, but they account for 30% of the payout costs. So this is an outrage to have for someone to own a property and frequently these are not the people living on floodplains because they have no other place to go. Many of these are like trophy homes along the coastal areas, they're used as rental properties. And, you know, they just keep getting hammered and rebuilt, taxpayer hammer, get taxpayer payouts, rebuilt. And we're all paying for that. So limiting the repeated damage payouts should be a no-brainer. Same problem, development industries come in there and say, well, you know, as long as somebody is willing to pay us to rebuild these houses, we're going to rebuild them, you know? And so that's number one. It should be easy to change. Number two should be a disclosure requirement on flood damage. When you want to sell a house, you have to do a deed search to assure the buyer that you're actually, you actually own the house you're selling to them. This is to protect the buyer. There is no disclosure of flood damage, so the people buying the home have no idea that it floods.

GR: That's interesting because there's disclosures for lead paint. There's disclosure for all sorts of expenses and repairs that that home has had. I didn't know that.

TP: Yeah, absolutely. So the poor people buying the place aren't required to be told. They of course can look themselves. But let me tell you about my own experience on this. I was going to buy a cabin along the Rogue River in Oregon. The place cabin of my dreams. Okay, so I met with a realtor there and, kind of looked things over and asked, you know, is this exposed to flood hazards? It didn't quite pass my eyeball test as a guy who's worked with rivers all my life, and she said, oh, yes, they built a dam upstream. It will never flood again. And that didn't quite pass my sniff test of the negotiation. So I went straight to the county planning office. I was able to do this, fortunately, looked up the maps and sure enough, I was right in the floodway waiting for another atmospheric river with my name on it. So I of course declined to buy that property, but somebody else did, and they probably had no idea it was going to flood. So disclosure should be a requirement. We pay for these flood maps for FEMA to do, it should be public knowledge. The, you know, the arguments to not let people know what they're buying or, you know, just don’t fly. So that's the second big thing, a third kind of reform that's needed is in the schedule for how much is paid for flood insurance. And to their credit, FEMA is moving on this issue and reforming the cost schedule so that those properties that account for the biggest payouts when they flood are actually paying more for the insurance than the poor people who just, you know, through no fault of their own, live in the floodplain and get hammered repeatedly. So those are three reforms that should be easy to do. There are many others we need to more effectively map floodplains. We need to have the 500-year, rather than a 100-year flood be the principle guiding metric in this. We need to include the effects of global warming because they are going to make floods way, way bigger. But those are just a few of the really practical things that can be done that should be done, that must be done to reform the program.

GR: So I want to get to some of the big picture things here in the last part of our conversation. But let me just check one impression that I've gotten from something you said earlier, and make sure I've got that fact right. And that's, you were talking about dams and levees originally. So I just want to make sure I understand this. One of the trends, I assume, that we've seen, along with the flooding, is that more dams have been failing than before. Is that correct? Okay. And the same thing with the levees that they've been I mean, I obviously everyone thinks that Katrina, but. Yeah. Okay.

TP: Excuse me to clarify.

GR: Go ahead.

TP: With all credit to the Army Corps, most of the dam failures are not corps dams were built for flood control. But some are in the Bureau Reclamation, built, for example, Teton Dam in Idaho, which failed while it was being filled. It caused more flood damage than an entire network of Snake River dams had prevented in flood damage over the course of history. Most of the dam failures, however, are private dams that have been poorly regulated, poorly monitored, many of them without even owners anymore. So, but nonetheless…

GR: Like the story of the Johnstown flood, you know that that.

TP: Exactly.

GR: Okay. Got it. Okay. If you just joined us, you're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media, and my guest is the nature writer Tim Palmer. So, I want to get to some of the bigger questions that your book gets at. And I want to first ask you, before we get to your the argument that's kind of embedded in the title of your book, but flooding itself, how will more regular and less constrained flooding help us help the planet? Why is it good?

TP: Yes, yes, yes. There's a whole other side to the flooding coin here that we have not talked about that almost nobody talks about, and that is that floods are not only inevitable in the workings of nature, but they're essential to the workings of nature. We actually need to have floods. It's the way landforms are formed. Floods account for the very best of our wildlife habitat. They're needed by fish for their habitat. Floods are what deliver sand to the beaches, we wouldn’t have beaches. If you like beach sand at the ocean, you got to like floods. If you like fish, you got to like floods. And so they are part of the natural process of the way the earth works, that we have failed to really recognize and give credit for.

GR: And so your title is, you know, “Seek Higher Ground.” So if that's really okay. So, so ultimately your bottom line solution to this is we need to locate in different places. First of all, if you could briefly because I want to have a follow up to this. What do you mean by that? Is that just like where we should be doing new construction, where people should be thinking about buying homes? All the above?

TP: Yeah, yeah. So we need to, number one, effectively zone our floodplains so that they are not developed more than they already are. Two very interesting statistics on this. 90% of our floodplain acreage is not heavily developed. So the problem could get about nine times worse than it now is if we're all developed. So we need to protect what still is open space. Second number here is 7%. And that is the total floodplain area of the United States. There are a lot of other places to go, to build, and not that that will be easy, but 97% of America is not floodplain. So much of that is more suitable for development than the high-hazard areas of floodplains that we have. So that's number one. We need to protect what is still open space. Number two, a lot of people are already there. And of course, we're not going to move Saint Louis, you know, or Memphis or Portland, Oregon and so forth. We need to protect them effectively with levees. But most of the area that is in a flood hazard area is not heavily developed. And in those areas, we should look at every possibility we can to help people relocate and get up out of the safety zone. I interviewed some very interesting people in my book who did this. And you know, and their stories are inspiring, really on how you know, people can come to grips with this problem and actually solve it, rather than just staying to worry and, and stress about the next flood to come.

GR: You know, I would think that first of all, the trauma of being flooded would be huge. And second of all, worrying about, as you just said, would be huge. There is one question though. We've got about a minute and a half left, so I want to give you a little bit of time to think about this, but what you just said, though, will be easier for some people than others. Right. And, and, and I'm thinking primarily because of economics. So that dislocation that might be involved and moving could be disastrous for some folks. So I would think that you'd have to build into this some kind of additional help for the people who need it. And very briefly, in about a minute or so, how would you do that?

TP: That's absolutely right. And, and a lot of agencies are doing precisely that. The number one, very few, if any public agencies are requiring people to move. This is the programs to help people relocate are all are essentially all voluntary government agencies. There's federal money, there's state money. There are local districts that all work toward helping people move if they want to. There's a lot of grant money available to do that, but it's not nearly enough. And here is another great pair of numbers. These are the two I'll leave you with. For every $1.70. Are federal government spends helping people to move away from flood danger and be done with the problem, the federal government spends $100 helping people to stay by helping pay for, quote, floodproofing, it doesn't work very well. To do, to help with public facilities that get damaged. So we need to reverse that ratio so that we're really helping people to move rather than to stay.

GR: That was Tim Palmer. And again, his new book is titled “Seek Higher Ground: The Natural Solution to Our Urgent Flooding Crisis.” It's an important book. It's evidence-based. It's got a lot of good material in there, but it's also very, very readable, so I highly recommend it. Tim, thanks so much for taking the time to talk to me. Really appreciate it.

TP: Thank you, Grand it’s been wonderful to be with you today.

GR: Great. You've been listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media conversations in the public interest.

On this week's episode of the Campbell Conversations, Grant Reeher speaks with Mary Jumbelic. She is a forensic pathologist, serving as Onondaga County's Chief Medical Examiner from 1998 - 2009. She's recently published the memoir, "Here, Where Death Delights: A Literary Memoir".

Program Transcript:

Grant Reeher: Welcome to the Campbell Conversations. I'm Grant Reeher. My guest today is Mary Jumbelic. She's a forensic pathologist, and she served as Onondaga County's Chief Medical Examiner from 1998 to 2009. She's recently published a memoir titled “Here, Where Death Delights.” Doctor Jumbelic, welcome to the program.

Mary Jumbelic: Thank you so much, Grant.

GR: Well, thank you for making the time to be with us. Let me just start very basic question. How did you come to write this book?

MJ: Well, I've always been a writer, Grant, starting back when I was 13 and I received a diary for Christmas. My father died six weeks later, and I think I found solace in writing down my feelings and thoughts after that experience. And I just kept doing it ever since. I liked English in high school and all through college, I took creative writing, but I found a passion with medicine and going to become a physician. Some of my writing took a little different flavor. I wrote academic articles and publications, but I also kept journals for all my times through those hard years. So if I did a mass disaster response, I kept a journal about it. So I have notes from the World Trade Center and the tsunami and things of that nature. When I retired, I just decided that I would follow up on some of my interests, and writing was a very strong one of those.

GR: All right. Well, so, briefly explain the title to me. “Here, Where Death Delights.” How does death delight?

MJ: Well, it actually comes from a Latin quote that I won't boggle by trying to say it in modern English, but, basically it's found on plaques in, in many morgues, dating back to the 1450s. And it's, as the quote is, “Let conversation cease, let laughter flee. Here is the place where death delights to help the living.” And so I drew my title from that quote. I think the dead have a lot to teach us, and perhaps delight is a strong word. but they do have a lot to tell us, a lot to guide us by. And two former forensic pathologists have written memoirs, one back in the 1960s, Milton Halpern and Bernard Knight in the 1980s from the UK. And their memoirs were called “Where Death Delights.” So I feel I'm in good company with them.

GR: Yeah. So, at the beginning of your book, you thank the Syracuse Downtown Writers Center of the YMCA. And, I've had, instructors and other participants from that program on the show in the past here on the Campbell Conversations. So just tell us a little bit about your involvement in that group.

MJ: Yes. I found that the Downtown Writers Center was a resource available to me where I could take classes. Oftentimes it was convenient in the evening, and I began dabbling with writing and memoir classes and having readers read my stories and I had no formal other than a few classes in college. I don't have an MFA, and, I haven't gone to, you know, fancy writing programs in Iowa or wherever. However, I felt that the Downtown Writer's Center had very knowledgeable instructors that helped me really hone my craft, and that the process of having my work reviewed every week. Readers comment on it and pick it apart and have no connection to me personally to my story. So they have an objectivity that I can't get from friends and family. It was brilliant and it really forced me to look at my writing with a harsh light and an editorial eye, and I think improved it remarkably.

GR: Yeah, that's my that's been my impression, too, talking to other, writers who have participated in this. Now, the style of this book, is called, I believe, literary nonfiction. You have literary memoir as the subtitle of your book. Explain what that genre is.

MJ: Yes. Well, the general overall genre clearly is nonfiction, and but it's also creative nonfiction. and literary memoir is a more defining term so that I feel that the stories are told in a narrative way. So there's an arc to the book, but it doesn't simply encompass my life in a memoir. It is storytelling, but truthful storytelling, it captures more fictional elements of style than a classic nonfiction would.

GR: Yeah, what I liked about it, and I know this is part of it too. But each of your chapters, stand alone. I mean, there's an end to each of them, but then they all accumulate to something as well. And so I think it's, it's a great book, for, like, reading in the evening or even reading before you go to bed, because you can get to the end of something, but then it's still there for you the next day to continue on. So, I really liked the style. So,

MJ: Thank you.

GR: Let me, let me now shift down to the sort of the meat of the book and, and, your experience as a forensic pathologist. Forensic pathology, obviously is not going to be for everyone, even though death may delight. is there a typical path that you're aware of to becoming a forensic pathologist among the medical profession? And in any way, what was your path if there's not a typical one?

MJ: Well, I don't think it's a popular, choice for a profession. for many reasons. Not simply because death might not delight everyone. it is a subset of pathology. So those doctors that work in the hospital, and they do laboratory work and they take specimens and they're analyzing the urine, and they're also taking sections from surgery and seeing whether it's cancer or not. You know, that's a whole branch of medicine, pathology. And then forensics is a sub-branch of that. And it's small. There are only about 500 board-certified forensic pathologists in the United States.

GR: Wow.

MJ: Now, so there aren't enough to go around, in the country and in the past, because it's often government-affiliated, the reimbursement, the, the salaries haven't really been up to par with other branches of medicine. So that's been difficult to work with. The dead don't vote, as my old boss used to say. So the taxes, go to the living. and, you know, the dead are left trying to scramble for like a little bit of money that might be left over. you know, that being said, I think people have recognized, in government in the past decade that you do need to support that branch of medicine. So I went into it for the interest, for the puzzle solving, for delving into what happened to the person, for being able to explain it to the grieving family members, for helping with recognizing hazards for the living and, for doing, you know, larger scale community work, public health work. So I felt I was drawn to it from that perspective.

GR: You're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher, and I'm speaking with former Chief Medical Examiner for Onondaga County, Mary Jumbelic, who's recently published a memoir titled “Here, Where Death Delights.” So in the book, you write a lot about how your work intersects with your family life and the effects it has on your family. And, you know, I would just think that it would create a lot of, unique challenges. tell us a little bit about the work-family interactions that you had in your line of work.

MJ: Yes. I think, it does create a big challenge, I guess, like anyone who might be in a, you know, first responder type of field, law enforcement, ER work, EMTs, but, you know, so there's, you know, calling out at night for a homicide, you know, having to drop everything and, you know, being late for, you know, maybe family events and that type of thing. That being said, I think what has kept my sanity and kept me grounded has been my family and they've all been incredibly supportive. And I was lucky to have my mother help raise my kids when they were younger. And when I lost her, I had a nanny who became like a second mother to me. I even learned Russian, because she didn't speak any English. So it was very profound. And so my kids always had, like, the village to help, help them. They weren't just relying on some busy parents. It was a very cooperative, environment.

GR: And even setting the family issue aside, it just seems to me I would think that for you as an individual, even though you have a passion for this work and you mentioned the different reasons why you went into it, I would think that the work would wear you down after a while. did you have any special techniques of coping with that phenomenon?

MJ: I think the work does wear you down. And I think, I think part of the motivation of writing the book was to exorcize some of the ghosts that still dwell, in my mind, even years after finishing the work, if you will. so I guess the technique that most people use and that came in handy was, you know, compartmentalization where you have to divide yourself. Here's my role as medical examiner. Here's my role as mother. I'm going home now, you know. but it can't be a really firm barrier. It has to be permeable, because if it's too firm a barrier, you lose your empathetic human nature in the work. So you become distant. You become scientific. You can't respond to the family members. And so you have to have it permeable and yet still be able to put it aside, and enjoy the time you're not dealing with death and sorrow. So, I think my family helped ground me with that and remind me of that, when I came home and, and were very important elements in my being able to cope.

GR: And the essence of your work entails drawing on the body, of the deceased body to reconstruct the deceased final hours or less minutes. Can you just give me an example of how that works?

MJ: Well, oftentimes, we'll come upon a scene. I'll be called to a scene and there's but dead person, and they may be laying in bed. They may be laying on the floor. They may be out in the forest. It may be in a car crash. It's quite, quite the panoply of, scenes. And the very first thing is to absorb and take note of the situation, how the person's lying, where they're what the environment is, what's around him, where they reaching for something, you know, what were they doing right before they… was a phone nearby? Did they write something down? All of these things that you're processing at the scene. And the next time that I will see the deceased is at the morgue, and it's a little bit of a more austere environment. So they are now on the gurney, and I am now observing them. But when I say the dead speak and they and they talk to me, they are talking to me through their disease, through their wounds, through what they did, did they shampoo their hair recently? Have they eaten a meal? I can see that inside their body. I can tell what it is. Have they applied deodorant? Did they paint their nails? what was their state of dress? All of this is giving me so much information. They are really talking to me like this is what I did in the last few hours of my life, and they're. And they're they're showing me and telling me that.

GR: That's interesting. You're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher, and I'm talking with Mary Jumbelic. Doctor Jumbelic is a forensic pathologist who has served as the Chief Medical Examiner for Onondaga County. She recently published a memoir titled “Here, Where Death Delights,” and we've been discussing her book. So you gave me an example before the break of sort of how this process works, what you're trying to do. Is there one case over and above all the others that sticks with you in your head, maybe even haunts you?

MJ: Well, there are there are many, believe it or not. I guess the prologue to my book was one of the first stories I ever wrote. And it's about a boy who was murdered by his father after the mother was murdered in the same house. And that prologue sets up my book, really because I can envision that so clearly in my mind, going into the house and the situation and seeing the poor child and the mother and then coming home after that to my family and having my boys hug me so strongly and the symbol that stuck in my mind and it's in the story is bloody handprints that were on the wall from the boy after he had been, cut by a knife. And I have on my wall my boy's handprints in finger paint and that contrast of, you know, terror from a child and the love and joy from another child sits with me and is the tension that I feel in many cases, but is emblematic of it.

GR: Yeah, that's very powerful. So how did you know in doing this work, how did you know when it was time to retire?

MJ: Well, I have rheumatoid arthritis. when I developed it, you know, 17 years ago or some something like that. And, it has affected my joints primarily and really got into my ability to bend down, go to scenes, you know, do all this, do all this stuff – manual labor. People don't think of a forensic pathologist as being a manual labor. But we really are in many ways. And, it really took its toll on me. And I had really bad flare-ups of that. So it kind of was time when I felt I couldn't do it to the extent of that I wanted to professionally. Yeah.

GR: So in going through your book, I have to say I was surprised not to find a discussion of the Newlander case. And just to remind our listeners of that case, Robert Neulander was a prominent DeWitt ObGyn physician who was convicted of murdering his wife, Lesley, in their home. He had claimed that she fell in the shower. You were friends with this couple and as I understand it, you were retired by the time this incident happened and the original medical examiner's report, not yours, concurred with Doctor Neulander that it was indeed an accident. But then you develop suspicions about that. Take the story from there.

MJ: Sure. You're correct. It's not in this book. That's because I'm writing a second book and halfway through it now, and it will be included in that one, which, is going to feature stories, of violence against women as part of the lens that I will be using. Yes, I was approached by friends of Leslie about the case, and I had had a devastating medical situation myself, so I was in a wheelchair. I had been in a coma. I was recovering, from a complication related to my rheumatoid, and, I didn't. And when she died, I was shocked and she had visited me just a couple days before, and I couldn't wrap my mind around it. I wasn't well myself, but the friends never let it drop. They never let it drop. And it just kept saying, you know, please look into this. Please tell me what to do. And it went from there. And then, you know, once I did get involved, it was clear to me that this was a murder. And then the rest is kind of, history, if you will. It, there was an investigation already ongoing, unbeknownst to me. Other people weren't settled with this either. was it as if, I was Chicken Little, calling out. So, it went from there and everyone, the prosecution did what they needed to. The police did what they needed to do. They had many other experts look at it, not just a little old Mary Jumbelic and come to the conclusion that, you know, she was killed, and, and didn’t fall in the shower and, and a trial and then an appeal and another trial, and there'll be more appeals. But in my mind, it's settled, yeah.

GR: Well, given all that was going on with you and your relationship to the couple, this whole thing must have affected, you know, very deeply.

MJ: It did, and it was very hard within the community for a couple of years because people didn't know what was going on. You know, nothing was made public. So the evidence was private. And all the investigation was somewhat private, and there are just rumors floating around. And so there was the pro-Bob side and the pro-Leslie side. And I was just persona non grata in the middle of everything. So it was not just because of my relationship with them, but because of the community, very, very difficult couple of years.

GR: If you've just joined us, you're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. And my guest is former Onondaga County Chief Medical Examiner Mary Jumbelic. So I did want to ask you a couple of other questions about this and hopefully, I'm not, you know, opening up a wound too much for you here, but I am very curious to get your take on these things. Doctor Neulander's children, I believe, stuck by him during this trial. but in one of the appeals that you mentioned, the evidence was described by the court as overwhelming, in terms of his guilt. Why do you think the children have stuck by him and not kind of, in a sense, taking the side of the dead here?

MJ: Well, I guess, it philosophically gets to, what did the original information that was provided to them do to them? So that's why it's so, so very important that the medical examiner forensic pathologist that's listening to the dead person takes that information and provides it, whether it's pleasant or whether it's not pleasant or whether it confirms or whether it denies what the family thinks, it's important to get it right. It's important to get it right at that at that point, because what happened is, it was called an accident. Everyone thought it was an accident for months. So that has a chance for that settles in. That's the story. That's the oral history. And then how do you change that? Especially when the family doesn't see the evidence, doesn't see everything until court and that's like what, two years later? And so now there's just been too much time for that to jell and set, hard to reverse that.

GR: Yeah, that makes sense. It's kind of a cognitive dissonance kind of kind of thing. Well, you mentioned there were a lot of appeals in this case. My understanding is Doctor Neulander just recently filed another one several weeks ago, and it revolves around the instructions that the judge gave the jurors regarding his daughter not testifying on his behalf, I guess in one of the subsequent hearings. I'm not a lawyer, I'm not a legal expert. But my understanding would be if at this point, if he wanted not to end his life in prison, he'd probably be better off admitting guilt and trying to show good behavior in prison. And, you know, do all the things you need to do to get parole. But he's persisting in these appeals, insisting on his on his innocence. Why do you think he's doing that? Do you have any insight into that?

MJ: You know, I'm not a psychologist or psychiatrist or, sociologist. so I don't I don't know what is propelling him forward, but at some point, you're so deep in the lie, I think you can't get out of it. How do you save face and get out of it? “Oh. I've put my family through all this. I've put the community through all this. I still have some support. And now I'm just going to say, oh, well, sorry, guys. you know, I did it.” But, you know, and I'm not sure it's weighing on his conscience. Like, it doesn't strike me as the kind of person who needs to clear his mind before he goes to the grave, so I don't know that, though. But, I don't. What would compel him? What would compel him at this point?

GR: Yeah. Well, we've got about, three minutes or so left, and I want to try to squeeze in, two questions if I can. Okay. I want to change this to a happier note and then the first one is, you know, you've done a lot of, very interesting, philanthropic work helping in different things. You mentioned, going to New York on 9/11. Just tell us about some of the work you've done in various places.

MJ: Well, it started with the crash, off of, Mauritius in Long Island, the TWA crash, where the state, the governor called the response team to help out the local medical examiner. And while I was there, I met the man in charge of the federal team Disaster Mortuary Operational Response Team. He said, why don't you join our federal team? So I joined the federal team and the next year responded to Guam on a Korean airline crash there. And then one thing led to another, and I started responding to mass disasters, with the biggest, probably the most personal impact being the World Trade Center. But all of them have had, tremendous impact. And I represented the United States, for the Andaman Sea tsunami that occurred back in 2004. I went over to Thailand and there was a big international committee, and I represented the United States as a medical examiner. So my husband has always said, oh, you couldn't take death just on a like a local single basis. You had to really swallow the whole thing. Like really large format. I never saw it that way. I just kind of got drawn into it. But, I guess he's right. It was very impactful because you get to see how different cultures handle death. You get to see what happens to a society in a country when a major event occurs, and you still try to focus on the individual that's on your table.

GR: Yeah. That's interesting. So, we got about a minute left or so. I want to leave you time to talk about the new book you've got in the works. So it will involve the Neulander case. Tell, are you using the same approach or the same kind of literary memoir or something different? Tell us. Tell us what you're up to there.

MJ: Yes, I think that my voice in the stories has been very positively received, and I've gotten a lot of feedback from readers and reviews of the format. And so I feel, emboldened by that. So I'm, I'm continuing in that vein and it will have different stories again woven in with my experiences as a girl and as a woman. So, yes, Leslie will be one large piece of it, but so will Carol Ryan, and so will others that are close to my heart and that I don't that I remember in great detail. And I will interweave that with my own experiences.

GR: Oh. Okay. Well, that sounds great. Just a few seconds left, squeeze something else and go back to what we were just talking about. You going into different areas of the world, working with death. Is there a culture out there or a country out there that you think handles death particularly well in a healthy way?

MJ: Oh, that's loaded. That is a heavy question. I think that every culture has its pluses and minuses when it deals with death, but I think we don't do it well. So I guess I'm answering the opposite…

GR: That's ok.

MJ: …you're saying. But I don't think we do it well. I think we're afraid of it in America. I think we cover it up, we sanitize it, we put deodorant on it, and we kind of ignore the impact of it. If we could just look it in the face, I think it would have a much stronger impact on us.

GR: That was Doctor Mary Jumbelic. And again, her new memoir is titled “Here, Where Death Delights.” It's a very interesting read, and it's very well done. Doctor Jumbelic, thanks so much for taking the time to talk with me.

MJ: You're welcome. Thank you so much for the opportunity, Grant.

GR: You've been listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media, conversations in the public interest.

Program transcript:

Grant Reeher: Welcome to the Campbell Conversations. I'm Grant Reeher. My guest today is Melissa DeRosa. Ms. DeRosa served as secretary to New York Governor Andrew Cuomo during the COVID pandemic. That office is the highest non-elected position in state government. She left the office when the governor resigned and has now published a memoir titled, “What's Left Unsaid: My Life at the Center of Power, Politics and Crisis”. Ms. DeRosa, welcome to the program.

Melissa DeRosa: Thank you so much for having me. Great to be here.

GR: Well, we appreciate you making the time. So, let me just start with a really basic question about the book. What were you trying to accomplish in the writing of it and the publication of it?

MD: You know, I decided I was going to write the book within 24 hours of me being out of office. And it was because I wasn't going to allow the first draft of history to stand. And the first draft of history is written by reporters in real time based on non-primary sources, people who aren't in the room when it comes to politics and government, the people feeding them information have a whole host of different motivations. And I lived it, I was there, I was on the phone with Jared Kushner, I was on the phone with Donald Trump, I was in the Oval Office, I was in the room with Bill de Blasio, I was in the room with the health professionals, I was there when we shut down the state of New York. And so I felt a responsibility both to the public, because this was a once in a lifetime pandemic to really understand what was going on when the cameras weren't rolling during those famous briefings, to my administration, who I felt was really unfairly treated in that last year of the administration and to myself and my family to tell the truth as I lived it and sort of lift the veil and let everybody else in.

GR: And I wanted to ask you, you kind of segued into that at the end of your answer, but I wanted to ask you also a more personal question about the writing of it. Was it therapeutic to write this? Was it reliving a trauma, was it a mix of both? What was that like?

MD: You know, when I started the writing process after we resigned, I was almost, it was almost like journaling, which for your listeners, you know, who I don't know if they know what that means, but it's almost like a form of you’re writing to process a trauma or get through something, relive it for yourself to understand it. And so it was incredibly therapeutic. It was also incredibly re-traumatizing at some points. You know, I would literally sit there and close my eyes and bring myself back to the moment of calling the families of the health care workers who passed away and remembering those moments and what that emotion was. And I would cry while I was writing. And so it was, you know, it was therapeutic, it was cathartic, it was also traumatizing in a lot of ways.

GR: Well, I did want to ask you some questions about your experiences during the pandemic that are in your book. But I wanted to ask you a broader question about Governor Andrew Cuomo and his sort of his overall political slant. And I was thinking of this as I was reading the book, when Andrew Cuomo first ran for governor, I remember it, he ran more as a centrist. It was someone who recognized the state's spending issues, the outmigration problem, unfriendly business climate, spoke about all those things. But when he was in office, I think it's fair to say he tacked more to the left. And at one point in the later time of his administration, I think he had some famous phrase about like, I am progressivism in New York, or, but he was very, very strongly saying he was a progressive. I wanted to know how you would characterize the overall policy direction, the overall policy goals of Cuomo's governorship.

MD: I think you hit the nail on the head. You know, when he ran for office in 2010 originally, and disclaimer, I was working for President Obama at that time, but obviously I have a unique perspective into all of this. When he was running for office in 2010, the state was in a massive deficit, he inherited I believe it was a $14 billion deficit that he then turned around. And so, you know I remember when he was running and he would say I'm a progressive who's broke. And he was all about trying to retain and attract businesses. You know, he came in and he brought in a bunch of a bipartisan coalition on a tax committee that included people like George Pataki, who was his predecessor and some other big name Republicans. And, you know, he took a whack at the tax code. We did things like, we lowered the estate tax, which traditionally Democrats don't really go near, we lowered corporate taxes, we lowered small business taxes. And then I think as the administration went on and the party shifted left, he did, you know, wrap his arms around and sort of lead the way on a number of really big progressive issues, like the $15 minimum wage, paid family leave. But, you know, I think his progressive bonafides were always there, he's Mario Cuomo’s son. You know, he did marriage equality in his first year in office and famously, you know, was able to wrangle the entire Democratic conference, as well as four Republicans to vote for that bill and was really ahead of its time. So socially, I think it's fair to say he was always progressive. I think fiscally he was always very moderate. And then as time went on, I think that he did tack more to the left on certain fiscal issues.

GR: Okay. And you alluded to this when you talked about first draft of history that you wanted to counter. But obviously, Andrew Cuomo and his administration, you know, and you have been subject to a lot of criticisms since he stepped down and resigned. Very briefly, because I know you could speak for a very long time on it, but very briefly, why do you think those criticisms are misguided?

MD: Well, it depends on the criticism, right? But I do think that particularly in politics of today, where everything has become so weaponized and the selective outrage is so real, you know, where you can see on what you can, and I write this in the book, you can almost draw a straight line from someone's call for resignation, not to their principles, but to their political interests. And Andrew Cuomo had been in power for so long, by the time he resigned, he had been there for nearly 11 years. He had been attorney general for four years, before that, he had served as HUD secretary in the Clinton administration. He ran his father's first campaign when he was 20 years old. And there were a lot of people with pitchforks that wanted him out. And I think that when there's an opening, you know, sometimes people take it. And in that instance, people took it.

GR: And so to flip that around, though, what do you think are the legitimate criticisms of his tenure in your view? What were the biggest mistakes that the administration made along the way?

MD: You know, and I write about this in the book too sort of at the end where I look back and reflect on everything that happened. You know, when you're a hammer, everything's a nail. And I think that one of the biggest things that, you know, in looking back, we really became so accustomed to fighting all the time, fighting the legislature, fighting the left, fighting Trump, fighting, you know, this one, fighting that one, that we almost lost calibration. And sometimes you catch more flies with honey. And I think that, you know, we had really thrown our weight around. And the governor would say, Governor Cuomo would say it's because the goals that we were after were so worthy and so important and it was about the people and that was first and foremost. Which I do agree in some instances, but it doesn't have to be that way in all instances. And so I think at the end of the day, we had alienated a base of political support that would have been necessary to get through that period. And had we not always looked at everything as a fight, I don't think that necessarily would have been the case in the spring of 2021.

GR: As an outside observer, that sounds like a good insight to me. You're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher and we're speaking with former secretary to the governor Melissa DeRosa. She's the recent author of, “What's Left Unsaid: My Life at the Center of Power, Politics and Crisis”. So let's talk about the COVID pandemic a little bit. And if you, again, it's similar to the question I just asked you, but if you could do the state's response to COVID again, would you make a different decision along the way? I mean, one big one that comes to my mind is a different decision about putting COVID patients into nursing homes, for example.

MD: You know, I got asked this question on Bill Maher and I said, you know, people ask me, would you do anything differently? I would do everything differently, I would do everything differently. I mean, this was the definition of building the plane while you're flying it. And I get into this in the book and really try to bring people behind the scenes because even though COVID wasn't that long ago, I think almost as sort of a trauma response, we all have collectively really put it away from our minds and it feels much longer ago than it was. And I think it's really easy to forget what it was that we were going through. But, you know, why was it that they closed travel down from Asia but not from Europe? You know, they closed the back door to the country because COVID existed in China, we knew it existed in China. They didn't close the airports to Asia, and that was why New York and New Jersey in the tristate area got hit so hard out of the gate. But in hindsight, how stupid is that? And I mean, these are the smartest people in the world in government, right? Dr. Fauci was helping to make these calls, they had this whole COVID task force at the federal level. Some of this stuff I blame President Trump for, but some of it I don't. You know, they didn't advise him to shut down travel to Europe. But how is it, given that we live in such a global economy, that we didn't think that, of course, a pandemic somewhere is a pandemic everywhere? And those critical weeks between when we knew that COVID existed in China and leaving the door open to Europe and not thinking that it wasn't already in New York and with a subway system like New York’s subway system and the interconnected way in which the tristate area works and lives, that it wasn't everywhere. You know, we wasted so much time that in hindsight, if we had taken steps to shut down earlier and we could have gotten, you know, brought the curve down and, you know, so many decisions were made around trying to keep the hospitals from collapsing which segues into your question on the nursing homes. I mean, people sort of fundamentally misunderstand what happened there, but that was a call that was made at a time when every major, you know, consultant, academic institution was projecting that New York State’s hospital system was going to collapse, that we were getting 120, 130, 140,000 beds, even though the entire system collectively only has 40,000 beds. And that decision was made by health professionals based on health guidance given from Washington to try to say if people are in hospitals that no longer need to be there because they're medically stable and believed not to be contagious, as long as certain steps are taken, they can go back to where they were living. And so, you know, when I look back on all of that there's the scientific and medical hindsight of 2020 of the things I would do differently. And then there are the political things that I would have done differently, looking back in 2020. And whether or not that March 25th health guidance, you know, impacted is still a cause for debate. Some people say yes other reports say no. But if I had known it was going to cause that political firestorm and that it was going to create an opportunity to weaponize real pain of nursing home families to get caught up in the middle of those politics, I would have said do anything but that, you know, whatever we have to do to do anything but that, avoid that of course, because you want to avoid controversy. But, you know, again, and that was part of the reason I wrote the book, because so much of this has gotten lost in the politics and so much of it got lost in the moment that I thought it was important to sort of bring people back into the room as we were living it to understand how and why decisions were being made. You know, both chronologically and also the thought that was going into it.

GR: And one quick follow up on that. You know, you alluded to this, but one of the big political storms that came out of all this had to do with the reporting of COVID deaths in the nursing homes.

MD: Yep.

GR: And I think the general impression is that, you know, those were underreported in some way. Explain that, I know that's a complicated one, but if you could explain it briefly.

MD: I’ll try to do it quickly, and I write about it in the book. When we originally started reporting deaths in March of 2020 it was done for one reason, for simplicity. Anyone, you know, every day, at the end of the day, every hospital in the state reported into state government the number of number of COVID deaths and every nursing home reported in the number of nursing home deaths. And they did it based on their patient population where they were. So the nursing home said, three people in my nursing home died today. The hospital said we had five people in the hospital that died today. And then in the middle of April, end of April of 2020, the press started asking a different question, which was, what if you were a nursing home patient who left the nursing home, went to the hospital and died in the hospital? That person like, how many of those people died? And so then I write in the book, we went back and did this retrospective, we issued up to a dozen surveys to the nursing homes who, by the way, at the time were dealing with COVID and were completely overwhelmed and asked them all these retrospective questions. And then they start reporting in all of these numbers that were clearly wrong. Some nursing homes were reporting deaths going back to December of 2019 before COVID was even here. Some nursing homes were reporting anticipated death dates in the future. Some nursing homes said every single patient that left here, we believe died of COVID, whether we know it or not. And so it was a forensic nightmare, which then and fast forward to August of 2020 we underwent this audit and then ended up releasing the numbers in January. But that was where the controversy came from. And that's another thing we're looking back on it, had we known that that number was going to become a political football, in March of 2020 when we were standing in the war room we would have just said, have nursing homes report the people that leave there and confirm with the hospitals that they died and we can report that subset earlier. But that was another one of those, it almost felt like manufactured controversies, but it took real life pain and sort of weaponized it and it turned into the scandal that spiraled out of control.

GR: You're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher and I'm talking with Melissa DeRosa, former Secretary to Governor Andrew Cuomo. She recently published a memoir titled, “What's Left Unsaid: My Life at the Center of Power, Politics and Crisis” and we've been discussing her book. So I've got a kind of a retrospective hypothetical political question for you about your boss. In 2020, Andrew Cuomo was arguably at his political peak, and certainly the Biden people didn't want him to be running for president, you talked about that in your book. He ultimately cooperated with them, stayed out of the race. Do you think, looking back on it now, he should have run for president then, that was the moment he should have run for president, 2020?

MD: You know, if he had run for president in 2020, I have no doubt in my mind he would have been the Democratic nominee and beaten Biden. But the problem is, Andrew Cuomo was exactly where he needed to be for the state of New York in 2020 and if he were running for president back then in the midst of that pandemic, every decision he made would have been viewed from the onset as a political one. And we only successfully brought down the curve, crushed the curve in New York, beat back COVID because the people of the state of New York I think honestly, watched those press conferences every day he gave them the facts as he knew them, he made an emotional appeal to stay home and everyone sort of fell in line. And not just in New York, but nationwide he stepped into that leadership role. And so I think on the one hand, was that his moment? Yeah, I think politically that was his moment, he would have been the nominee. On the other hand, I think that it was a much higher calling that he be governor of the state of New York during that once in a lifetime pandemic and not be viewed through a political lens, because I think if that had been the case, COVID would have spiraled further out of control here and it would have resulted in many more deaths.

GR: So I asked you earlier about things you might, you wish the administration might have done differently. And if I were making a list of those things, this would be on top of mine, so I wanted to get your sense of it. Did the governor make a mistake putting out that book about COVID?

MD: Yes. Yes, and you know, it was one of those things that, again, I think had we had the foresight to know that it was going to spiral out of control the way that it did, I wish I would have thrown my body in front of it. And there are some things that as staff, you know, you look back and say, oh, I should have done that differently because I had the ear of the principal. And that was one of those things where I should have thrown my body in front of it because it just turned out to be such a political headache, and to what end?

GR: And on that point, I don't mean to be too harsh with you here, but I mean, you're obviously (an) extremely politically intelligent person and you've got a team of people around you that were that way. How did you get that one wrong? Because it seems like the optics to me were just begging...

MD: Obvious? Yeah. (laughter)

GR: (laughter)

MD: No, I mean, and I write about this in the book, it was the end of June of 2020, and we just finished the briefings, the daily briefings which obviously we picked up late. But the 111 day briefings had just finished and we had brought the positivity down below 1% in New York sort of consistently, and it stayed there for three months. And it was like the way Andrew Cuomo's brain works is always like, what's next, what's next, what's next? And it was like the minute we ended those briefings, he sort of was like, we should do this and I'm going to write this book and I'm going to tell the story of what happened and we're going to get it published immediately so that the rest of the country can learn from what we lived through in the first wave, because they're all going to get it in the second wave. And it was really a crash project. You know, it was done over the summer in like a six week time period, and it was published in October. And so, you know, it's interesting to me because some people have tried to, the assembly in their impeachment report said, you know, oh, they were doing this during this critical time, and it was like, well, it was actually during the summer of 2020 when the positivity was below 1% and we were taking sort of a collective breather. And there was no point during that process where his attention was being taken away from COVID. It was like he wrote that book so quickly, a lot of it was done based on voice notes he took in real time. And the, I understood the goal of let's tell the story as it happens to the rest of the country can learn from it. But the, you know, making the money from it in the middle of all of that, you know, obviously was a huge political headache that he, you know, we never should have gone near. And just the timing of it, because I think it would have been different if COVID hadn't come back in the fall and then we were in the middle of a second wave. I think if we just beaten back COVID and that was that, I think it would have been a different proposition. But no, you're right. And I don't know if that was like, COVID brain, I was too tired, I wasn’t seeing straight, but no, I mean, I definitely hold myself responsible for not speaking up more on that one.

GR: If you've just joined us, you're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media and my guest is Melissa DeRosa. So here's my, I guess my $64,000 question and it may seem like a dumb one, but I am still mystified a little bit by this. Why did the governor decide to resign, given the circumstances? I mean, there are other political figures who have weathered arguably much worse, #MeToo types of accusations. No criminal charges have come from any of these and the criticism that the attorney general's report had some political motivation behind it does seem to have some plausibility to it. Why not just stick it out and force the legislatures’ hand? Make them vote?

MD: You know, I write about this in the book extensively. It was such an emotional time and this is the other thing that people sort of forget, I mean, there were a couple of factors. Number one, the legislature said they were going to impeach, they had the votes. Say what you will about Andrew Cuomo, he can count votes better than literally anyone I've ever seen in my life. And there's no due process guaranteed in the New York State Constitution. There's no, you know, high crimes and misdemeanors like there is at a federal level. It is purely in New York, a political process, the impeachment process. And I believed, he believed they were going to do it and they had the votes to do it. So it would have just been a kangaroo court. But secondly, you know, when that report came out and Joe Biden came out and called for the governor's resignation based on pure politics, by the way, and I write this in the book and you know, it was Biden who I, it hurt me so much because I respected the president so much. We had a long relationship with him. I worked for him and Obama, the governor went back with his son, the governor went back with him, Mario Cuomo went back with him. He had been accused of sexual assault far worse than any accusation ever leveled at Andrew Cuomo. And he came out and said, I didn't read the report, but I saw the attorney general's press conference and he has to go. And when that firestorm kicked off and when the President of the United States of your own party goes out and says that, it created this avalanche that it was just impossible to stop, and every single member of Congress came out and the governors in the surrounding states came out. And, you know, the legislature and then on top of it, the press storm was so vicious. And you have to remember, this is after two years of dealing with COVID where essentially nobody slept, we were all processing in real time emotional trauma that I think we didn't even realize we were living through at the time of making life and death decisions and the weight of all of that, and the sleepless nights and the stress and, you know, the isolation of being away from our family, the pressures of being in the national spotlight, all of that sort of combined. And then the press was not just going after him, the press was going after me, the press was going after his brother, the press was going after some of our longtime advisers, every day, relentlessly. And I write in the book about one moment, Maureen Dowd wrote a column where she essentially compared me to Hitler's enabler, and she compared a number of our top advisers to Hitler's enabler. Now, when you look back on it, it's like everyone had lost their collective minds. Andrew Cuomo was accused of, you know, everyone throws a number 11 around. What people don't realize in that number 11 is that, it's a kiss on the cheek, a hand on the waist for a photograph. You know, calling someone sweetheart, saying, “ciao bella” when you walk out of the room, you know, these are not allegations of assault. This is not Harvey Weinstein type behavior. But the media frenzy and the political insanity of sort of #MeToo and the politics of the moment met, and I couldn't take it anymore. And I write about in the book when I went to the governor's mansion to tell him like, I couldn't put my family through it anymore. You know, they were watching me be pilloried in the press, it was killing them. It was killing me. It was hurting his children, it was hurting his brother. And so there was this very human moment where I think he understood the only way it was going to stop for the people around him even more than himself, was to step down. And, you know, looking back on that hindsight 20-20, could he have stayed and fought? I mean, I still go back to the answer of the legislature was going to impeach him. And, you know, you look at recent things the legislature has done, and this is a little weedsy for your listenership, but there was a Justice LaSalle that they put up for the Court of Appeals last year and this is a totally different type of scenario, but completely tarred and feathered the guy, completely distorted his judicial record. This was a public servant for years and years, made him out to be anti-woman, anti-labor, because he was basically making legal calls as a judge. They then gave him the hearing, they all announced their votes before they went into the hearing and it was a kangaroo court. And that's what it would have been, but Andrew Cuomo on steroids, and in the midst of it, we were fighting COVID, we were trying to get vaccines in arms were trying to get the economy back up and running and the emotional toll was too great. So that's a long answer, but it's a hard question.

GR: But it's an important issue and it's an interesting answer. We got about a minute and a half left. I want to try to squeeze two questions in, if I can. So we're going to go into sort of semi-lightning round here. But at the end of your book, you reflect on the value of government and the good things that government can do for people, especially during a crisis like COVID. I just wanted to hear you say a few words about that, about your view about the proper role of government.

MD: You know, look, government, I write that in the book, during COVID, you saw the best and the worst of government. And in that moment in New York State, the government came together. We built field hospitals, we stood up drive through testing sites. We hardened our hospital system, we brought in PPE, we came together and we saved lives. And very rarely can you point to a time in history other than war where you can say we saved lives. And in COVID, I think you saw that great moment.

GR: Yeah. And the final question is, I read an account of a public discussion of this book that you did recently in Albany. And according to that report, you indicated, I'll say, in very strong fashion, that you were interested in planning on going back into politics. Just a couple of seconds left. What form might that new activity take?

MD: You know, we'll see. But what I've learned in the last, you know, year since everything happened is I'm not done yet. I have more left to give and I shoot from the sidelines. And I'm a big believer that if you're going to do that, you better be prepared to get in the ring. So, we'll see, but stay tuned.

GR: Okay, we will. That was Melissa DeRosa. And again, her new book is titled, “What's Left Unsaid: My Life at the Center of Power, Politics and Crisis”. Whether you love Andrew Cuomo or you hate Andrew Cuomo, this book is a very interesting read. Ms. DeRosa, thanks so much for taking the time to talk with me.

MD: Thanks so much for having me.

GR: You’ve been listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media, conversations in the public interest.

Program transcript:

Grant Reeher: Welcome to the Campbell Conversations, I'm Grant Reeher. Every once in a while on the program, we do something completely different, and that's what we're doing today. My guest is Svetlana Slapšak. She lives in Slovenia and is a specialist in Balkan studies and a historian and a writer. In 1993, she won the American Pen Freedom of Expression Award and in 2005 she was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. She's here with me today to discuss a new book that she coauthored with Noah Charney, titled, “The Slavic Myths”. Charney was a previous guest on the program discussing his book on women in art. But today, it's, “The Slavic Myths” and Ms. Slapšak, welcome to the program.

Svetlana Slapšak: Thank you.

GR: It's great to have you. Well, let me just start with a real basic question for our listeners. Who are the Slavs? How would you define the Slavic people?

SS: Very shortly, I would define Slavs as a huge, very mixed ethnic group. The biggest group in all Europe and in a part of Asia. And at the same time defined by one family of languages, which is Slavic languages. And that would be the shortest definition.

GR: Okay. And some, just to, maybe this is obvious to you, but just so we have a handle on Slavic languages, give us some examples of those languages, what are we talking about?

SS: Russian, Polish, Czech, Slovak, Serbian, Croatian, Montenegrin, recently, Macedonian and so on and so on. So there are many, of course, Baltic groups and Mediterranean groups and Balkan groups and so on and so on. It's a very complicated linguistic image, but it's extremely differentiated and very extremely funny to learn about.

GR: Okay, well, that gives us a much better idea, thanks. So you've written this book about the myths that are part of the tradition of these peoples. Why are their myths important for us to know beyond simply being stories that are passed down over the generations? And that's important, too, but is there a larger importance of these myths, do you think?

SS: Oh, definitely it is. Basically, the Slavic epic tradition and the traditional narratives in the Slavic countries was connected to ancient technique of telling stories in Homer and some others. And in fact, it's in the Balkans where the technique of this epic telling the story was analyzed and in a way discovered. And it was started by two Americans, Milton Parry and Albert Lord. So we have the notion of Singer of Tales, a person who has a treasury of motives and stories, already made stories in his head, and he can produce basically a story on any topic you give him, extempore, immediately. So that's one of the importance of the Slavic epic and oral tradition, basically. And the other thing is that the, let's say, the Slavic myths, some of them are overbearing the rest and this is Russian myths, of course. But the minor Slavic traditions and the narratives and epic traditions are also important. And Balkans among these especially important because it links the Mediterranean myths, the ancient myths, and also the midst of Central Europe and the Nordic myths. And to be different from both of them, it's completely chaotic without real structure and without real hierarchy. And that's what makes it so interesting.

GR: Oh, okay. So, well, you may have just given me a hint of the answer to this next question on what you just said. But if we think of the Slavic myths, and I'll ask you to talk about some of the specific ones in a little bit, but right now, if we think about these Slavic myths as a whole, group, are there any general characteristics of these myths? Are there any sort of ways that they are? You said they’re chaotic, but are they structured in any way, is there a certain type of moral or story they all point to?

SS: Oh, definitely they do. They also mean the tradition between the ancient myths of Europe and the Christianity. And in some ways, this translation or transition, if you want, is so interesting that it really gives new narratives and new meanings to some aspects of Christianity in Europe.

GR: Interesting. And so do they have these myths? Do they have any social or political purposes or messages that you could identify?

SS: They were built on that in the 19th century by intellectuals of all Slavic countries. So, let's say when you start with Slavic myths, you know that they are a lie, a gross lie (laughter) by intellectuals to promote their own nation. But when you clear up a bit, a lot of dust and a lot of state, let's say marmalade that they were dipped in, you'll find in fact many social nuances. Many ideas about slavery, about injustice, about justice winning at the end and so on and so on. They're deeply social, most of these myths. But of course, this estate, if you want, crust, had to be broken, had to be deconstructed to see what is beneath.

GR: And what about any kind of spiritual messages? You mentioned these connect sort of older stories of Christianity and maybe some of the, I heard Nordic in here as well, so, you know, are there any sort of spiritual messages that the Slavic myths are about?

SS: Oh, definitely. They went through Christianity, but they didn't accept the whole. And if we want to see the spiritual line that really unites Slavic mythology, it's shamanism. It's the practices of metempsychosis, of living through the lives of other creatures, not only humans, but also animals. So that's a spiritual line that goes even today that is recognizable in some rituals, even today.

GR: Okay, and when you said one of the social or political messages you mentioned just as winning out in the end and I, you know, I happened to be reading a second book in addition to yours about Poland right now. And I'm just struck by the tragedies over the centuries that that country and those people have been through. I mean, the one that I was obviously most familiar with was World War Two and then the aftermath of World War Two with the Soviet domination. But, my lord, it just goes back and back and back. And I guess my question is, justice winning out in the end, I think that's going to be a hard sell for some of the people in this area of the world, given all of the tragedy that they have lived through over the centuries. Tell me a little bit more about that.

SS: Definitely. There is something that links, if you want, the notion of ancient tragedy and the Slavic myths and in fact, the whole spiritual tradition. And that is the only genre that we certainly know is transferred for antiquity and never stopped. There's no seizure, it's always there. That's a women's lament over dead. From ancient Greece to today in the Balkans and in Greece, it's the same thing. So when you think about this, then you realize, yes, there's a tragedy in history of all these peoples. And when you think about Poland, well, that's a very special case because understanding Poland will make you understand the war between Russia and Ukraine today.

GR: Yes, I'm getting some insight into that. You're listening to The Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher, and I'm speaking with Svetlana Slapšak. She's the author of, “The Slavic Myths”. Okay, so what are some of the myths, specific myths that our listeners are going to be most likely to be familiar with? If they were opening your book they'd say, oh, okay, I know this story. What are some of the big ones there?

SS: Well, the big ones are certainly the vampire and werewolf. In America, the shortened version of vampire gave them, which all Americans know at least from film history. And it's something that really passed immediately into the popular literature in the West. And the American, Bram Stoker make it made it so, so known, so glorious in the whole world. You find it in comics, you find it in videogames. Everywhere there's a vampire, there's somewhere there's a vampire there, a series of them about vampires. And of course, it's an interesting phenomenon with werewolf because they exchange their roles and their names also because of the taboo of the name they are too powerful. And they're both related to one of the oldest and the strongest, the Balkan myths which is the myth of wolf. Wolf might be in some occasions, also the primary deity of the Balkans. So it's an interesting phenomenon which, well, vampire changes color, too. In the Balkans, he's red when they buried him and in the West, he's white (laughter), he sucked all the blood, he is white. So it's an interesting phenomenon which we follow in popular culture, also in some serious poetry. So that's a person that they would recognize immediately.

GR: And you say that the wolf then, a primary deity for the origin of some of these myths.

SS: Yeah.

GR: I'd like to hear a little bit more about that. As a deity, what is the wolf embodying? Is it about love? Is it about justice? Vengeance? What are the things that the wolf does a deity?

SS: Well, in my view, he's sacred because of the extreme structure of the wolf society. That's the thing that really impressed people. The wolf society is a complicated one with hierarchies, with relations, interrelations and so on and so on, so that impressed people. But also his strength, his power and being dangerous. He is revered because he might be good also. He is also a symbol of wisdom, practical wisdom. So he, like, he is something close to the Greek Metis, the practical intelligence, the Odysseus way of thinking, finding tricks to how to get out of trouble and so on and so on. So wolf is extremely multilateral creature and also he is a symbol of masculinity, but a well arranged masculinity which belongs to a certain society which behaves according to the rules and so on.

GR: Interesting, interesting. So those are some of the two big ones people are going to obviously be aware of, werewolves and vampires. What are some of the myths that would be unknown or less known to our listeners that you think are especially interesting?

SS: Well, there's my favorite who was totally unknown, and that's the Saint Friday if I translate her name. She's Saint Paraskevi in Greek because she's the day before Sabbath, the day of preparation, so that's this saint. But also her earlier roots go directly to Demeter (the) Greek goddess and also to Aphrodite. So she is a wise woman who protects women. Basically, women in activities like cleaning, weaving, finding medical plants, medicinal plants and so on and so on. And she was translated from the pagan myths to the Christian myths. And she functions in a very specific way in the Christian world, in the Balkans. She is the saint who sits right next to Saint Elias, who is also elected as a leading saint of the Olympic space of Christian saints in the Balkans. She's extremely powerful and she, exactly like Demeter, has a daughter. The father is not known and is not important at all, but the daughter is. So the story is about daughter and in Balkan and tradition, her daughter is called Sunday. It's Friday and Sunday, and between them is Saturday, which is the day of dead. So you see the whole link, which comes from very early times, goes through Christianity and comes back into the new world as a kind of pagan belief. And she is one of the saints that you will meet in churches in the Balkans, in Greece, in Bosnia, in Serbia, everywhere, Macedonia, everywhere. She has a special altar and special duties around women. She heals women, but not only that. For instance, there's one rule that might be remembered and useful, and that is if you wash your husband's shirt on Thursday evening, he will be sick on Friday (laughter).

GR: (laughter)

SS: So she's protecting women from aggressive, from male violence also, she's extremely important. So when you see the walls covered with votive gifts to Petka as she is named in the Slavic Balkan languages you will be surprised, and also Roma and Muslim women have Saint Petka as protectors. So there's one creature that we didn't know about, and it is extremely important.

GR: You know those connections are just fascinating. You're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher and I'm talking with Balkan studies specialist Svetlana Slapšak about her new book, “The Slavic Myths”. Ms. Slapšak was also nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 2005. Well, tell me how you went about collecting and selecting the myths that go into this book. How did you go about writing this up?

SS: Well, I was very scared of the Russian scientists and the Russian achievements in the domain of Slavic myths. They're certainly the most productive group that ever wrote about Slavic myths and some of the most famous names, we're writing, trying to construct the trials and the hierarchy in Slavic myths. That's exactly what I didn't want to do. I wanted to show their lack of hierarchy and their structures which are completely different. So yes, it is a kind of answer to many ruling ideas about Slavic mythology, but it's also about putting into the first plan, smaller Slavic groups of narratives and oral traditions, that was our ideas. And also to think about myths that we could interpret as cultural myths, founding / foundation myths. And that's why we include, for instance, the famous and legendary Czechish ruler Libuše. And some other ideas we brought in showing how much connections there are between the state ideologies and the interpretation of mythology. And also the main idea of the book was to be a popular book. Not a real scientific achievement, but a popular book which would tell the story and give some basic philological, contextual historical background to better understand these things. And we also put a lot of other myths which would not be included into these notes. So it's worth reading the whole book and not only the good stories. And the other thing is also that the idea was to include some aspects of Slavic myths, which are not usually discussed or researched. And there's a huge area which I absolutely adore, and that could not enter into this book. And this is about plants and the use of plants and magic with plants.

GR: So when you were doing the research in the writing for this book, you're obviously an expert in the field and you're very aware of it. Did you come across anything, though, that completely surprised you that you just had no idea about and it really struck you?

SS: But of course, the thing that struck me was going into detail about the myths which are common to different ethnic groups, not only Slavs at all, like Albanians and Greeks. That I knew about it, but when I gathered the real data and a lot of facts which would not enter the book, of course, that really surprised me. So that's a field of investigation for the Balkan researchers, basically for the Balkan researchers. And it's also a great initiative to make work together people from the West, especially from the West, with the native knowledge bearers from other parts to make these areas more known, more popular, more interesting. Well, also for for cartoons and video games, basically (laughter). They all did it there with, “The Witcher” on Netflix to make this world more known and more amicable and also more bearable.

GR: If you've just joined us, you're listening to The Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media and my guest is Svetlana Slapšak. She's the author of, “The Slavic Myths”. So, when you were finding some of these myths that you weren't aware of previously or even the ones that you were aware of and you looked more deeply into them, is there one particular myth that has stayed with you more than the others, got inside your head, maybe even haunted you?

SS: (laughter) Well, I am haunted by one person from the myths, which also was a profession in everyday life. And this is (unintelligible), the name is unpronounceable, but it comes from the Greek word stoicheion, element, and also element of weather. And these guys, which were Albanians, Montenegrins, Serbians and Bosnians, and also some Italians were able to control the winds and the tempests and so on and so on. And they were walking around through their rituals with the human nerves around their feet and stuff like that. This is really a magic creature, but it's also created from life because we know their names and we know their deeds and what they were doing to do their able to fly. One of them would deal with a tempest in Montenegro and then fly to Budapest, stuff like that (laughter). So, it's a creature that really works in your subconscious and appears in your dreams, I can tell you.

GR: And that's why it's haunting you, because it's shown up in your dreams?

SS: Yeah, absolutely (laughter).

GR: So I have to ask you, as I was looking through the book, one of the things that I thought was most memorable about it, in addition to the stories that you are telling, are the visuals in here. The woodblock prints are really splendid. Where did they come from, how did you how did you arrange those?

SS: Well, we did not that's Thames & Hudson editor’s job. They did it absolutely wonderfully. I was absolutely hypnotized when I was looking at these drawings. They're really, really wonderful. They have this character of wood cutting and at the same time, of course they are not, but they give a hint of primitive traditional, somewhere in time and at the same time, so, so, so impressive. Yeah, that's one of the best solutions for the book I could even dream of.

GR: Yeah. They really, really struck me. Well, so, we've got about five minutes left, and I wanted to switch gears unless there is something important about this book that I have not covered with you and then you can tell me what that is. But I wanted to switch gears and I wanted to ask you to tell me a little bit about the work that led to you being nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize, because that's obviously a big deal. And I wanted to hear more about the activities that you were doing that led people to want to recognize you that way.

SS: Oh, thank you for this question. I wanted to intervene, but I didn't dare not to steal time. I was, in effect, in a group of a thousand women proposed for a Nobel Prize. And it was an internet action and women from all over the world voted for women who they thought were fighters for peace. And we came up with a thousand names. That was a Swiss MP who decided to do this action. And she gathered these thousand names and went with them to the Nobel Committee, that's all. So, yes, I'm one of the thousand, that's all (laughter), let's put it into the real frame. But the other thing is, yes, I was activist for peace all of my life and I'm still is, so, I don't think I should be rewarded for that.

GR: So tell us a little bit about your peace activism then. We've only got about 3 minutes left or so. But what things have you been involved with over your life that that have had that…

SS: I was involved with since the ‘68, Let's face it, that's a crucial year in Europe, the university year of around Europe. But then, of course, the real thing happened by the end of (the) 80’s, the second half of (the) 80’s when the nationalisms started to tear down Yugoslavia. And I was in a party which was exclusively for the conservation of Yugoslavia and for peace. We didn't like it of course, that's obvious. But then I went to Slovenia to live with my husband and I was doing many peace activities there. And then, let's say since the beginning of the 90’s, there were so many occasions to breed for peace that I don't even remember how many wars and how many atrocities happened in that time, not only the Balkans, starting with Rwanda and Asia and so on and so on. So yes, today is especially tragic time when we think about wars and genocide.

GR: Absolutely. So you must have some feelings about the war in Ukraine, I'm guessing. It's not terribly far away from where you are. How have you experienced that?

SS: Well, Ukraine is, was very important for me because it's a country, it's a culture that was transferring some of the Western cultural modes to Russia, like the polyphonic music and stuff like that. And Ukraine is really very special in that sense. And when you think about how many artists, literates, actors, musicians came from Ukraine, your heart really hurts, so that's one thing. And the other thing is that when you think about Ukraine as a mixture of very, very many different ethnic groups and its links with Russia, it's really tragic that this culture, which is so important in the heart of the Slavic cultures at all, is something that has been destructed in front of our eyes. And the other thing is that we learn so much being a family and so much about violence against women, the first thing I think when there's war, there's violence, I think about women and children. So it's really something that makes me very sensitive to any kind of violence, animals too.

GR: Yeah. Well, you've lived through so much of it, and you have seen so many different violent conflicts as I think about the region of the world that you occupy. Do you have any optimism about how this war in Ukraine will ultimately end up?

SS: No, no. There's a disturbing tradition of long term wars in Europe in the past. So I hate to say it, but I'm not optimist at all. Revealing the possibilities of peace and reasonable behaving between the states is something that does not appear as a solution at this moment. So any appealing to rationalities, useless, I'm afraid.

GR: Well, we only have a few seconds left. This may be too much of a bit of a stretch, but thinking about those Slavic myths, thinking about the war in Ukraine, is there any sort of connection if the myths could be talking to the people in the conflict now, is there anything you think they would say?

SS: That would be great. Yeah, what they would say first of all, it would be, the myths would have a sense of humor. These myths are really the most useful and the most pedagogically applicable today. So the myths with humor, the animals, the wise animal could trick the others, the tricksters generally, are the figures that could help at this moment.

GR: Well, I'll keep hoping in that regard.

SS: Me too (laughter).

GR: I'm glad we were able to end that. That was Svetlana Slapšak and again, her new book is titled, “The Slavic Myths”. It's a really beautiful book, I think it's informative and entertaining and I think our listeners would enjoy it. Ms. Slapšak, thanks so much for taking the time to talk with me. It was really wonderful to meet you.

SS: Thank you for inviting me, bye bye.

GR: You've been listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media, conversations and the public interest.

Using trains in political campaigns may seem antiquated, but the process is still alive. This week, Grant Reeher talks with Edward Segal, a highly experienced campaign manager and press secretary, and is a student of the political use of trains. Segal is the author of "Whistle-Stop Politics: Campaign Trains and the Reporters Who Covered Them."