Real Change News | The best of our Q-n-A’s: He said, She said

December 30, 2009
Vol: 17 No: 1

Interview

The best of our Q-n-A’s: He said, She said

by: Rosette Royale , Assistant Editor
and Adam Hyla , Editor and Robin Lindley , Contributing Writer

n From the Middle East to Pugetopolis, from the Republican Right to same-sex marriage, Real Change brought you quotes worthy of Bartlett’s 2009

Junot Diaz

Photo by: Lily Oei , Contributing Photographer

Charles Johnson

Photo by: Mary Randlett , Contributing Photographer

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“Faulkner was asked what a writer needs to create what he had done. He said, “It ain’t talent.” I agree with him. Talent doesn’t hurt, but the main thing, he said, was “curiosity, insight, to wonder, to mull and to muse why it is man does what he does.” He said if you’ve got that, then talent doesn’t make much difference.”
—Andre Dubus III, author of “The Garden of Last Days.” [Nov. 11-17]

“People asked me if animals know when they’re going to get slaughtered. I had to answer that question in the ’70s, when I first started. I went out to the local [slaughter] plant in Arizona, and watched animals go up the chute. Then I went over to the local feed yard, and watched animals go up the chute to get vaccinations. The behavior was the same in both places. In fact, the feed yard was slightly worse because they were rougher in handling the cattle. The [slaughter] plant had five and a half foot fences, which the cattle could easily jump, and they almost never jumped.”
— Temple Grandin, co-author of “Animals Make Us Human: Creating the Best Life for Animals.” [Feb. 25 – Mar. 3]

“As I go around this country talking, and I ask how many people have read these [torture memos,] I get blank faces! All they have to do is go on the ACLU website and take a look at these Department of Justice torture memos or CIA Inspector General’s Report. They’re easily Googled! You can get them! You don’t have to read every word, but these things — these are horrid things, these are unconscionable things, and they were done in our name. And if we’re going to be a democracy, we have to take some responsibility for what’s done in our name.”
— Ray McGovern, ex-CIA analyst, critic of the use of torture in intelligence gathering. [Dec. 2-8]

“This is actually a huge problem that the military is confronting now. The number of suicides has reached an all-time high. A lot of troops come home after their service, pretend it never happened and try to move on with their lives. But I think many courageous ones feel a moral responsibility to talk about their experiences, and I think that’s really admirable. Many face hostility from their comrades; they’re called traitors if they talk about civilian deaths. They do it at great risk.”
— Laila Al-Arian, co-author of “Collateral Damage: America’s War Against Iraqi Civilians” [Nov. 4-10]

“I think that, actually, police work overall has changed to a large extent because of women’s influence out on the street in ‘talking’ people to jail, in having conversations as opposed to just immediately getting into a fight. [But] our society has also changed. I mean, the police departments of the ’30s, ’40s, ’50s were much more beat people to jail kind of departments than they are now, as a general rule.”
— Adam Eisenberg, author of “A Different Shade of Blue: How Women Changed the Face of Police Work.” [Nov. 18-24]

“In New York there’s Rikers Island, a whole island devoted to pre-trial detainment, and on visiting day on the men’s side there’s a three-hour wait, the visiting room is packed with all these women going to visit their men folk, whether it’s mothers visiting sons or wives visiting husbands or girlfriends visiting boyfriends. And then you go to the women’s side and it’s empty.”
— Victoria Law, author of “Resistance Behind Bars: the Struggles of Incarcerated Women.” [May 6-12]

“You do not solve that problem [of black women finding more professional success than black men] until you solve the problem of 70 percent of black children being born out of wedlock and 50 percent of them being raised in fatherless homes. You do not solve these problems until you solve the problem of the black family and its dissolution, because [as] the families dissolve, the communities dissolve. It’s a problem of young black male culture. I know what it is. August Wilson knew what it was, and we had to figure out how we were going to deal with it, so we didn’t wind up dead at 20 years old or in prison or with a criminal record. It’s a matter of the choices you make.”
— Charles Johnson, author of “Middle Passage.” [June 3-9]

“I do think that we get lots of great benefits from the new ways that we are able to communicate with each other. It is great to be able to connect with so many people and to find other people who share the same interests. But for a lot of reasons, I think that we should be wary of giving ourselves over entirely to surfing the latest wave of internet hysteria.”
— Bill Wasik, author of “And Then There’s This: How Stories Live and Die in Viral Culture.” [June 10-16]

“People need to overcome their fear of politics and their fear of holding power. And that’s a fear that’s pervasive on the left, and it’s pervasive among people who’ve been hurt by power: homosexuals, minorities. They need to understand that you can work outside the system in a protest mode and work within the systems, too, at the same time.”
— Max Blumenthal, liberal journalist, author of “Republican Gomorrah: Inside the Movement that Shattered the Party.” [Oct. 29-Nov. 3]

“Nobody wants to be reminded of how much body, sex and desire play a role in our lives, how uncomfortable we are with them, how attracted we are to them. It’s the role of an artist to remind us what we really are. And even though people get wigged out about it, it doesn’t stop me from reminding others that this is something that we’re really involved in. I mean, Jesus Christ: There are GNPs in the world that don’t match the U.S. consumption of pornography.”
— Junot Diaz, author of “The Brief, Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.” [Feb. 18-24]

“The United States is an anomaly. Same-sex marriage is spreading across the world: Nepal is thinking about instituting same-sex marriage, even Taiwan; Italy and Spain are more favorable toward it than America. So America tends to be an outlier in its intolerance of same-sex relationships. On the other hand, we do see that every generational cohort, including young evangelicals, are much more accepting than the one before them, at least of same-sex relationships. So I’m not predicting same-sex marriage, because I think there is a tremendous opposition to it, but I do think that same-sex civil unions granting most of the same rights of marriage is something that will eventually come to America.”
— Stephanie Coontz, author of “Marriage, a History: From Obedience to Intimacy or How Love Conquered Marriage.” [Mar. 11-17]

“The whole of the Middle East is a place where religion and politics are so inextricably intertwined that to not even acknowledge that is just asking for trouble. Is it possible? I don’t know. But the very idea that one can impose democracy is a fundamentally undemocratic idea.”
— Lesley Hazelton, author of “After the Prophet: the Epic Story of the Shia-Sunni Split in Islam.” [Sept. 16-22]

“If you travel on a highway through America today, a highway that was built in the 1960s, you will eat identical food everywhere in the country. There’s absolutely no difference. The food doesn’t express anything.”
— Mark Kurlansky, author of “The Food of a Younger Land” [Jun 17-23]

“People often talk about how very expensive it is to live in the central city. My daughter lives in Manhattan right now, her apartment is extremely expensive. She could live in a much bigger apartment in Kansas City or in the little town where I live. But in neither of those places could she do what she does in Manhattan, which is to live without a car. The direct and indirect cost of … driving is a very fuzzy cost and [people] don’t really think about it rationally.”
— David Owen, author of “Green Metropolis: Why Living Smaller, Living Closer, and Driving Less Are the Keys to Sustainability.” [Sept. 30-Oct. 6]

“The idea that Seattle has to purge itself of homeless people is misguided. I was appalled at the sweeping out of the camps and where people were finding shelter in greenbelts. Places like Nickelsville seem to both [raise] public awareness and promote the values that mainstream culture wants people to have — independence, entrepreneurship, civil society, compassion — and creating a way people can get back on their feet without being entirely reliant on the social service network. On the whole, it’s been a positive way to deal with a terrible problem.”
— Knute Berger, columnist on crosscut.com, author of “Pugetopolis: A Mossback Takes on Growth Addicts, Weather Wimps, and the Myth of Seattle Nice.” [Apr. 15-21]

“I knew [L.A.] was a place with a huge homeless population, but part of that I just chalked up to the great climate. But there are many other factors: It’s an obscene real estate market, it’s a two-dimensional economy, it’s haves and have-nots, rich and poor. And it’s very easy in a place like Los Angeles to not be able to pay the rent, to maybe descend into despair, to maybe take a drink, to maybe develop an addiction, to maybe have a mental condition triggered: And you’re on the streets. You just fall out.”
— Steve Lopez, L.A. Times columnist, author of “The Soloist: A Lost Dream, an Unlikely Friendship and the Redemptive Power of Music.” [May 27 – June 2]

“My sense is that 10-year plans to end homelessness are playing out differently in different places. My concern is that they are both conceptualized and carried out as a kind of triage, a way of containing the most obvious and egregious expression of deeper inequities. That said, maybe the emphasis we’ve seen in several places on “housing first” can be used as jumping off point to draw attention to the larger problem of the crisis of affordable housing.”
—Alice O’Connor, author of “Poverty Knowledge: Social Science, Social Policy, and the Poor in Twentieth-Century U.S. History.” [Apr. 29 – May 5]

“I don’t think this is the Great Depression all over again. I think that the white collar layoffs always get way more attention. As much as you and I both know white collar folks have been laid off, we pay a lot more attention to the high unemployment rate now because of the media frame. The real people that are bearing the brunt are not the people I’m writing about. They’re the people at the bottom half of the income distribution. The poor, the more marginal workers, always get screwed first.”
— Dalton Conley, sociologist, author of “Elsewhere, U.S.A.: How We Got from the Company Man, Family Dinners, and the Affluent Society to the Home Office, BlackBerry Moms, and Economic Anxiety.” [Jan. 21-27]

“The big issue for me is global poverty and we’ve got a billion people going to bed hungry every night and in 40 years that might be four billion. We’re going to need 70 percent more food on this planet, and there’s only two ways to grow more food: You can use more land or you can get more food out the land you’ve got. And I don’t think that we can use more land unless we want to mow down the rain forests, so that means: Let’s figure out how to get more food out of the land we’ve got.”
— Michael Specter, author of “Denialism: How Irrational Thinking Hinders Scientific Progress, Harms the Planet and Threatens Our Lives.” [Dec. 9-15]

“People need to accept that there are some horrible things about the international agriculture system — they don’t pay high enough wages, they do some horrible things to the environment, they promote obesity by promoting corn syrup over processed foods — but creating cheaper prices through mechanization is not a bad thing for poor people.”
—Joel Berg, author of “All You Can Eat: How Hungry is America?” [Apr. 22-28]

“My sense is this: Everyone of us, never mind the distinctions — Black, white, red, brown, yellow, rich, poor, educated, illiterate, suburban, urban, Republican, Democrat — all want the same thing: to live in a nation that is as good as its promise. Nobody’s asking for more; nobody ought to settle for less. But at some point we’ve got to move this country to a place where people live in a country that is as good as its promise.”
— Tavis Smiley, host of “Tavis Smiley” on PBS, co-author of “Accountable: Making America as Good as its Promise.” [Mar. 25-31] n

Interviews by ROSETTE ROYALE, ADAM HYLA, CYDNEY GILLIS, ROBIN LINLEY, COREY KAHLER and ROBERT ALFORD

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