Latest / The Nation Podcasts / GOP Election Deniers running for Governor; plus John Berger’s Ways of Seeing / Start Making Sense

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GOP Election Deniers running for Governor; plus John Berger’s Ways of Seeing / Start Making Sense · The Nation Podcasts

• 0:08
  [SPEAKER_01]: From the nation magazine, this is Start Making Sense.
• 0:11
  [SPEAKER_01]: I'm John Weiner, later in the show, John Berger, author of the classic book Ways Of Seeing, was more than a Marxist art critic.
• 0:20
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's the hundredth anniversary of his birth, and John Powers will comment on his life and work, both of which were extraordinary.
• 0:28
  [SPEAKER_01]: John's critic at large on NPR's fresh air with Terry Gross.
• 0:32
  [SPEAKER_01]: But first,
• 0:33
  [SPEAKER_01]: The Governor's races in this election are crucial to the next presidential election.
• 0:39
  [SPEAKER_01]: Harold Meyerson will comment in a minute.
• 0:44
  [SPEAKER_01]: Now, it's time for this week's political update.
• 0:46
  [SPEAKER_01]: And for that, we turned to Harold Meyerson.
• 0:48
  [SPEAKER_01]: He's editor at Large of the American Prospect.
• 0:51
  [SPEAKER_01]: We reached him today in our nation's capital.
• 0:53
  [SPEAKER_01]: Harold, welcome back.
• 0:55
  [SPEAKER_03]: Always good to be here, John.
• 0:57
  [SPEAKER_01]: Well, most of the election reporting has been about winning control of Congress, especially the Senate, but some of this year's elections will also determine who oversees the presidential election in November 28.
• 1:10
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's the governors who are elected this November.
• 1:14
  [SPEAKER_01]: who will be the key to the security of the election of a new president two years from now because they have the final word declaring the winner in their state and Republicans this year have nominated candidates for governor who have denied the results of the 2020 presidential election and others who have expressed skepticism about the 2020 results election deniers are running
• 1:41
  [SPEAKER_01]: Trump carried in 2024 that the Democrats have to win.
• 1:45
  [SPEAKER_01]: They include Arizona, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Nevada.
• 1:51
  [SPEAKER_01]: A Republican victory next month in any one of these governors' races could create a potential opening for Trump's party to subvert the 2020-8 presidential election.
• 2:02
  [SPEAKER_01]: Now things look good for the Democratic candidates for governors in Arizona, Pennsylvania, and Michigan,
• 2:08
  [SPEAKER_01]: in Wisconsin, it's a little too close for comfort, and the closest of all those races is Nevada, where the incumbent governor running for reelection is a Republican with a long history of ties to election deniers.
• 2:24
  [SPEAKER_01]: Harold, you've just returned from Nevada, tell us about a Republican
• 2:33
  [SPEAKER_03]: Joe Lambardo was kind of a standard issued Republican in the age of Trump.
• 2:40
  [SPEAKER_03]: He's also particularly close to some money to interest where his the details of his record are shall we say questionable after two workers were killed working on a
• 2:55
  [SPEAKER_03]: project of the boring corporation owned by Elon Musk.
• 3:01
  [SPEAKER_03]: The charges were sort of mysteriously dropped and Lambatta's administration says it has no record of these proceedings at all they seem to have mysteriously vanished.
• 3:13
  [SPEAKER_03]: But his campaign for reelection is somewhat curious in that he's really not campaigning very much on his record and his issues.
• 3:23
  [SPEAKER_03]: He's campaigning and has been since early this year, chiefly by attacking his Democratic challenger, who is the state's attorney general, Aeron Ford.
• 3:34
  [SPEAKER_03]: His name is Aaron, but he pronounces it Aeron.
• 3:39
  [SPEAKER_03]: Ford, by contrast, is emphasizing both his working class roots, which are quite
• 3:46
  [SPEAKER_03]: evident from his precarious economic upbringing, and his working class-oriented program.
• 3:55
  [SPEAKER_03]: I believe he is the only candidate out there this year, who is running in part on repealing Nevada's right to work law, which inhibits union organizing since there's a very heavy
• 4:15
  [SPEAKER_03]: I think it's pretty clear that if Ford can win and the two most recent polls show him either up or down by two percentage points, depending on which poll you look at, if he can win, you know, I think it's quite likely Nevada will in fact repeal its right to work law.
• 4:33
  [SPEAKER_01]: A little background here, Navada Island from your new piece of the prospectus, roughly one-third Latino agent, eight, 11 percent Asian, 11 percent black, and A-RON Ford is a black man.
• 4:46
  [SPEAKER_01]: And 45 percent white, the big question seems to me as our Latinos backing the black candidate for governor in Navada.
• 4:57
  [SPEAKER_03]: They seem to be some of the internals on polling shows that Ford is up by as much as 30 percentage points.
• 5:04
  [SPEAKER_03]: Now, any study of Latino voting, and I did a lot of them back when I was at the LA Weekly and was looking at the rising share of voters in LA and California, generally or Latino.
• 5:18
  [SPEAKER_03]: Any look at Latino voting shows that they are probably the most
• 5:22
  [SPEAKER_03]: wallet, bread and butter-oriented demographic constituency abroad in the United States, wages, levels of employment, and the cost of living, clearly are the main things that Latino generally working-class voters look at, and boy is the cost of living out of control in Nevada.
• 5:47
  [SPEAKER_01]: I was a little surprised to learn from your new piece that Nevada's people are more working class than any state outside of Appalachia and the deep south.
• 5:59
  [SPEAKER_01]: Tell us a little about that.
• 6:00
  [SPEAKER_03]: Well, you know, if you look at the metric of a percentage of college graduates, it is the seventh lowest after states like West Virginia, Mississippi, Alabama, Tennessee.
• 6:13
  [SPEAKER_03]: So metaphorically, when a state is found that at least in its popular culture reputation by Bugsy Seagull,
• 6:21
  [SPEAKER_03]: That's not quite the same as having a John Harvard, let us say, as one of the state's founding pillars.
• 6:30
  [SPEAKER_03]: It has an overwhelmingly working class, a population, the largest private sector employers in the state, our MGM resorts and Caesar palace resorts.
• 6:42
  [SPEAKER_03]: Those are not the kind of jobs that required graduate school
• 6:48
  [SPEAKER_03]: training, but with, you know, if you're a poker or a blackjack dealer, you better know as well as any mathematician, what the odds are for having the house win.
• 6:58
  [SPEAKER_01]: You said that Aeron Ford's life was an example of economic precarity.
• 7:04
  [SPEAKER_01]: It is a pretty great story.
• 7:06
  [SPEAKER_01]: Tell us about what he was doing before he was elected the State's Attorney General.
• 7:11
  [SPEAKER_03]: Well, he'd been a successful lawyer for a number of years and his wife is a successful lawyer as well, but before that, he grew up in a household where his father, who worked in a supermarket, brought home as dinner for him, the leftover candy bars that at the end of the day.
• 7:31
  [SPEAKER_03]: As Ford told a group of teamsters, I saw him talking with, he didn't even have a spoon let alone a silver spoon in his mouth and something he told me in an interview which really struck me in the early years of his marriage which has been now going on for 30 years, his wife wanted to buy a home and this was
• 7:54
  [SPEAKER_03]: a little bit disconcerting to him.
• 7:56
  [SPEAKER_03]: He said his dream, for him, the American dream was renting a home with an electric stove, so when the gas company shut off your bill for non-payment, you would still have a stove.
• 8:09
  [SPEAKER_03]: That suggests an upbringing in the precariat, and he is making
• 8:21
  [SPEAKER_01]: You also report that the Republican campaign against him has relentlessly publicized the endorsement of his campaign by California Governor Gavin Newsom.
• 8:33
  [SPEAKER_01]: Why is that such a big deal?
• 8:35
  [SPEAKER_03]: Well, the sort of supposition behind the Lembardo campaign emphasis of that is somehow the cultural vibes of California were going to climb over the Sierra's and, you know, in fact, the Nevada flatlands if Ford was elected and the effect of the
• 8:57
  [SPEAKER_03]: these ads has been such that during the meeting I said in on with his doing back and forth with the teamsters, one of the teamster members asked him about his California upbringing and Ford had to say that his upbringing took place entirely in Texas and that he's never lived in California in his life.
• 9:18
  [SPEAKER_03]: So such as the effect of this kind of
• 9:22
  [SPEAKER_03]: crap saturation that is clearly been on Nevada's air waves and social media.
• 9:29
  [SPEAKER_01]: You've said he's one of the most pro working class candidates running anywhere in the country today.
• 9:35
  [SPEAKER_01]: Is he, is he, does that make him something like Mamdani or Bernie?
• 9:41
  [SPEAKER_03]: Not really, he doesn't really align himself with those Democrats.
• 9:45
  [SPEAKER_03]: His hero, he says, is Barack Obama.
• 9:48
  [SPEAKER_03]: And I think he's sort of in the mainstream of the kind of somewhat mushy, social, democratic, non-black nationalist politics.
• 9:56
  [SPEAKER_03]: We associate with Obama, but minus sort of the ties to Wall Street, which inhibited Obama's responses to the great recession.
• 10:07
  [SPEAKER_03]: And clearly,
• 10:09
  [SPEAKER_03]: pushing a program of higher wages, banning private equity from owning homes, definitely a more working class oriented platform than the kind of platform that Obama might have been running on in 2008 and 2012.
• 10:29
  [SPEAKER_01]: So what does Iran forward need to do to win this election and become Nevada's next governor?
• 10:36
  [SPEAKER_03]: He's getting outspent as most Democrats are this year on the media by the Lombardo campaign, which is made a big issue of a lot of it, and forwards out of state travels, a good deal of which were due to lawsuits that he had represented the state in for trials out of state and for meetings with his fellow attorneys general, not all of them were where that, however.
• 11:03
  [SPEAKER_03]: So, he needs really just to effectively introduce himself and that's best done with the ground game in Nevada.
• 11:10
  [SPEAKER_03]: To Nevada and, you know, contrast his concern for bread and butter issues with the relative indifference of the Republican against whom he's running.
• 11:22
  [SPEAKER_01]: The other big topic in the news this week is money in politics, especially Elon Musk, the world's richest man, we learned the news that he has now become America's biggest midterm spender.
• 11:35
  [SPEAKER_01]: He has spent more than a quarter of a billion dollars.
• 11:39
  [SPEAKER_01]: That's at least 276 million of the reported spending.
• 11:44
  [SPEAKER_01]: focusing mostly on trying to save the Republican Senate majority.
• 11:48
  [SPEAKER_01]: In 2024, he built a big turnout operation through a super PAC called America PAC and he's revived that and they do door to door canvassing in trying to turn out hard to reach Republican voters.
• 12:06
  [SPEAKER_01]: Texas is his biggest concern, his own home state, and it's there that he spent most of most of the money of his canvas operation.
• 12:16
  [SPEAKER_01]: This is unusual for Texas, because it's such a big state, mostly candidates rely on TV.
• 12:22
  [SPEAKER_01]: and it's interesting that Musk's canvassing operation is focused not on swing voters, but on low-propensity conservative voters who voted for Trump in 2024, but that have are unlikely to vote in mid-terms.
• 12:40
  [SPEAKER_01]: And to turn them out, Musk's super PAC is focusing on transgender issues.
• 12:48
  [SPEAKER_01]: Is this working?
• 12:49
  [SPEAKER_01]: The best poll, the New York Times CNAPOL, shows that in Texas, Talarico, now leads Kinpex, then 51 to 45, whereas the same poll had them tied at 47 each in June.
• 13:03
  [SPEAKER_01]: So it seems like Musk spending hundreds of millions to turn out unlikely Republicans
• 13:10
  [SPEAKER_01]: It isn't working right now.
• 13:12
  [SPEAKER_01]: My question for you is why is this unprecedented level of spending?
• 13:17
  [SPEAKER_01]: The focus on canvassing as well as paid media.
• 13:21
  [SPEAKER_01]: Why has this having so little effect on voters in Texas?
• 13:25
  [SPEAKER_03]: Well, obviously we don't know, you know, what effect it really has until the votes come in on election day, but what we do know is that the outreach to the only sometime right wing voters.
• 13:40
  [SPEAKER_03]: be they ads or visits on their doorsteps to the extent that it's highlighting the trans issue of that is countered by this constituencies daily dealings with the price of everything.
• 13:57
  [SPEAKER_03]: This isn't really a particularly upper middle class constituency that they're trying to reach the upper middle class tends to vote.
• 14:05
  [SPEAKER_03]: in midterms.
• 14:06
  [SPEAKER_03]: It's more working class, and you know, working class is not exactly experiencing a very good time, as we said in our discussion of Nevada, and today is economy, and so that this is an uphill struggle, no matter how many paid door knockers, Elon Musk and a Ford to deploy.
• 14:27
  [SPEAKER_01]: Mike Johnson had a revealing remark in puzzling over the latest poll results.
• 14:34
  [SPEAKER_01]: He said, quote, angry people vote, satisfied people don't close quote.
• 14:40
  [SPEAKER_01]: I think he's under something there.
• 14:41
  [SPEAKER_03]: He's very on a something there.
• 14:43
  [SPEAKER_03]: Indignation at the government's failure to really perform sort of the basics.
• 14:49
  [SPEAKER_03]: You would hope and expect it would perform.
• 14:52
  [SPEAKER_03]: is a great motivator to get out and vote, and the Democrats are writing that way.
• 14:57
  [SPEAKER_03]: We don't know yet quite how far it will carry them.
• 15:01
  [SPEAKER_03]: But the fact that Texas is in play not just for the Senate seat, but for the gubernatorial seat is evidence thus far that that wave is there.
• 15:10
  [SPEAKER_01]: One last thing, our political definition of the week, J.D.
• 15:15
  [SPEAKER_01]: Vance was asked at a recent press conference to define socialism.
• 15:20
  [SPEAKER_01]: He said, quote, I think in reality what the term means in the American context is that you want to replace American workers with foreign workers and you want boys to play in girls' sports, close quote.
• 15:35
  [SPEAKER_01]: What if you have any comment?
• 15:37
  [SPEAKER_03]: Let you say, I don't think Karl Marx would recognize that.
• 15:41
  [SPEAKER_03]: I don't think Eugene Debs would recognize that, or Norman Thomas, or Michael Harrington, or Bayer, Dreston, or A. Philip Randolph, or Zoran Mandami, or Bernie Sanders, or A.O.C.
• 15:55
  [SPEAKER_01]: Harold Myersen, read amitprospect.org.
• 15:58
  [SPEAKER_01]: We're a terrific report on politics and the Vata has just been published.
• 16:01
  [SPEAKER_01]: Harold, thanks for talking with us today.
• 16:03
  [SPEAKER_03]: Oh, it's good to be here, John.
• 16:06
  [SPEAKER_01]: And remember, this Saturday, October 17th, is no king's vote early day.
• 16:11
  [SPEAKER_01]: The no king's coalition has shifted his focus from dramatizing opposition to Trump's authoritarianism to support for voting, especially voting early.
• 16:23
  [SPEAKER_01]: The best election protection is huge margins of victory, more than 2,000 places will hold no kings vote early events.
• 16:31
  [SPEAKER_01]: This Saturday, October 17th, you can check the map at nokings.org to find an event near you.
• 16:39
  [SPEAKER_01]: I really like the nokings map 2,000 events with events in every state of the union.
• 16:45
  [SPEAKER_01]: It really shows that we are everywhere.
• 16:48
  [SPEAKER_01]: Vote early October 17th, join no kings, vote early events.
• 17:08
  [SPEAKER_01]: Now it's time to talk about John Berger, the British Marxist who wrote about art and a lot of other things, starting with ways of seeing in 1972.
• 17:18
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's the hundredth anniversary of his birth this year.
• 17:20
  [SPEAKER_01]: For comment we turned to John Powers, he's critic at large on fresh air with Terry Gross, where he has an audience of millions.
• 17:28
  [SPEAKER_01]: John, welcome back.
• 17:30
  [SPEAKER_02]: Glad to be here.
• 17:31
  [SPEAKER_01]: John Berger first became known in 1972 with what was a four part BBC TV series, ways of seeing.
• 17:40
  [SPEAKER_01]: The Guardian recently said he appeared there to be an insurrectionist, the critics equivalent of a rock star or cult leader, close quote.
• 17:51
  [SPEAKER_01]: In 1972, you were something like 20 years old and college student.
• 17:55
  [SPEAKER_01]: What was it like for you to watch that show?
• 17:59
  [SPEAKER_02]: It was life-changing.
• 18:00
  [SPEAKER_02]: I would very rarely call something life-changing but somehow seeing that show made me think there was an entire new way to think about art and politics and life.
• 18:12
  [SPEAKER_02]: In watching the show again, I can see why he might have seemed like a rock star.
• 18:15
  [SPEAKER_02]: He had this long curly hair and wasn't dressed in a suit the way people presenters were back then.
• 18:22
  [SPEAKER_02]: But what was striking was he was simply telling you things that as soon as he said them were transparently true, for instance, one of the most famous parts of ways of seeing, it started about the history of the nude.
• 18:35
  [SPEAKER_02]: He was the first person I ever did, who came up with the idea of the male gaze, and he drew the distinction between nakedness and nudity, and he talked about the politics of who's seeing, who and why, and
• 18:48
  [SPEAKER_02]: that changed my life, you know, when he would show you a landscape painting and say that basically the meaning of this is about the ownership of the land rather than the beauty of the landscape, you know, that blew my head off.
• 19:01
  [SPEAKER_02]: So it was extraordinary.
• 19:04
  [SPEAKER_01]: And one of the striking things to me, rereading this book now, is how much he loves European art.
• 19:13
  [SPEAKER_01]: And he's steeped in European art.
• 19:15
  [SPEAKER_01]: There's the Vinci and there's Rembrandt and there's Picasso and so on.
• 19:20
  [SPEAKER_01]: But as you say, it's a completely...
• 19:22
  [SPEAKER_01]: breathtaking and thrilling way of looking at this even today, I must say.
• 19:29
  [SPEAKER_02]: Part of what makes him great is that he's not a demystifier purely.
• 19:34
  [SPEAKER_02]: There's a passage where he talks about a painting that Rembrandt did his wife, where he basically explains how it's a painting from love.
• 19:42
  [SPEAKER_02]: and his way of describing the sensual feeling and how she's not being there to be seen and how Rembrandt looks at her, and he's honoring and loving the painting for itself and at the same time explaining all the stuff around it.
• 19:57
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, my only complaint is the penguin paperback, you know, which has been in our shelves for 40 years.
• 20:03
  [SPEAKER_01]: The reproductions are just tiny thumbnails and black and white.
• 20:08
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's horrible to look at since this whole thing is about looking.
• 20:12
  [SPEAKER_01]: But the argument is still, I would say, thrilling.
• 20:15
  [SPEAKER_01]: Then, in 1972, Berger also published a novel.
• 20:20
  [SPEAKER_01]: The title was The Letter G.
• 20:23
  [SPEAKER_01]: It won the Booker Prize and his acceptance speech is probably as well known as the book.
• 20:29
  [SPEAKER_01]: Let's talk about the accepted speech.
• 20:32
  [SPEAKER_02]: I guess the first thing is it's a historical novel filled with sex and politics and ideas.
• 20:39
  [SPEAKER_02]: It is, you know, as they say, postmodern, meaning that he talks about partly the process of writing and he talks about how we write things slightly difficult,
• 20:51
  [SPEAKER_02]: I think to everyone's surprise, he won the Booker Prize, and it was announced and he had this speech prepared, and the legend of the speech, I knew the legend of the speech before I actually read this speech, was that he got up and essentially insulted the people there, giving the Booker Prize by saying, you know that the McConnell Booker Company made its money from slavery, and so therefore I'm going to give half of the money to the Black Panthers.
• 21:19
  [SPEAKER_02]: And that's how it's presented almost always, which is him being rude in all the rest.
• 21:24
  [SPEAKER_02]: Then you read the speech and it's in fact a carefully reason speech starts off talking about the idea of literary competitions and how that links to the marketing of books and to excellence.
• 21:35
  [SPEAKER_02]: He then praises the jury for choosing other very worthy books that he was very honored to be alongside and then he goes into a discussion of more of how he was going to work on a book on immigration
• 21:48
  [SPEAKER_02]: And that when you were working on a book and immigration, you can't fail to notice that lots of the immigrants in Britain came from the Caribbean.
• 21:55
  [SPEAKER_02]: And that those people from the Caribbean partly came there because they had been impoverished by companies like McConnell Booker.
• 22:02
  [SPEAKER_02]: And so therefore that he wanted to turn the award against itself slightly by giving half the money to the Black Panthers.
• 22:09
  [SPEAKER_02]: when you read it, it's exceedingly eloquent, it's exceedingly well argued, and it is while controversial and clearly point making, it's not strident in any rational meaning of that term.
• 22:23
  [SPEAKER_02]: I would add in connection with that, that part of the importance of the speech is that he had become famous a bit because of ways of seeing on television.
• 22:32
  [SPEAKER_02]: One of his earlier books was a book about Picasso,
• 22:36
  [SPEAKER_02]: and about Picasso losing as his fame increased, he started lost touch with his connection with the world.
• 22:44
  [SPEAKER_02]: And I think Berger was partly in doing this, trying to make sure that he himself, in accepting his word, didn't get folded in to the literary establishment and the British establishment.
• 22:55
  [SPEAKER_02]: These spent his entire life fighting.
• 22:57
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, well, I want to thank you for suggesting I read the text of the book or speech and not just the posthumous couple of sentences about it.
• 23:07
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's one of the most eloquent political statements I've ever read.
• 23:11
  [SPEAKER_02]: You know, it is actually shows him at his best.
• 23:15
  [SPEAKER_01]: I think for me the most eloquent sentence is he talks about the current struggle against exploitation in the Eocolonialism and he says, it is only by virtue of this common struggle.
• 23:30
  [SPEAKER_01]: that it is possible for the descendants of the slave and the slave master to approach each other again with the amazed hope of potential equals.
• 23:41
  [SPEAKER_01]: Fantastic.
• 23:42
  [SPEAKER_02]: Many people were unhappy.
• 23:44
  [SPEAKER_02]: I've one of the Edna O'Brien's, I think, ex-husband, said if you want to give money to murderers, why not give it to the IRA?
• 23:54
  [SPEAKER_02]: because the event was so, I think so decorous before then, that to give a very rational speech like that would seem like a slap.
• 24:05
  [SPEAKER_01]: And let me just say as a footnote, the Booker Prize has changed a lot since then.
• 24:10
  [SPEAKER_01]: Right now, they have a big web page about Berger's speech.
• 24:14
  [SPEAKER_01]: They have photographs from the event.
• 24:16
  [SPEAKER_01]: Obviously, they consider it now, kind of a historic moment in their development.
• 24:22
  [SPEAKER_01]: So, after the success of the BBC show and the prize for the novel, he left Britain and moved first to Geneva and then to a peasant village in the Alps of Southwestern France called Quincy, was it was this like, or well going to live with the miners and rode to Wiggen Pier to report on their exploitation and resistance?
• 24:46
  [SPEAKER_02]: Well, if Orwell had stayed at Wiggenpeer for 50 years, because he spent almost the rest of his life there, you know, that was his base.
• 24:54
  [SPEAKER_02]: He was leaving England and here's where one should say that part of the glamour and excitement of Berger in addition to his good looks and dashing style was that he was a secret.
• 25:06
  [SPEAKER_02]: in this, he's linked to DH Lawrence on one hand and probably in Italy, Pasalini on the other, which is looking for some sort of pre-capitalist authenticity.
• 25:16
  [SPEAKER_02]: But in fact, he was trying to find a way that was not just living in more or less hypercapitalist London.
• 25:23
  [SPEAKER_02]: He didn't want to be part of that life.
• 25:25
  [SPEAKER_02]: He also historically, because he lived among peasants, and was public notorious, not just famous for not having an indoor bathroom in his house there, even though the peasants around him did have indoor bathrooms.
• 25:40
  [SPEAKER_02]: Okay, and I think his landlord there always referred to him the actor because he was like this this glamorous British guy showing up, but he then did help them doing their work.
• 25:53
  [SPEAKER_02]: He did help like during Hayes season.
• 25:55
  [SPEAKER_02]: He would actually help.
• 25:56
  [SPEAKER_02]: He wanted to be part of this community.
• 25:58
  [SPEAKER_02]: People do find some sort of earlier model of less alienated way of living and he was clearly drawn to that.
• 26:06
  [SPEAKER_01]: The big writing project of his first years in Quincy was he had described in the booker speech a book about migrant laborers.
• 26:17
  [SPEAKER_01]: It was published in 1975 called a seventh man.
• 26:22
  [SPEAKER_01]: What was that book like and how does it hold up today?
• 26:24
  [SPEAKER_02]: It's a combination of more or less political analysis and reportage with photographs by his guy, he's worked with him, John Morris, Swiss guy.
• 26:35
  [SPEAKER_02]: It's following not specific immigrants, but almost following some sort of idealized or generic immigrant from the moment they leave their village, all the way through the process they're getting exploited, and all the things that happened to them.
• 26:49
  [SPEAKER_02]: It still holds up.
• 26:50
  [SPEAKER_02]: It's a different group of immigrants.
• 26:51
  [SPEAKER_02]: It now seems slightly dated because the immigrants are fleeing in a different way than they did before.
• 26:56
  [SPEAKER_02]: And the world is less sympathetic to them, weirdly enough, back in the mid-70s, there was the talk of how badly exploited they were.
• 27:05
  [SPEAKER_02]: and now it's probably even worse through much of Europe.
• 27:08
  [SPEAKER_02]: But in fact, it really holds up exceedingly what the are just beautiful passages where Berger writes about what it means to leave your village, where the framework of your life is suddenly shattered and you're off where you basically know nothing and you've made the decision to do that and the money situation is so bad for you that your mother wants you to go.
• 27:31
  [SPEAKER_02]: and how often the immigrants take food with them to remind them of them, but they eat it too soon because they need to be anchored in it.
• 27:40
  [SPEAKER_02]: And it's beautiful stuff with the political analysis of how the European economy works and how it needs those people to work cheaply and be exploited.
• 27:49
  [SPEAKER_01]: And then the last part is about returning home and about the complexity of your family that stayed behind that you've had a support with your money now is kind of alienated from you and you from them.
• 28:03
  [SPEAKER_02]: Yes.
• 28:04
  [SPEAKER_02]: It's kind of like war in a way, which is you've had this completely life-altering experience and you no longer mesh, trying to make the better world, you probably make it worse for yourself.
• 28:17
  [SPEAKER_01]: And we should note that Verso reissued a seventh man in the paperback last year, I think perhaps for the American context where Trump's attacks on immigrant workers from Latin America has been such a definitive part of our politics for the last decade.
• 28:37
  [SPEAKER_02]: Yes, absolutely.
• 28:38
  [SPEAKER_02]: I think that's one reason why the book is still relevant because what
• 28:44
  [SPEAKER_02]: was both understanding and empathizing with people who were not like, probably a person reading the book.
• 28:53
  [SPEAKER_02]: He could have had the cushy life of a prosperous intellect, like he could have come to the US probably, and written for vanity fair, like Christopher Hitchens, or written for of his like Alexander Coburn, like all the Brits who came over, he could easily have done it.
• 29:11
  [SPEAKER_02]: and he did, he went to France and lived in a peasant village and wrote a masterful book about the life of the peasantry because it's a vanishing form of life and he wanted to capture that.
• 29:24
  [SPEAKER_01]: Berger died in 2017 at the age of 90, now that it's the 100th anniversary of his birth, we've getting a new biography by Tom Overton, who've been talking with Berger for a long time.
• 29:39
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's called From Life.
• 29:41
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's being published in the United States right now.
• 29:44
  [SPEAKER_01]: I mean, the first thing everybody wants to know about Tom Overton is,
• 29:48
  [SPEAKER_01]: What does he say about Burgers, chaotic personal life, his string of wives and lovers?
• 29:56
  [SPEAKER_02]: He's rather madder of fact about it.
• 29:58
  [SPEAKER_02]: Burgers was involved with so many different women, and was also just theoretically a sex guy, which is to say that the hero of G, the novel G.
• 30:11
  [SPEAKER_02]: the one the booker prize is a guy who goes around seducing women and believes that it's important to have the sensual intimate personal experience.
• 30:20
  [SPEAKER_02]: That's essential to living properly and is progressive in addition to all of that.
• 30:24
  [SPEAKER_02]: Then which was, which was Burgers thought.
• 30:27
  [SPEAKER_02]: And so along the way, he has different women at some point they break up for reasons that people break up.
• 30:34
  [SPEAKER_02]: He had four wives, that's one more than me.
• 30:37
  [SPEAKER_02]: I'm in no position to be sanctimonious about it.
• 30:41
  [SPEAKER_02]: There's a point where Berger's written an eloquent thing about free love and over the notes that he did have his wife of the time type it.
• 30:53
  [SPEAKER_02]: Even as it was his defense basically of going off and sleeping with somebody else.
• 30:57
  [SPEAKER_02]: And so that there was that side to Berger that probably wasn't all together sweet.
• 31:01
  [SPEAKER_02]: Like many womanizers he was in himself deeply.
• 31:05
  [SPEAKER_02]: What's important about the sex stuff, one reason I love him so much is he seems like his work is such an ideal antidote to digital culture because he is about the look that tastes the feel of the actual world.
• 31:20
  [SPEAKER_02]: He is about like not just feeling bad for immigrants but going and meeting them.
• 31:25
  [SPEAKER_02]: shaking hands with them, writing and vans with them.
• 31:28
  [SPEAKER_02]: So, I mean, for him, the physical fact of the material world is essential to everything.
• 31:35
  [SPEAKER_02]: I mean, he would just be, I think, aghast.
• 31:37
  [SPEAKER_02]: And I think it's the proof of ultimate capitalist alienation that people now think they can know one another without even wanting to touch them.
• 31:45
  [SPEAKER_02]: Because he was a skin contact guy from the get-go.
• 31:49
  [SPEAKER_02]: And that in some ways probably made him a bad romantic partner.
• 31:53
  [SPEAKER_02]: You know, but it did make him also brilliant when he wrote about it, and for me, at some level I don't care that he, you know, he was foolish on certain things.
• 32:04
  [SPEAKER_02]: I don't care.
• 32:06
  [SPEAKER_02]: The actual work he wrote was so great that only an idiot would think that somehow it disqualifies him, that he had too many girlfriends.
• 32:15
  [SPEAKER_01]: Well, Verso is currently publishing 14 books by John Berger, that does not include ways of seeing, which has been a Penguin Book for decades.
• 32:25
  [SPEAKER_01]: Penguin, notably, is releasing for the first time an audio book of ways of seeing
• 32:31
  [SPEAKER_01]: in December, and it's not revealing who the reader is going to be since Berger's own voice in that original BBC show is so authoritative and recognizable, it is kind of a challenge for someone else to read this to us.
• 32:45
  [SPEAKER_02]: I mean, he was good friends with the Tilda Swinton, so maybe Tilda will read it.
• 32:49
  [SPEAKER_02]: The NLR because it says, bring out his trilogy about peasant life.
• 32:53
  [SPEAKER_02]: That's in the spring.
• 32:54
  [SPEAKER_02]: They this last summer, they brought out G.
• 32:59
  [SPEAKER_02]: And at the same time, it's overtoned biography.
• 33:01
  [SPEAKER_02]: They're bringing out a collection of his calls about looking, which I highly recommend.
• 33:06
  [SPEAKER_02]: I think everyone should buy because every single essay in it is fantastic.
• 33:11
  [SPEAKER_02]: There's a great one about looking at animals that has been loved by animal rights people ever since he read and it was a long time before people were doing it.
• 33:20
  [SPEAKER_02]: He has a fantastic piece.
• 33:23
  [SPEAKER_02]: on Francis Bacon and Walt Disney, in which the argument is talking about how bacon and Walt Disney flatten human life, and how they do it in different ways, but in fact what they share in common is that what Bacon shares with Walt Disney, the bleakest darkest person and Walt Disney, it's a brilliant, every essay in it is fantastic.
• 33:42
  [SPEAKER_01]: About looking, finally, burger once described himself as, quote, a Marxist among other things.
• 33:51
  [SPEAKER_01]: And the socialist magazine, Jacobin, when he died, said his basic commitment was to the idea that solidarity with the voiceless was a duty, and that capitalism was the bitter enemy of all creative labor.
• 34:08
  [SPEAKER_01]: It seems pretty good to me.
• 34:10
  [SPEAKER_02]: It is.
• 34:10
  [SPEAKER_02]: That's absolutely true.
• 34:12
  [SPEAKER_02]: I don't think I could think of anything he did, where that wouldn't be a proper description of it.
• 34:18
  [SPEAKER_02]: with the proviso that he is a Marxist among other things, he does change the way you see the world in my life there've been maybe two or three people who've done that and he's one of them.
• 34:30
  [SPEAKER_01]: John Powers, you can hear him on NPR's fresh air with Terry Gross.
• 34:34
  [SPEAKER_01]: John, special thanks for this one.
• 34:37
  [SPEAKER_01]: My pleasure.
• 34:46
  [SPEAKER_01]: Start making sense.
• 34:48
  [SPEAKER_01]: A podcast from the Nation Magazine is recorded at our upstairs studio in Los Angeles.
• 34:54
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• 34:59
  [SPEAKER_01]: Richie the Ambrose is executive producer, Boskarsun Kara is president of the nation, Katrina Van Nouvelle is editor and publisher of the nation.
• 35:08
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• 35:13
  [SPEAKER_01]: You can find out more about Start Making Sense at thenation.com and subscribe to Start Making Sense on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
• 35:24
  [SPEAKER_01]: I'm John Weiner, thanks for listening.