Latest / FROM THE INSIDE OUT by BETH ARNOLD / #65 THE RECKONING

Transcript

#65 THE RECKONING · FROM THE INSIDE OUT by BETH ARNOLD

• 0:23
  SPEAKER_00: Pull up a chair.
• 0:24
  SPEAKER_00: I'm Beth Arnold, and this is From the Inside Out, where American life, politics, and memory meet as we tiny specks in the cosmos try to make sense of it all.
• 0:36
  SPEAKER_00: With the midterm elections just days away, I've been thinking about the choices we make when our conscience comes into conflict with what we're told to believe, or what we're willing to tolerate.
• 0:51
  SPEAKER_00: In Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, a boy makes a decision he believes will send him to hell, but he makes it anyway.
• 1:00
  SPEAKER_00: What does that moment have to tell us about America today?
• 1:05
  SPEAKER_00: About truth, courage, morality, and the responsibility we have to one another.
• 1:11
  SPEAKER_00: It's October 29th, 2026.
• 1:15
  SPEAKER_00: This week's essay is called The Reckoning.
• 1:20
  SPEAKER_00: The Reckoning.
• 1:21
  SPEAKER_00: What happens when we can no longer reconcile the people we claim to be with the things we're willing to support?
• 1:30
  SPEAKER_00: Truth is truth to the end of reckoning.
• 1:34
  SPEAKER_00: William Shakespeare.
• 1:36
  SPEAKER_00: In Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Huck faces a choice he believes could cost him his soul.
• 1:44
  SPEAKER_00: He and Jim have been traveling down the Mississippi on a raft, Huck fleeing his abusive father, Jim, escaping slavery.
• 1:52
  SPEAKER_00: During their journey, Huck takes aboard two other men beating it from trouble.
• 1:58
  SPEAKER_00: They're con artists who call themselves the Duke and the King.
• 2:02
  SPEAKER_00: Eventually, the King sells Jim for$40, leaving him captive at a nearby farm.
• 2:10
  SPEAKER_00: Huck wants to rescue his friend, but he has been raised to believe that Jim is someone else's property and that helping him escape is a sin.
• 2:22
  SPEAKER_00: He fears eternal punishment.
• 2:25
  SPEAKER_00: Finally, he writes to Miss Watson, the woman who enslaves Jim, telling her where to find him.
• 2:32
  SPEAKER_00: Huck believes he has done the right thing, but then he remembers their life on the river, Jim keeping watch while he slept, caring for him, calling him his best friend.
• 2:44
  SPEAKER_00: Those memories bring him back to the person his letter would betray.
• 2:49
  SPEAKER_00: Huck holds the paper trembling.
• 2:52
  SPEAKER_00: He can't reconcile what he's been taught is right with what he knows of Jim and what he believes in his heart is right.
• 3:02
  SPEAKER_00: He has to decide what to do and accept the consequences.
• 3:08
  SPEAKER_00: All right then, I'll go to hell, he says and tears the letter up.
• 3:14
  SPEAKER_00: This is the moment of Huck's reckoning.
• 3:17
  SPEAKER_00: He didn't look away or say he's not his brother's keeper or it's not his problem.
• 3:24
  SPEAKER_00: Despite his abusive father or their wild trip down the Mississippi, he didn't only fend for himself.
• 3:32
  SPEAKER_00: Whether he recognized what it meant or not, he faced his own duality and stood up not only for Jim, but ultimately for himself, American society and culture.
• 3:46
  SPEAKER_00: He burnished humanity.
• 3:49
  SPEAKER_00: Art changes the world, and Twain moved his literature into our national consciousness.
• 3:55
  SPEAKER_00: Not just for his time, but for American society into eternity.
• 4:00
  SPEAKER_00: And then Percival Everett brought us James, and I was riveted.
• 4:05
  SPEAKER_00: He takes us back to the river, but this time we see through the eyes of the man Huck knows as Jim.
• 4:13
  SPEAKER_00: We hear his thoughts, his intelligence, his anger.
• 4:17
  SPEAKER_00: We see his agency.
• 4:19
  SPEAKER_00: His life is his own and his freedom is his right.
• 4:24
  SPEAKER_00: Everett asks us to reckon with whose story we've been reading and whose we haven't.
• 4:32
  SPEAKER_00: Huck's choice anticipates the moral conflict in to kill a mockingbird, whether to follow a racist community's expectations or stand by the person those expectations would condemn.
• 4:47
  SPEAKER_00: But where Atticus Finch acts from a conviction that he's doing right, Huck chooses to help Jim even though he believes he's wrong.
• 4:58
  SPEAKER_00: Which is the harder act?
• 4:59
  SPEAKER_00: Or does it matter?
• 5:01
  SPEAKER_00: A few days ago, the Lone Wolf and I watched a movie called Truth and Treason.
• 5:07
  SPEAKER_00: Based on a gripping true World War II story, it follows a 16-year-old German boy who, after discovering the regime is feeding his country lies, risks his life to distribute anti-Nazi leaflets.
• 5:22
  SPEAKER_00: Each of these young men, fictional and real, met his reckoning with courage, mixed in with everything else he went through in tough situations brimming with trouble.
• 5:36
  SPEAKER_00: Young Helmuth Hubener refused obedience to Nazi propaganda and launched an underground resistance movement against Adolf Hitler.
• 5:46
  SPEAKER_00: The Nerve.
• 5:47
  SPEAKER_00: At just 16 years old, he used a shortwave radio to secretly listen to forbidden BBC radio broadcasts in Hamburg, discovering that the German public was being systematically lied to with Nazi propaganda.
• 6:05
  SPEAKER_00: He wrote and typed up essays, poems, and satirical leaflets that challenged it and denounced Hitler.
• 6:13
  SPEAKER_00: Spoiler, he was caught and executed by guillotine at 17 on October 27, 1942, 84 years ago this week.
• 6:27
  SPEAKER_00: I was surprised by the method.
• 6:29
  SPEAKER_00: I didn't realize that the guillotine became part of the Nazi machinery of repression.
• 6:35
  SPEAKER_00: The regime treated opposition as a crime and carried out its executions through its prison system.
• 6:44
  SPEAKER_00: Before Germany used the guillotine, a handheld executioner axe was the tool.
• 6:50
  SPEAKER_00: Imagine the executioners' nightmares.
• 6:54
  SPEAKER_00: Hexath's call for a public execution by firing squad carries a whiff of this brutality.
• 7:03
  SPEAKER_00: Truth is what moved this teenager to risk his life, to be true to himself and humanity and to his God.
• 7:11
  SPEAKER_00: He understood that the absence of veracity is inevitably one of the steps fascists take to rope people in.
• 7:19
  SPEAKER_00: We've now seen this in our own country, in this administration.
• 7:25
  SPEAKER_00: Lies, lies, and more lies.
• 7:27
  SPEAKER_00: Who can stomach them?
• 7:29
  SPEAKER_00: In this election, one of the jaw-dropping deceptions the Republicans are trotting out again is that children go off to school and come back with a sex change.
• 7:41
  SPEAKER_00: One would think that this is beyond the pale of anything a rational human being could believe, but here we are.
• 7:49
  SPEAKER_00: When LBJ was running for the Senate, he flew around Texas in a shiny helicopter to wow the rural electorate who had never seen one.
• 7:59
  SPEAKER_00: I'm reading the second in Robert Carrow's brilliant books about LBJ, The Means of Ascent.
• 8:06
  SPEAKER_00: Carro is able to reveal the true story of the fiercely contested 1948 senatorial election when Johnson is running against beloved former Texas governor Koch Stevenson, who embodied in his own life the myth of the cowboy night.
• 8:26
  SPEAKER_00: And ultimately, as the political duel between the two men quickens, carrying with it all the confrontational and moral drama of the perfect Western, Carol makes us witness to a momentous turning point in American politics.
• 8:43
  SPEAKER_00: The tragic last stand of the old politics versus the new, the politics of issue versus the politics of image, mass manipulation, money, and electronic dazzle.
• 8:59
  SPEAKER_00: This race was a reckoning for both men.
• 9:03
  SPEAKER_00: Sexuality is one of the smokescreens the GOP beats voters with, like they flog made-up issues about immigrants, people of color, the poor, and accuse Democrats of socialism, communism, radicalism.
• 9:19
  SPEAKER_00: Wave a flag and holler patriotism when attacking the Constitution and everything our democracy has stood for.
• 9:28
  SPEAKER_00: LBJ's campaign knew that if they repeated something over and over and over again, people would believe it was true, whether it was or not.
• 9:39
  SPEAKER_00: Trump's playbook.
• 9:41
  SPEAKER_00: Trump's level of deceit and corruption is astonishing.
• 9:46
  SPEAKER_00: But the recent White House meeting with 12 Catholic bishops and the way Trump used them as bait is worth repeating.
• 9:54
  SPEAKER_00: As Heather Cox Richardson reported in Letters from an American, 12 Catholic bishops went to the White House expecting a private discussion of immigration enforcement, religious worker visas, and human dignity with the possibility of praying privately with the president.
• 10:13
  SPEAKER_00: According to Milwaukee Archbishop Jeffrey Grob, they were then taken into the Oval Office and directed to stand behind Trump and pray.
• 10:24
  SPEAKER_00: Less than two weeks before the midterms, the White House distributed photographs and a video without the bishop's consent.
• 10:32
  SPEAKER_00: They had come to discuss concerns about the administration's policies, but their presence was turned into an image that could suggest their blessing of those policies.
• 10:45
  SPEAKER_00: The Archbishop publicly apologized, insisting that the prayer was no endorsement of Trump, his policies, or his party.
• 10:55
  SPEAKER_00: He described hearing from people hurt by those policies and accused the White House of manipulating something sacred.
• 11:04
  SPEAKER_00: But his most revealing admission was this.
• 11:08
  SPEAKER_00: I did not go without reservations.
• 11:10
  SPEAKER_00: I wish I had heeded them.
• 11:13
  SPEAKER_00: He had felt the warning before he went.
• 11:17
  SPEAKER_00: Now he had to answer for disregarding it.
• 11:20
  SPEAKER_00: He was used, his own reckoning.
• 11:24
  SPEAKER_00: There is the duality, the people we claim to be, and the things we allow ourselves to become part of.
• 11:33
  SPEAKER_00: What would Jesus do?
• 11:35
  SPEAKER_00: He'd be Pope Leo.
• 11:37
  SPEAKER_00: This Pope has zeroed in on the compassion and inclusivity of true Christianity to counter Trump's hate with love.
• 11:47
  SPEAKER_00: And in this reckoning election, it will be up to us to show where our souls are.
• 11:54
  SPEAKER_00: The complete moral failure of this administration and all those who are enabling Trump, as Obama said in his chaos and cruelty and corruption and incompetence, is the energy driving this blue wave we're hoping for.
• 12:10
  SPEAKER_00: As I said, when I republished last week's piece about Obama's election night in Paris, this midterm has the feel of a massive turnaround, as was 2008 after George W.
• 12:24
  SPEAKER_00: Bush.
• 12:25
  SPEAKER_00: A chance to turn away from the Christian nationalist fascism that the radical right has been working so diligently toward for a very long time.
• 12:36
  SPEAKER_00: A chance to begin the redemption of our country and the prosecution of those who deserve to go to jail, starting with the president.
• 12:46
  SPEAKER_00: After everything we've seen, what and who are we willing to authorize with our votes?
• 12:53
  SPEAKER_00: This election is a reckoning on conduct we have seen repeatedly.
• 12:58
  SPEAKER_00: A president acting like a mafia boss who has no moral leadership but has bombarded his countrymen and the world with authoritarian disinformation, corruption, hate, and fear.
• 13:12
  SPEAKER_00: A Congress full of Republicans who have empowered him and a Supreme Court who paves his way.
• 13:20
  SPEAKER_00: We voters have a responsibility to one another about what we're willing to excuse, reward, or empower.
• 13:28
  SPEAKER_00: These reckonings are on the way.
• 13:31
  SPEAKER_00: I've written this before, but when Nixon went down for his criminal obstruction and his vice president Spiro Agnew had resigned after a federal investigation revealed he had been accepting kickbacks and bribes for years, including as vice president, the high-minded talk was that we couldn't send our president to jail.
• 13:54
  SPEAKER_00: I was at the Georgetown Club with Senator John McClellan, my aunt and uncle, and the senator said as much.
• 14:01
  SPEAKER_00: That was then.
• 14:03
  SPEAKER_00: In that reckoning, the Republican leaders upheld the law and their integrity and told Nixon they did not have his back.
• 14:12
  SPEAKER_00: We're seeing a spirit of accountability and its people rise up all over the world.
• 14:20
  SPEAKER_00: In Brazil, voters have re-elected Luis Ignacio Lula da Silva, defeating Flavio Bolsonaro, the son of the former president who tried to overturn his own election defeat.
• 14:34
  SPEAKER_00: As Paul Krugman reported, Lula prevailed despite restrictions on his campaign's meta accounts that the company attributed to technical problems, not unlike the meta excuses about the No Kingsday account also having technical problems, which I don't believe.
• 14:54
  SPEAKER_00: And Krugman questioned that explanation.
• 14:57
  SPEAKER_00: Whatever the reach of the oligarchs, the Brazilian people exercised their own power.
• 15:04
  SPEAKER_00: They voted, they won.
• 15:06
  SPEAKER_00: People have the power.
• 15:09
  SPEAKER_00: In Serbia, students helped turn a public tragedy into a demand for accountability.
• 15:16
  SPEAKER_00: The collapse of a railway station canopy in Novi Sod killed 16 people.
• 15:23
  SPEAKER_00: Protesters blamed corruption and negligence.
• 15:26
  SPEAKER_00: For nearly two years, they organized, marched, and refused to disappear.
• 15:32
  SPEAKER_00: Now their student-backed movement has won a parliamentary majority.
• 15:38
  SPEAKER_00: And Alexander Vus has conceded defeat.
• 15:42
  SPEAKER_00: I know I pronounced his name wrong, sorry.
• 15:45
  SPEAKER_00: A leader who seemed immovable discovered that the people could move him.
• 15:51
  SPEAKER_00: People have the power.
• 15:54
  SPEAKER_00: In India, young people are challenging Narinda Modi's government over corrupted examinations, diminished opportunities, and threats to their votes.
• 16:05
  SPEAKER_00: As Lydia Polgreen reported in the New York Times, protesters are carrying copies of their constitution, holding their country to its promises.
• 16:16
  SPEAKER_00: One detail says a great deal about the morality of this movement.
• 16:21
  SPEAKER_00: When police detained a group of students and eventually released the women, the women refused to leave until the men were freed to.
• 16:43
  SPEAKER_00: And in France, students demanding teachers, decent school buildings, affordable housing, and a fair chance at university have drawn parents and workers into the streets.
• 16:56
  SPEAKER_00: One protester looking across the Atlantic at us told the Associated Press, we don't want to end up like them, meaning us, the United States, where part of the population has everything and the others have nothing.
• 17:13
  SPEAKER_00: They hit it on the nose.
• 17:15
  SPEAKER_00: Imagine being the country whose inequality others march to avoid.
• 17:22
  SPEAKER_00: In all these movements, people are insisting that government answer to them, and they are using their might to change things.
• 17:32
  SPEAKER_00: That is part of what compelled me to write a modern declaration, a modern-day revolutionary pamphlet.
• 17:39
  SPEAKER_00: In the revolutionary era, pamphlets passed from hand to hand, challenging the authority of kings and asking people to imagine governing themselves.
• 17:50
  SPEAKER_00: Words helped inspire people and move them to act.
• 17:57
  SPEAKER_00: I wrote a modern declaration with that style and urgency.
• 18:02
  SPEAKER_00: We are watching a president treat our country as his possession, enabled by people who swore to uphold his constitution.
• 18:10
  SPEAKER_00: What happened to government by the consent of the governed?
• 18:14
  SPEAKER_00: What are we consenting to now?
• 18:17
  SPEAKER_00: Read it, carry it, pass it around, talk about it, argue with it.
• 18:22
  SPEAKER_00: We have a country to reclaim and promises to make good on.
• 18:26
  SPEAKER_00: The people in these countries are exercising their power.
• 18:31
  SPEAKER_00: In this election, we have to decide what we'll do with ours.
• 18:37
  SPEAKER_00: None of us can remain silent or neutral.
• 18:40
  SPEAKER_00: We must get ourselves and our friends and neighbors to the polls to vote for Democrats who can stop this rush towards fascism.
• 18:49
  SPEAKER_00: Even when I believe many of our fellow Americans have been literally brainwashed by radical right media, we can't overlook that the conservative beliefs that are being hammered by Trump and his minions live within our society and around the world and have been almost as long as men have existed.
• 19:11
  SPEAKER_00: FDR's policies that saved us from the depression were reviled by conservative Republicans, business leaders, and the wealthy, radical populists, libertarians, and free market economists.
• 19:25
  SPEAKER_00: I'll put it like this.
• 19:27
  SPEAKER_00: Some of us believe in the social contract, and some of us don't.
• 19:32
  SPEAKER_00: Some of us want to help our fellow men and live together with the equality our declaration declared, and some of us oppose that.
• 19:43
  SPEAKER_00: But I know this.
• 19:46
  SPEAKER_00: We can't look the other way.
• 19:48
  SPEAKER_00: We can't pretend that people don't know better.
• 19:53
  SPEAKER_00: We can't hide behind the social media that Mark Zuckerberg is manipulating us all with, or as Southerners who are trained to be, quote, nice, unquote.
• 20:06
  SPEAKER_00: We can't keep quiet because we don't want to upset some acquaintance we haven't seen in 20 years or neighbors down the block.
• 20:15
  SPEAKER_00: We've all seen the footage of Minnesotans rising up when federal immigration officers pulled their friends and neighbors out of their homes, snatched them from their jobs and at schools where they were leaving their children, detained them at scheduled court appearances, put them in concentration camps, and sent them to countries where they've never been.
• 20:38
  SPEAKER_00: We watched videotapes of ICE killing Renee Good and Alex Pretty on the street and Minnesotans standing up to them.
• 20:48
  SPEAKER_00: This election is our reckoning, yours and mine.
• 20:53
  SPEAKER_00: What will you do?
• 20:57
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you for listening to The Reckoning and thank you for being part of From the Inside Out.
• 21:02
  SPEAKER_00: Whether you're a longtime reader or listener, a free subscriber, a paid subscriber, or someone who's just found me, I'm grateful you're here.
• 21:11
  SPEAKER_00: Every one of you matters to this community.
• 21:15
  SPEAKER_00: If you value independent journalism and believe these conversations deserve a wider audience, please subscribe.
• 21:22
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• 21:26
  SPEAKER_00: And please share this essay with people you know.
• 21:29
  SPEAKER_00: Your support helps me keep writing, speaking out, and reaching more people.
• 21:34
  SPEAKER_00: I also hope you'll buy a modern declaration, my revolutionary pamphlet for our times.
• 21:40
  SPEAKER_00: Read it, give it to someone, pass it along.
• 21:43
  SPEAKER_00: I wrote it to remind Americans that this country belongs to us and that we have the power and the responsibility to shape its future.
• 21:53
  SPEAKER_00: And please vote on November 3rd.
• 21:56
  SPEAKER_00: Bring your friends and neighbors.
• 21:58
  SPEAKER_00: Our democracy needs every one of us.
• 22:01
  SPEAKER_00: Until next time, from one tiny speck in the cosmos to another.