Christopher Lydon Interviews…

     Music for America is a phenomenon to notice, improvising its own path into the Internet Age.  I hear it as “MeetUp, the Musical” with a young dancing pulse.  Or a sort of soundtrack to Jim Moore’s Second Superpower.  The idea of Music for America crystallized, as the Second Superpower did, around the worldwide protests last February 15 before the preemptive smashing of Baghdad.  “The amazing thing was that we didn’t make a dent in the media at the time,” said one of the MFA originals Franz Hartl, at the left, in conversation.  “There was non-coverage of the millions of people around the world who said: this is going to be a mistake.”  So they are back to haunt the people who ignored them.  “The idea of relying on the media to broadcast a message for you was not working any more,” Hartl said.  “We had to look for alternatives…  We’re trying to look at what comes after protest.”

     “The importance of the Web,” said his sidekick Dan Droller, at the right, “was that it provided a place where we could have the public sphere develop and coalesce.  I think John Dewey would say it’s the return of The Public, the idea that we actually can come together and form ideas in this common place.”

     Part One: This was a quick sobering up of kids attuned to parties, not politics.  “We’re talking to my friends,” Dan Droller went on, “like me.  Fat, dumb and happy in the sense that I just liked going to shows, hanging out with friends.  I voted, but that was all.”  The trigger to action was discovering that broadcast politics is failing young people above all.  “The gap between broadcast news and reality awakened us.” 

     Part Two: So Music for America has embraced a multiplicity of American musics–bluegrass, jazz, rock, hip-hop and electronica–to bring the language of youth, passion and fun into the civic square.  “You know, I’ve got some friends in bands,” said Dan Droller, distilling the spirit of MFA.  “Why don’t we throw some shows to get more people to know about…”  His issues list runs from the Iraq war and the drug war to music copyrights and file sharing, media consolidation, the environment and higher education.  Kid stuff, in short, of keen interest to a vast swath of citizens who normally stay home on election days.

     Why organize youth who don’t vote?  “Because old people died,” Franz Hartl said. 

     Dan Droller: “Our friends, our peers, know they’re hurting to pay rent or to get health insurance, and are just worried about that.  That’s a good thing that they already know about it.  We want to show them there’s this whole world that does affect them.”

     Their slogan is “Music and Other Social Causes.”  Their ideal is “open-source politics.”  Their goal is participation.  “It’s about the end of broadcast and control.”  Among their signal contributions so far is prompting me to lay a first musical bed under my blog conversation.   Special thanks here to the loop meister Ben Walker of “Your Radio Nightlight” for insinuating some free tracks from the MFA site around and between the words. Listen up to Parts One and Two.  And get down!

George Lakoff of Berkeley is one of the giants of modern linguistics and brain sciences–an authority on neural networks, how the mind works, and most especially how the body politic responds to words that cue frames of moral meaning. He gave me a provocative earful the other day and I post it here in two twenty-minute takes.
In Part One, Lakoff exults in the Internet ventilation of political talk; its visible effect in MoveOn and the Dean campaign is “only the beginning. He maps the “naming and framing” dimensions of the California recall campaign and Arnold Schwartzenegger’s election. The “competent clerk” Gray Davis walked into a trap of deregulated energy prices and brownouts that had been contrived by the Bush White House. Arnold was no eccentric, in Lakoff terms, but the modern machine Republican, the embodiment of “individual discipline in a difficult, dangerous world… a strict leader who’s got moral authority to protect you. Who better than the Terminator?” And then Lakoff picks his way through the mostly disguised meanings and motives around the Iraq war.
In Part Two, I begin with the paradox of our times: that we are learning to live with both an information revolution and a culture of propaganda. “What the Right has done,” Lakoff answered, “is create a populist art form known as the rant.” He laments the lost language of world leadership: who makes good use these days of key words like fairness, freedom, trust, cooperation, treaty obligations, the values of the United Nations charter, respect, competence, responsibility and openness? Lakoff sets Howard Dean’s language and body-language in the Harry Truman tradition. Dean is “forceful, serious, honest–not namby-pamby.” He thinks that a medical doctor makes “a very good messenger.” He wishes Dean would campaign in the South around doctor’s visits to Veterans Hospitals. “Talk to the patients and the doctors there about what it means to fight in a war–about what happens to you… and what happens to the other people you see.” Lakoff thinks Dean and the Democrats in general are “not there yet.”
George Lakoff is a devout progressive with cold comfort for liberals. Conservatives, he says, have won the fight over political language. It’s a central argument of Lakoff’s book Moral Politics that for the last 30 years, left-wing foundations have been doing what comes naturally, “helping people who need help,” while right-wing foundations have put a network of thinkers and writers to work honing symbolic phrases like “tort reform” and “tax relief.” Even with Al Franken on your side, there is no winning an argument around “tax relief” that sounds like mercy and justice for the afflicted. “If you use their language,” Lakoff said, “you use their mode of thought; you use the way they think about the world.” It is the work of Lakoff’s Rockridge Institute to assemble the cognitive scientists and media masters to build a fresh language of progressive ideas.
Lakoff thinks it’s a 5-year assignment. I wonder why it should be so complicated or so long. Listen to our argument here. And look for yourself, please, at the December Atlantic Monthly. The cover story, “Tour of Duty,” is taken from John Kerry’s war diaries and letters home from Vietnam 35 years ago. For example:
“Wherever I went and young Vietnamese men would look at me I grew scared. There really was no way to tell who was who. You could be in a room with one and not know whether he was really a Charlie or not… Whom did you begin to trust and where did you draw the line. Another ludicrous aspect of the war.”
On the death of a close friend from Yale, Dick Pershing, grandson of the US Army legend in World War I, “Black Jack” Pershing, Kerry wrote: “Then I just… cried–a pathetic and very empty kind of crying that turned into anger and bitterness. I have never felt so void of feeling before–so numb.”
The closer Kerry came to fighting and death, the more absurd everything felt, as on the night when his Swift boat escorted the Vietnamese mercenaries, mostly ex-Viet Cong, who blew away four evidently defenseless people in a sampan. Kerry wrote about facing a young woman who survived: “I felt a certain sense of guilt, shame, sorrow, remorse–something inexplicable about the way they were shot and about the predicament of the girl… I hated all of us for the situation which stripped people of their self-respect.”
To his future wife, Judy Thorne, Kerry wrote home: “Judy, if I do nothing else in my life I will never stop trying to bring to people the conviction of how wasteful and asinine is a human expenditure of this kind.”
George Lakoff argues that in America today “there is not a publicly acceptable language of opposition to war.” I don’t believe him. John Kerry named it and framed it in 1968. Yet Kerry seems to have brought none of the hard lessons of Vietnam to bear on the neo-imperial folly that has boobytrapped American troops in Iraq. A renewed American conversation today needs candor and courage more than cognitive science. If John Kerry had addressed Iraq on the Senate floor with the simple heart of his letters home from war, if he’d remembered what he’d written, he–and we–might have been spared the mess we’re all in now.

     “I’m a Cortez guy,” Joe Trippi roared at the end of our conversation in the corner office of Howard Dean’s headquarters in Burlington, Vt.  As in: Hernando Cortez, the Conquistador who faced the Aztec hordes five centuries ago with just 400 Spanish troops at his side, and burned his own boats on the beach in case his compatriots thought of leaving prematurely.  Horses, gunpowder and steel made all the difference for Cortez.  The Trippi difference in the Democratic nomination fight has been the Internet. 

     There’s a military note of stunning political incorrectness in the Cortez connection, entirely out of tune with Trippi’s actual record.  He is a congenital liberal from Los Angeles who was mesmerized at age 13 by Robert Kennedy’s victory and martyrdom a few blocks from his home in 1968.  At 17 Trippi read Hunter Thompson’s Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail and decided that the man he wanted to be when he grew up was Gene Pokorny, the altar-boyish guerrilla who’d organized George McGovern’s Wisconsin primary campaign in 1972.  Trippi cut his real political teeth marshalling a campus rebellion at San Jose State University and then grape boycotts on behalf of farm workers.  Starting with Ted Kennedy in Iowa in 1979, Trippi has been a field captain on call for any number of leftish Democrats who lost big in the end.  So the Cortez fantasy of a killer instinct and a cool, comprehensive grasp of a technological revolution is a bet on the future, not the past.

     With colleague Josh Ward at the wheel, I went up to Burlington on Wednesday on a reporting mission, to meet the man who didn’t simply find traction for Howard Dean in the blogosphere.  Trippi has kicked the Internet into gear for all time and for all to see.  He may be the only completely modern improvisational master of a power game that is evolving week to week. 

     Dipping Skoal snuff and drinking Diet Pepsi non-stop, Joe Trippi in person has an air of nervous tension and a deeper serenity.  As he explained in a benchmark interview with Larry Lessig last August, Trippi and the Dean campaign both come out of Silicon Valley and the open-source software wars of the mid-nineties.  But just as important, I think, Trippi is a stalwart of the rebels’ and dreamers’ wing of the Democratic party, a devoted student in particular of Gary Hart, who ran the McGovern campaign (and Gene Pokorny) in 1972.  In 1984 Trippi observed Hart’s pebble-and-ripples model of “concentric circles” in an insurgent campaign that almost stole the presidential nomination from Walter Mondale.  Hart’s idea was “run into a town in Iowa.  Just get one person.  That’s your pebble.  Drop your pebble in the water.  And leave.  Let that energy ripple out to other folks in town.”  The wave nearly swamped Mondale. 

     For me the metaphor resonates with the great Emerson essay, “Circles,” and with Stirling Newberry‘s view that the shape of power in the Internet era is shifting from pyramids to spheres.  More to the point, the image of circles stuck with Joe Trippi.  “The Internet,” it dawned on him a couple of years ago, “was concentric-circle organizing on steroids.”

     I had wondered if Trippi, with a Dean nomination plausibly in sight, would be turning his thinking now to the very different business of a general campaign against George Bush.  The answer was that my question was wrong.  Trippi’s thinking began with next fall’s campaign and worked backwards.  The question was how to find 2-million workers and raise $200-million in small contributions against an incumbent Republican with unlimited cash.  An entirely out-of-control, viral Internet contagion was the only means of building those numbers by November, 2004.  The Dean campaign we have seen so far (with half a million recruits and about $30-million in income) is a preview of Trippi’s strategy, not a culmination. 

     Inescapably there will be a fall campaign of Dean TV spots, Trippi said, a sort of barking contest with Karl Rove.  But Trippi’s heart will not be in it.  Television is “an abysmal way to communicate,” he said.  The Internet campaign “gets back to something we had before television, back to neighbors knocking on doors.”  If Trippi is right, the critical conversations among voters about the candidates will be “at the bar and the water cooler,” prompted by bloggers, not ad men.

     What makes him so sure, I asked, that George W. Bush is not “bloggable”?  We tend to forget that one year ago the idea of a quick, righteous and virtually painless war on Iraq made an easily bloggable cause.  War-bloggers, I said, used to be the toast of the Web.  

     Trippi grants the power of the war-bloggers, in the past.  But he seems certain that George Bush is all wrong for the Internet.  “In any medium, you have to say something,” Trippi said, but the Internet in particular puts a premium on a certain style of provocation and a degree of authenticity that Howard Dean commands and George Bush does not.  The other Republican handicap on the Internet, in the Trippi view, is that Bush and Rove have not even begun to unlearn the ancient rules of campaign command and control–rules that Trippi grew up with, too.  “I know how tough it is to undo the wiring upstairs.  But it’s very simple: you cannot command and control the Internet.”

     Our conversation is here in three takes:  Part One outlines some strategic fundamentals of Internet politics.  Part Two is the story of Joe Trippi’s development as an operative.  Part Three is about 2004, including an Internet campaign for Congress. 

     Joe Trippi has a placid assurance that the Democratic nomination is Dean’s, that an epochal change in campaign politics is underway, and that we are on the verge of a historic collision of forces in American life.  

   Who is going to decode the Internet transformation of American politics?

    Not, alas, the New York Times, the best inadequate old newspaper we have.  The Times “Week in Review” piece on Sunday, “Howard Dean’s Internet Push,” signed by Glen Justice, was a head-in-the-sand classic.  The big news, the story said, is that an Internet consultant’s phone rings once a day now, not once a week or once a month.  No mention that a huge base of small-sum Internet donors has demonstrated how to wipe the corrupting stain of money off democracy–a much more cleansing, practical, citizen-driven reform than the late, lumbering and maybe unenforceable McCain-Feingold legislation.  The Times story was that Howard Dean has brought a new trick to the game, another fax machine, another new device “like direct mail, phone solicitation and events in restaurants” and so captured the Internetizens.  Nary a hint of the more plausible counter-story: that free citizens online drafted Howard Dean and are carrying him like a hood ornament on their campaign.  The closing line, ignoring the disruption of the Senatorial beauty pageant, began: “It’s still the age of TV.”  Not once did the word “blog” appear in the Times piece.  The whole thing reminded me of John Perry Barlow’s generic Times headline: “Internet: Threat? … or Menace?”  It feels ironic, and all the more irksome, now that the Times online has a bigger circulation than the broadsheet. 

   The assignment is to find out, then tell the folks, what’s going on out there.  So this is a first invitation to report a new story, in a new way, as urgently as Theodore H. White did with The Making of the President 1960.  “When that book came out,” as White himself remarked later, “it was like Columbus telling about America at the court of Ferdinand and Isabella.”  Teddy White told it so well that his story line, with 44 years of dust on its eloquence, persists like an old fairy tale.  But Teddy White’s big-city bosses, his titans of industry and company towns, his “coruscatingly brilliant” Kennedy aides, his epic Rockefellers and his whole rather gigantic institutional cast, are gone from the stage–both body and spirit.  Only together, it seems to me, can we reobserve and rewrite the real narrative of American politics in this campaign year.

    In my own humble observation, what’s happening out there is the start of a fundamental reordering of democratic energy and political influences, a drastic subversion of a discredited game, an inversion of the old pyramids of control, or perhaps a shape shift, as Stirling Newberry argues, from pyramid to sphere.  The Internet represents a rewiring of the body politic, but it’s not the technology that’s interesting, it’s the individual engagement and social model implied in it.  One of many salient effects of the Internet in politics (along with the geekification of campaigns, the new language of memes, the networks in place of campaign organizations) is the seeming recapitulation of computer-industry history in the mid-1990s.  The leading practitioner of the new “open source” politics, Joe Trippi of the Dean campaign, got the idea working in California with Linux-based software entrepreneurs against the monster Microsoft.  “I always wondered how you could take that same collaboration that occurs in Linux and open source and apply it [in politics],” Trippi told Larry Lessig.  “What would happen if there were a way to do that and engage everybody in a presidential campaign?”

    What the Internet has created, and only Howard Dean so far has exploited, is a wide open public space in which the closed cronyism of both parties must surely be undone, maybe soon.  Matt Stoller writes in the Clark Sphere: “we are witnessing a nonpartisan war between those reactionaries who reject the widening spacial boundaries of politics and those visionaries who embrace them.”  The Internet appeals not least because it’s a subliminal reminder of a beloved myth, the open American frontier.  “The Internet, like the frontier, is about creation, growth and open spaces,” Stoller observes.  The Internet is the First Amendment’s essential meaning and killer-app for our time.  “In a sense, America was founded on the principle of wide media spectrum… Media consolidation touches a nerve for precisely this reason.  The controlled, closed nature of corporate systems rubs that individualistic streak in the American polity precisely the wrong way.”

    What peaked in the campaign of 2000, in my view, was a media-enabled process that mercilessly pruned away the more expansive and provocative minds in the field–Bill Bradley, John McCain and Ralph Nader; then bored us silly with two diminished standard bearers haggling mechanically at the dead center of the TV screen over what they decided was the demographic sliver and tiny cluster of states still at play in their pathetic excuse for a popular national debate and decision. 

   No one is going to tell us this story of the 2004 campaign.  We’re going to have to tell it ourselves, to each other. 

    So here, finally, is the ask.  Will you please pull up a chair, get yourself online, and join an open exploratory conversation till the first Tuesday of November next year about this choice of an American chief.  Before this week is out I will open a new blog that I want to call simply “notes on the transformation.”

    If you’re looking for a place to start your notes and comments, answer these questions first: 

•     What is your test of authenticity in the candidates you care about?  And what scores have you been jotting down?
  
•     When you feel a sermon coming on about this country in this time, on what soapbox, talk show, op-ed page or website are you inclined to deliver it?
  
•     In the public observation and commentary on the 2004 campaign, which big or little media stars are as close to the mark as your own kitchen conversations and rush-hour monologues?  In short, who’s getting it?

   My initial premise is that if there are people who know what’s going they aren’t talking; and the ones that are talking don’t know.  My purpose is to create a busy space for accessible commentary and argument–no bullshit, no pandering–about what the new and old politics and media are doing to us.  I’ve asked Jay Rosen of NYU and PressThink to hold up the other end of an open tent as a co-editor with a light touch.  We bring different CVs and institutional tags: he in New York as teacher and visionary reformer; I in Boston-Cambridge with New York Times campaign work in my checkered multi-media history.  We share a critical and reformist curiosity and a yen for a public voice in professional journalism. 

   I start with long lists in my head of old and young pro’s in politics and journalism I want to hear from.  But the real authorities are the ones we haven’t met yet.  Introduce your favorites.  Introduce yourselves.  I want to profile and question the megaphones that people take seriously, from Sean Hannity to Tim Russert to CommonDreams to Instapundit.  I want to hear from the famous techies, like Dave Winer, who wrote the software of the new media.  Many of them, like Dave, are humanists and political visionaries behind their geek masks.  I want to make an aggressive pursuit of foreign perspectives on this campaign, from Ha’aretz and the Toronto Globe and Mail, from the Guardian, Al Ahram, the African press, the bloggers in Iran and all their readers everywhere–not least because a lot of distant observers seem to know and care about our campaign more than we do.

    The trick in the new “Blogging of the President” blog will be to explain America not to Ferdinand and Isabella but to the ghost of Teddy White. It is not too much to dream that if we unshackle our imaginations and shed our inhibitions, we’d have a conversation that might yet restore the notion that Teddy White embodied, that “there is no excitement anywhere in the world, short of war, to match the excitement of an American presidential campaign.”

     “At first I thought you couldn’t really be a poet unless you’d killed yourself,” recalls one of the liveliest blog poets in our town, Jim Behrle.  “So I was very interested in Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton and John Berryman, and they led me to Lowell,” without whom young Jim says he might have been just a troublemaker forever.  Robert Lowell was first a local hero, a poet of places Jim Behrle knew well, like the railroad tracks in “Terminal Days at Beverly Farms.”  On the North Shore of Boston, Beverly Farms is a high-WASP beach town where Jim Behrle was a Catholic altar boy at St. Margaret’s Church.  “I rode that train into Boston,” Jim remembers, knowing that “there was a poet who wandered around here.  His father died here.  It made me feel connected to a new world that was peopled with poets.”  Lowell fortified the fancy, Jim says, when he became a poet, that “I was joining the brightest ring of angels.”  Lowell’s writing about his own mental illness was another liberation.  “Maybe people like Lowell gave us the bravery to admit we were crazy.”  The Lowell poems Jim Behrle chose to read are all about poets and place: “Terminal Days at Beverly Farms,” “For John Berryman I,” “Robert Frost,” the end of “For the Union Dead,” “Red and Black Brick Boston” and  “Art of the Possible.”  Listen here.