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The title of our show, "Just a Spoonful of America - Prescribing American Studies to Fight Fascism," might be more than a little ironic given that fascism currently stands astride the planet once again.

Perhaps our music tonight would offer a better chance at a cure. It comes from James Booker’s album Let’s Make a Better World! Live in Leipzig, Germany. 

The idea that art, literature and music in particular, might work as a sort of “Marshall Plan of the Mind” is our topic tonight. At the end of World War II, Located in the heart of Europe, in a castle in Salzburg, Austria, we find a center of denazification and cultural projection hosting seminars on the then newly crowned American Renaissance writers--Emerson, Melville, Hawthorne, Thoreau, and Whitman. Could reading American Literature denazify Germany?

And now, in the wake of the so-called American Century, with the resurgence of fascism in the US, Europe, and South America, we must interrogate the idea of a National Character. Is there actually a representative American identity and if there is, maybe it’s nowhere near as noble and just or democratic as has been conceived? Or is there now a need to de-Americanize the world?

We begin with a recent ending. In an essay for n+1 called “My Fellow Prisoners,” George Blaustein takes a critical look at one particular American character: The late Senator John McCain, a self-styled “Robert Jordan,” the hero of Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls.

GUEST

Our guest tonight, recorded via Skype from his office in Amsterdam, is George Blaustein, an assistant professor of American Studies at the University of Amsterdam and the author of Nightmare Envy & Other Stories: American Culture and European Reconstruction published by Oxford University Press. His essays and reviews have appeared in n+1 and online at The New Yorker.

Blaustein’s book traces what can be called the propaganda program of creating a national identity...what it means to be American...by critiquing its classic example, Margaret Mead’s And Keep Your Powder Dry from 1942, written to support and promote the idea of the American as the good soldier in a just war. Blaustein also highlights the European adventures of F. O. Matthiessen, a gay, Christian, socialist, Americanist professor at Harvard, who also plays a part in shaping the notion of an American Civilization with his books American Renaissance and From the Heart of Europe. But Matthiessen’s own life (especially his politics) and his death are as instructive of the ambiguities in defining America, of being allowed to represent America.

RELATED

"My Fellow Prisoners: On John McCain" by George Blaustein

MUSIC 

James Booker was a rhythm and blues keyboardist born in New Orleans, Louisiana. Booker combined rhythm and blues with jazz standards. Musician Dr. John described Booker as "the best black, gay, one-eyed junkie piano genius New Orleans has ever produced."

Booker recorded a number of albums while touring Europe in 1977, one of which was Let's Make A Better World!—It was not released until 1991 when it became the last record to be produced in the former East Germany by the record label Amiga, a state-owned music publisher at the time.

* "Let’s Make a Better World!"* "One Hell of a Nerve"* "Come On In This House"* "Little Tune for Lefty"* "Black Night is Falling"

CREDITS: Producer & Host, Doug Storm; Executive Producer, Wes Martin

Today’s show is “Whiteness Is As Whiteness Does: On the Typologies of Whiteness” with guest Heath Schultz, self-described as a “white, anti-racist, political activist.” Our opening song is already illustrative of the discussion to follow–Eric Clapton erasing Robert Johnson with his version of “HellHound On My Trail.” I’ll begin with Melville’s Moby Dick, because all …

Today’s show is “Whiteness Is As Whiteness Does: On the Typologies of Whiteness” with guest Heath Schultz, self-described as a “white, anti-racist, political activist." Our opening song is already illustrative of the discussion to follow--Eric Clapton erasing Robert Johnson with his version of "HellHound On My Trail.”

I’ll begin with Melville's Moby Dick, because all things may be found there. This is from Chapter 42, The Whiteness of the Whale:

Aside from those more obvious considerations touching Moby Dick, which could not but occasionally awaken in any man’s soul some alarm, there was another thought, or rather vague, nameless horror concerning him, which at times by its intensity completely overpowered all the rest; and yet so mystical and well nigh ineffable was it, that I almost despair of putting it in a comprehensible form. It was the whiteness of the whale that above all things appalled me.

We can say scientifically that "Race" is a social construct. There is no such thing as race except as a human concept designed to establish dominance hierarchies by creating denigrating or aggrandizing attributes for each so-called racial group. Once we commit to that then all else must be critique. "White" must then take on the full significance of its construct. All this simply means that the category WHITE is a socio-political and economic designation and it presents a spectrum of “whiteness” which orders social organization in the service of empowering and enriching particular people.

GUEST

For today’s show, we’ll look at a few ways that "Whiteness" presents itself in culture and politics with artist, writer, and activist Heath Schultz. Schultz is an assistant professor in the Art Department at the University of Tennessee Chattanooga whose video project, Typologies of Whiteness, seeks to demonstrate how whiteness as a structural position of violence is on ubiquitous display in our visual culture. The typologies include white musicians covering classic blues songs; white policing of black and brown dissent; the great white hope that makes america great again (referring a white prize fighter who can knock down the black champion); and the white love of police dramas on television with sympathetic cops for heroes.

The links below are to Heath Schultz's videos.

SEGMENT ONE

White Men Cover Robert Johnsons' "Helhound on my Trail"

SEGMENT TWO

White People Love the Police

SEGMENT THREE

The Great White Hope

SEGMENT FOUR

Sympathetic Cops

MUSIC

"Hellhound on My Trail" performed by Eric Clapton

"I Fought the Law" by the Bobby Fuller Four

"Authority Song" by John Mellencamp

"Dukes of Hazard Theme Song" by Waylon Jennings

"Hellhound on My Trail" by Robert Johnson

CREDITS

Producer & Host: Doug Storm

Studio Engineer: Wes Martin

Executive Producer: Wes Martin

Our last show highlighted the “lost” Orson Welles film It’s All True with filming taking place in 1942; and today we offer a bookend. Netflix has just released a version of another Welles project that was never completed, though this one was not so much lost as held hostage. It’s called The Other Side of …

Peter Bogdanovich and John Huston

Our last show highlighted the “lost” Orson Welles film It’s All True with filming taking place in 1942; and today we offer a bookend. Netflix has just released a version of another Welles project that was never completed, though this one was not so much lost as held hostage. It’s called The Other Side of the Wind and it’s another version of what some might refer to as the confessions of Orson Welles. For here, as at the beginning, it’s Rosebud that haunts this house...But in seeking Welles, in our grappling with hints and sleights and symbols, our searches only reflect us back to ourselves.

Welles introduced us to mirrors in 1941 in Citizen Kane and we are caught within them again here in 2018 via filming that ended in 1976.

The Other Side of the Wind stars John Huston as aging director Jake Hannaford and an ensemble cast that resembles Welles’s Mercury Theater, and much of the script seems to directly reference Welles’s own life. And so once again, we search for a key.

Here's Welles on naming his protagonist "Jake," and doing his usual best to muddy the waters of meaning:

Jake is the character John Huston plays and he is called Jake because ever since Frank Sinatra and I became friends, he has always called me "Jake." He's the only one who calls me Jake, it's a private joke, and for that reason, this director, who isn't me, is called Jake.

GUEST

Returning to Interchange to help us think about The Other Side of the Wind is Jonathan Rosenbaum, film critic and scholar, and author of many books, including Discovering Orson Welles, and he has two new books about to come out -- both collections — a two-volume work called Cinematic Encounters, volume one which will consist of interviews and dialogues is scheduled to be out in December and volume two, subtitled Portraits and Polemics is slated for June 2019. Both are being published by the University of Illinois Press.

We begin with Orson Welles in a 1960 interview talking about the most overrated job in filmmaking--the director. Then in each of our four segments we'll hear a clip from the film.

Oja Kodar

SEGMENT ONE - How Not to Sell A Film

SEGMENT TWO - Who Is Jake Hannaford?

SEGMENT THREE - Oja Did What?

SEGMENT FOUR - Slapping Proxy Pauline Kael

RELATED

An Interview with Jonathan Rosenbaum by Lawrence French

Jonathan Rosenbaum Interview with Oja Kodar (2015)

An Insider’s Look at the Saga of ‘The Other Side of the Wind’ by Joseph McBride

Pauline Kael Rides Again!: The Authorship of ‘The Other Side of the Wind’ by Joseph McBride

Welles on Interchange:

Ears to Hear: Orson Welles in Brazil

Welles Before Glass: Intimacy and Propaganda in Radio

Orson Undiminished, Or How Kane Was Raised

Orson Around: In Conversation with Jonathan Rosenbaum and James Naremore<...

Today’s show is a kind of extension of our program Big Oil, Mickey Mouse and Fascism in Latin America with Tango Wars author Mary Jo McConahay. That show detailed the fight between Axis and Allied powers over the hearts and minds AND most importantly, the natural resources of Latin America. At that time Brazil was …

Today’s show is a kind of extension of our program Big Oil, Mickey Mouse and Fascism in Latin America with Tango Wars author Mary Jo McConahay. That show detailed the fight between Axis and Allied powers over the hearts and minds AND most importantly, the natural resources of Latin America. At that time Brazil was governed by Getúlio Vargas a constitutional president who became a dictator, and there was a real chance that this vast land would side with the Nazis having become home to so many German immigrants.

As a quick aside here to point out the repetition compulsion of humankind: Brazil has just voted president elect Jair Bolsonaro, an extremist right wing Christian who has consistently praised Brazil’s former military dictatorships as “glorious.” Perhaps it’s notable that Bolsonaro’s family immigrated to Brazil from Italy and Germany in the 1880s.

Orson Welles, following hard upon the tailwind of Walt Disney, was strongly encouraged to travel in Latin America as a Goodwill ambassador at the behest of Nelson Rockefeller’s Office of Inter-American Affairs and to make a propaganda film as part of the trip--hopefully one as successful and on-the-mark as Disney’s. Hope’s springs are eternally sprung.

Our GUEST today is Catherine Benamou, associate professor in Media and Film Studies at University of California at Irvine, and author of the definitive account of It’s All True, Orson Welles' film project for RKO and hoped-for propaganda for the US war effort. Benamou’s book is also called It's All True: Orson Welles's Pan-American Odyssey. And comprehensively Benamou was an assistant producer and primary researcher for the 1993 documentary film that seeks to detail and recover this first of more than a few “lost” films of Orson Welles. It’s also titled It's All True.

The film in its perhaps final conception would consist of four episodes, two in Brazil on Carnaval and the jangada fishermen, one in Mexico on bullfighting with a kind of children’s book spin, and one set in the United States on the history of jazz. For our show, we’re going to focus on the work in Brazil. And we’ll get an assist from Welles himself along the way as we’ll hear a bit from the first episode of his radio program Hello Americans which highlights samba music in Brazil. It aired just over 76 years ago on November 15th, 1942.

RELATED

Hello Americans

Orson Welles Sketchbook - Episode 2: Critics

"Truth and Consequence: On It's All True" by Jonathan Rosenbaum

Orson Welles On the Air by Rob Schoon

Orson Welles in Focus eds. James N. Gilmore and Sidney Gottlieb (includes an essay by Catherine Benamou)

MUSIC

"No Tabuleiro da Baiana" performed by Carmen Miranda and Luiz Barbosa

"Praça Onze" by Trio de Ouro

"Nega do Cabela Duro" by Anjos Do Inferno

"A Jangada Voltou Só" by Dorival Caymmi

"Milagre" performed by Nana Caymmi

CREDITS

Producer & Host: Doug Storm

Executive Producer: Wes Martin

Let’s start with the fact that what we don’t know keeps on hurting us. Mary Jo McConahay’s The Tango War fills an important gap in U.S. awareness of World War II history. Beginning in the thirties, both the Allied and Axis powers were well aware of the need to control not just the hearts and …

Let’s start with the fact that what we don’t know keeps on hurting us.

Mary Jo McConahay’s The Tango War fills an important gap in U.S. awareness of World War II history. Beginning in the thirties, both the Allied and Axis powers were well aware of the need to control not just the hearts and minds but also the resources of Latin America. The region’s oil, rubber, and industrial diamonds were necessary to feed the war machines of the so-called civilized nations. The fight was often dirty: residents were captured to exchange for U.S. prisoners of war and rival spy networks shadowed each other across the continent. At all times it was a Tango War, in which each side closely shadowed the other’s steps.

We’ll hear about the Mexican Revolution; about U.S. oil barons choosing Nazism over Mexican sovereignty; about Henry Ford’s anti-semitism and his hubris laid bare in the failure of his Fordlandia rubber plantation; about political kidnapping, or trade bait, by the U.S. State Department called “Quiet Passages; about Walt Disney and Orson Welles as proposed propagandists! And we’ll end with the fact that Catholic Bishops helped Nazis escape arrest because their response against Communism meant supporting Christian Fascists.

These are some of the undeniable complications that lock so many people into actions that make them agents of suffering at the behest of wealth and power as it seeks global resource domination. Business interests often trump all other considerations and are often claimed to stand outside of morality.

SEGMENT ONE

In our first segment we’ll discover how Big Oil contributed to the reaction against the Mexican Revolution and its historic Constitution as it worked to undermine Mexican sovereignty in order protect profits. This Revolution, one you likely have not heard of if you’ve been educated in the United States, has been characterized as one of the greatest upheavals of the 20th century, resulting in an important program of social reform.

SEGMENT TWO

In this segment Big Oil is outmaneuvered by Little Oil in the person of William Rhodes Davis, resulting in Mexico being forced to sell it’s primary national resource to the Germans...thanks to a little help from Fred Koch, John Birch Society co-founder and father of Charles and David Koch.

SEGMENT THREE

In this segment we’ll hear more about Brazil’s rubber resources through the story of Henry Ford’s failed rubber plantation Fordlandia...but he had high hopes; and we’ll find out how a law from 1798 was used to justify political kidnapping by the Roosevelt Administration during World War II.

SEGMENT FOUR

For our final segment we’ll talk about propaganda...and the Good Neighbor Program. Nelson Rockefeller’s Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs sent Goodwill Ambassadors like filmmakers Walt Disney and Orson Welles to Latin America to share the cultural “goodwill” of the US towards its Southern Neighbors. Can you guess which of these movie directors proved a disappointment to the Masters of War?

GUEST

Mary Jo McConahay is an award-winning reporter who covered the wars in Central America and economics in the Middle East. She has traveled in seventy countries and has been fascinated by the history of World War II since childhood, when she listened to the stories of her father, a veteran U.S. Navy officer. She covers Latin America as an independent journalist. Her previous books include Maya Roads: One Woman's Journey Among the People of the Rainforest and Ricochet: Two Women War Reporters and a Friendship Under Fire.

MUSIC

The Rudolfo Biagi Orchestra

"Cielo" with singer Andres Falgas

"Cicatrices" with singer Andres Falgas

"Humillación" with singer Jorge Ortiz

"Te Odio" with singer Alberto Lago

Enric Madriguera and His Orchestra

Our opening song is “I’ve Grown So Ugly” by Robert Pete Williams, who was imprisoned in the Louisiana State Penitentiary in the mid 1950s. The rest of our music is by women prisoners and will come from field recordings taken in the 1930s and 40s from such plantation prisons as Parchman in Mississippi and Angola …