Bob Garfield (0:00)

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And here's Pima County Sheriff Clarence Dupnik on CNN Horse, holding fast to his belief in what set the stage for tragedy in Tucson last Saturday. It's my belief that the hard right is deliberately fueling the fire against public officials, elected officials, government and the administration. He repeated it even after FBI Director Robert Mueller described such a portrayal as premature. And after the media storm that followed, led by such notables as the Bill O'Reilly, Sheriff Dupnik has turned a horrific murder case into a political circus. Who does that serve? Sheriff Sarah Palin. Journalists and pundits should not manufacture a blood libel that serves only to incite the very hatred and violence that they purport to condemn. And Rush Limbaugh? Hey Sheriff, I'll bet you hope he's acquitted, right? What do you know about it? I don't know anything. I just know how liberals are. Sheriff because it's always somebody else's fault, right? Sheriff it's never the guilty's fault. They didn't do it. Somebody made them do it, right? Sheriff Jared Loughner was known for making death threats in Pima County. Some even suggest that the sheriff's remarks were motivated by guilt in failing to avert his rampage. But others find larger reasons for discounting his view. Slate's Jack Schaefer observed that such words as targeting, attacking, destroying, blasting, crushing and burying have long guided political thought in action. And that, quote, only the tiniest handful of people, most of whom are already behind bars and psychiatric institutions or on psycho meds, can be driven to kill by political whispers or shouts. Shaffer wrote that quote asking us to forever hold our tongues lest we awake their deeper demons infantilizes and neuters us and makes politicians no safer. After all, the Republic survives even though incivility has become the tenor of our times. Keith OLBERMANN this advice. Mr. Bush shut the hell up. In an ideal world, all discourse would be civil and all disagreements cordial. But our founding fathers knew they weren't designing a system for perfect men and women. Sarah Palin's placing of Gabrielle Giffords district in crosshairs on a map during the last campaign did not result in Giffords being shot in the head. Should we then avoid the incivility of confronting the potential impact of our modern media echo chamber where the most alarming accusations resound unchallenged? And the possibility that the apocalyptic rhetoric paints a portrait of a terrifying reality even for those of sound mind? Radicals are creating the conditions to stage a revolution. I know it sounds crazy. I know how it sounds. You think I want to be the guy on TV telling you this every night? I don't. Or my favorite don't retreat. Reload. And that is not a call for violence. I want people in Minnesota armed and dangerous on this issue of the energy tax because we need to fight back. Day number 74 of a country I am proud of, Obama attacks America. We need to defeat these bastards. We need to wipe them out. These are not fringe figures. These charges, these calls to arms issue forth hour after hour from the leading cable news channel, from a radio host so influential he was dubbed in the New York Times Magazine the brains and spirit behind the Republican Party and from our elected officials. Rhetoric did not kill six people last Saturday and wound 14 others. But every once in a while there is a need to assess where we are and where we are going. And perhaps now is one of those times. There is in this country, and there has been for too long, an ominous and sickening popularity of hatred. Back in 1963, NBC News anchor Chet Huntley was likely wrong when he suggested it was violent rhetoric that motivated the assassination of President Kennedy. But he wasn't wrong about the tenor of his times. You and I have heard in recent months someone say those Kennedys ought to be shot. A well known national magazine recently carried an article saying Chief Justice Warren should be hanged. In its own defense, it said it was only joking. But the left has been equally bad. Tonight it might be the hope and the resolve of all of us that we've heard the last of this kind of talk, jocular or serious. For the result is tragically the same. If politicians and pundits have the right to speak how and when they choose, surely those who listen have an equal right to choose the time to ponder what it means. In the absence of any connection between Jared Loughner's acts and the political speech that swirled around him, the question persists, what has the aggressive rhetoric done to our society? George Packer writes for the New Yorker, and he says Loughner's particular motivations for the shooting rampage aren't really the point. The point is that when this shooting took place, the fact that it made people realize how violent the discourse has become and how likely it was that something like this would happen meant that the two were going to be irrevocably associated. And in fact, to me, it's almost remarkable that there hadn't been a high profile attack because there had been many lower profile attacks or near attacks in our history. There have always been politically motivated attacks by mainly crackpots. There's also always been political rhetoric couched in the terms of war and combat. So what makes for example, Sarah Palin's crosshairs image of Gabrielle Giffords congressional district worse than what we've long been used to? I think historically it's ebbed and flowed. The 19th century was a pretty violent century. Politically, the 20th century was less so. In the last 10, 15 years, it has really heated up. What makes this atmosphere particularly dangerous is that those garden variety military metaphors are used in a context in which the Second Amendment is actually not a right being asserted. It's a weapon that's used in a kind of a coy way to issue a threat. If we don't get our way, we're going to turn to violence asserted not by fringe elements, but by, for example, Republican nominee for the US Senate, Sharon Engel. You know, if this Congress keeps going the way it is, people are really looking toward those Second Amendment remedies. They're saying, my goodness, what can we do to turn this country around? The key part of this is where it's coming from. It's coming from leaders in the right wing political movement and their media heroes. Let me just say one thing about Sarah Palin and the crosshairs campaign literature by itself, I wouldn't think that that's a particularly incendiary document. It's first, the context in which it appears, which is continual use of that kind of language of guns of war. And second, in retrospect, it just seems indecent. This woman was shot. Isn't it regrettable someone once put a crosshairs on her district. Now these are people who, as Orwell once wrote, are playing with fire without knowing that it's hot. They don't seem to understand the toxicity of what they've created. You talked in your post about static. Tell me, what's the static to which you refer? The incendiary language that is more and more the stuff of talk radio, cable news, and in more and more of mainstream news, which reports on cable news and talk radio. And it's as if now to qualify for the news, you have to be willing to say some pretty outrageous things because otherwise it's just not good enough to get you on the air. I'm not blaming those individuals for the shooting. In fact, there's a big gap between them. I'm saying in people's minds there was a natural association. It's as if people woke up and realized, I've been hearing really ugly language for several years now. And so it must have had something to do with those shootings. Well, it didn't. As it turned out, it could easily have. I wonder if it's just that we realize that this is what armed tyranny against an oppressive government looks like when it's written in actual blood. The shooting in a supermarket on a quiet Saturday morning in the most ordinary setting possible suddenly showed people this is what they're talking about. This is what a dead or wounded politician surrounded by other dead or wounded people is really like. And it's as if a kind of fantasy or hallucination that had been settling over parts of the country became real. And it was shocking for that reason. I want to go to 1995 in Oklahoma City. That was a crime committed by people who may or may not have had full command of their senses, but nonetheless knew exactly what they were about. That was an explicitly political act. And yet it seems to me that the conversation we're having now over the Arizona shootings is far more concerned with the political environment than the conversation was then. What's different? I think there was more unity about the horror of that event and what it meant. That event instantly delegitimized whatever appeal the militia movement, the far right fringe, might have had for anyone in public life. But this event, because the meaning is less clear here, the room for misunderstanding and false accusation and counter accusation is greater. And I think the political atmosphere today is worse. I wanted to tell you about some of our own deliberations on the show before we even had this conversation, because there has been no connection established between Jared Loughner's motives and the political environment in general, because he appears to be a paranoid schizophrenic. Acting out of his illness. There's a question as to whether it's fair to even discuss this issue. If there's no connection, why are we discussing the connection? It's a very difficult balance to strike between not assigning responsibility to anyone who isn't responsible and at the same time stating the obvious. We know that Gabrielle Giffords said on television early last year that she was concerned about the effects of the attacks on her. There was a very close association between her fear and her fate, but it wasn't a direct relation. And so to talk about it, one has to make those very fine distinctions. And. But to me, not to talk about it would be bizarre. For example, if the man who shot Yitzhak Rabin in 1995 were not politically motivated as he was, but were a paranoid schizophrenic, wouldn't the Israelis also have had to talk about the toxic atmosphere of charges of being a traitor and a heretic? I think we're in, if not quite such an extreme situation, a similar situation where the language has reached a point where public figures running for office were essentially saying, we're going to take up guns if we don't get our way. And then a woman is shot who feared being attacked and who had been under verbal attack for a whole year and whose opponent in the race last year used an M16 as a campaign tool. How can you not talk about that to me, it would just be bizarre not to. All right, George, thank you very, very much. Thanks, Bob. George Packer is a writer for the New Yorker. This is on the Media. Hello, podcast listeners. This is Brooke Gladstone and I am here with Alex Goldman, OTM producer and social networker extraordinaire. Hello, Alex. Hey. Yeah. We're here to discuss OTM's first crowdsourcing project. We're trying to track down which senator put a secret hold on a bill that had unanimously passed both houses in the 111th Congress, that is the whistleblower protection Enhancement Act. We figured if we could find out who put the hold on it, they would, I don't know, be embarrassed and pay the consequences for using what is a very anti Democratic tool to block a bill that had received unanimous bipartisan support. That's right. I mean, on the face of it, the idea of a secret hold seems so antithetical to the democratic process. So we just kind of wanted to simultaneously draw attention to that and draw attention to the Whistleblower Protection act itself by asking our listeners to call their senators and say directly to their staff, did you place a hold on the bill and get a confirmation that they did not. And if they can't say that they didn't, then we take that as a tacit admission that they might have. You also suggest that callers very civilly take names. In terms of accountability, what could be more important than getting the name of the person that you speak to at the congressional office? This way if we come out with 100 denials, then we can go back and say, well, we spoke to X, Y and Z and just follow up with the senators offices ourselves. One common question you've gotten on our website is how do you know that a senator isn't lying? There's no way for us to know. But it would be much more politically damaging for a senator's office to lie and then later be found out than it would for them just to tell the truth up front. Obviously, information is an enabling condition of journalism. So on. The media has a personal stake in it. But in the wake of the President's call to build a democracy that meets our children's expectations, we think citizens can play an active role that is civil, respectful and very much in keeping with the democratic process. Yeah, the response has been pretty heartening. We've had hundreds of people responding. Senator Mike Crapo from Idaho and Jeff Merkley from Oregon. They contacted us via email directly to let us know that they in fact were not the ones who put the hold on the Whistleblower Protection Enhancement act, were it only that all senators would be so responsive. If you're interested in participating, you can go to our website which is www.wnyc.org blowthewhistle. There you'll find a database that has the names of all the currently serving senators and you can find their contact information and phone numbers and you can use that information to call them. Thank you, Alex. Thanks Brooke. This is on the media. I'm Brooke Gladstone. And I'm Bob Garfield. For the past year, a Voice of America television show produced in Washington D.C. has hit a nerve with Iranians both inside and outside of Iran. Parazit, which means static in Persian, is a weekly half hour of political satire. Often compared to the Daily Show. It skewers Iranian politicians, religious leaders, anyone who the show's host Cambiz Hosseini and executive producer Saman Arbabi cash on Iranian state run television making hypocritical, false or absurd claims. Parazef can't be seen on TV inside Iran except via illegal satellite dishes. Many of its fans follow it online on YouTube, Combiz and Saman Say its Facebook page gets more than 17 million views every month. And that the inspiration for the show arrived, as most great ideas do. We were drinking at the bar. Guinness. Guinness, yeah, that's what we said. We said, why don't we start a satire show? Now the show is intensely political. At least it's intermittently intensely political. Was that the idea from the beginning? No. We wanted to do a cultural show. But like anything else in Iran, any subject tends to be political. Just the question of hairstyles. The government of Iran, the Culture Ministry, came up and they introduced, I think, 10, I think it was nine different hairstyles that were dictated to all the barbershops. Iranian state television did a completely irony free report on the recommended hairstyles. How did you handle it on your show? The state media runs so much garbage like that that people have become immune to it. So we basically take that stuff, turn it around, and we give it back to our audience saying, look, guys, we know you're used to hearing this stuff, but seriously, let's listen to this carefully one more time. Is this acceptable? And that's where the humor kicks in. Yeah. We found out about you guys reading about you in the Washington Post. A very good piece that compared you to the Daily show with Jon Stewart is Parazit the Daily Show. If we could be used in the same sentence as the Daily show, we're flattered. We never had a political satire TV show to look up to in Iranian media. So I would say, yeah, we got a lot of experience watching Jon Stewart. I was wondering if you could describe for us some of the segments that you have done. I can give you one of our most popular segments. We did. This crazy nutjob came on state media. I forgot his name. And he basically said that he has proof that in order to go to heaven, you must speak Arabic. And non Arabic speakers will definitely not go to heaven, and they'll end up going to hell. So what Kamiiz and I did, we did a skit. And the skit was about him and I trying to fake into getting to heaven by like, you know how we use fake IDs here in the States? By faking that we speak Arabic. So we basically repeated the same two words and we fooled the bouncer into getting into heaven. You mean like as if heaven were a nightclub? Right, right. And then the next scene shows that there's not much really going on in heaven. It's very boring. And all of a sudden, this revolutionary guy from the beginning of the Islamic Republic revolution who ordered the execution of so many people at the beginning of the revolution, like, thousands of people. Thousands of people. Who is a good person according to the Islamic Republic? His head pops up out of one of the clouds, and obviously to us, he's a mass murderer. And then that's where Cambiz fluffs and he says something in Farsi, and then that's where God finds out that we actually don't speak Arabic and we get kicked out of heaven. You raise an interesting point there, because, you know, while the Daily show is very good at locating hypocrisy and all the other stuff that reflects the worst of American politics, there aren't any mass murderers in the picture. Your satire really cuts very close to the bone on stuff that is in no way trivial. We use dark humor and angry dark comedy because for me, growing up in Iran, I felt a lot of suppression that caused a lot of anger. Not only for me, for my generation. Even though we are angry and we are a product of a revolution that we had nothing to do with, we're trying to manage to control this anger and try to talk to Islamic Republic government and say, dude, what you're doing to us is not right and we need our freedom back. But it is a VOA show. So literally speaking, you guys are agents of the government of the United States. How does that affect your credibility with your audience? We've earned our audience's trust because we've never taken sides with anyone. We've criticized Obama in the past. We've also criticized the green movement within Iran, the opposition leaders. So we've gained our credibility by just being balanced. We know that lots of people are watching us. In Iranian blog sphere, we make news every week that the state media in Iran, they're basically fighting back by producing shows that they're very similar to our show. Wait, wait, wait, wait. I gotta ask you about this. You're saying that the same state television that with a straight face presents stories on the proper way for men to get their hair cut is also attempting to do political satire? What does political satire from an authoritarian regime look like? Iran has a very complex political structure. Basically, what happened after the 2009 uprising, you saw a crack within the regime, and for the first time, you saw separation within founding fathers of the Islamic Republic. So what they're doing now, if they want to make fun of anything or criticize anything, now, they're divided. They're basically protecting only one side, which is Ahmadinejad Al Khamenei's post. Ayatollah Khamenei is The supreme leader of Iran, he's the mack daddy, and everybody else is fair game from the other side, for example, the opposition leaders. So they keep themselves very isolated. They're untouchable, and they make fun of everything else, which really screws up their credibility because it's ridiculous when you listen to what they're doing. But their jokes are really lame. I'm being really fair here. Seriously, I'm being really fair. The jokes are really bad. It's not funny. It's not funny. You can't laugh at those jokes. What would happen if you decided to go back to Iran? I think we're gonna go straight to jail and I can't take pain. If they torture me, I'm gonna make so many stuff up. You would not believe. Right now they're calling us CIA agents and they're calling us all kinds of names. Mossad agents. When you undertook this project, you understood that for the duration of the Iranian republic, you would be Persona non grata in your home country. That can't have been an easy decision to make. Did you talk about it honestly? No. Because we are fighting to have that country back. You know, those people who died on the streets, you know, they were our brothers and sisters. You know, they were just like us. You know, to be honest with you, we're here in D.C. we have it far better than those guys do over there. So we didn't sacrifice anything. What I think, honestly is happening in Iran is a genocide of hope. You know, depression is huge in Iran. You have no future whatsoever. That's a sad story for a generation that they're brilliant, they're bright, they have dreams, and they want to change their country and the world. Kambiz Aman, thank you very much. Thank you, Bob. Thank you. Thank you for having us, Bob. Kambiz Hosseini is the host and writer of Parazit, and Saman Arbabi is the show's executive producer. They spoke to us from Washington, D.C. saturday, January 15th marks the 10th anniversary of Wikipedia, the free, web based, crowdsourced, multilingual encyclopedia. The Pew Internet and American Life Project reported this week that 42% of all American adults use Wikipedia and that it's especially popular with people under 30 and or those with a college degree. Actually, some of those traits describe viewers of Comedy Central's Colbert Rapport with Stephen Colbert, who makes jokes about Wikipedia's open door editing. I'm no fan of encyclopedias. I've said it before. Who is Britannica to tell me that George Washington had slaves? If I want to say he didn't. That's my right. And now, thanks to Wikipedia, it's also a fact. Wikipedia's susceptibility to online vandalism made headlines in 2006 when journalist John Siegenthaler checked his own Wikipedia page and read that he was a suspect in both Kennedy assassinations. Not true. Wikipedia has since altered its policy regarding editing the biographies of living people. More recently, it was slammed by Fox News after it found what it called child pornography on the site. The fact is, Wikipedia's greatest weakness is the byproduct of what Sue Gardner, executive director of the Wikimedia foundation, calls its greatest strength. Roughly 20,000 hardcore volunteer editors and 100,000 occasional ones who correct, update and patrol its 17 million or so articles. She offers this description of the hardcore Wikipedian. The quintessential Wikipedia editor is a 25 year old guy, normally a graduate student and typically kind of overrepresented in the fields of science, technology, engineering and mathematics. Does it worry you that the lack of diversity could affect the editing? I mean, really, it has to. Absolutely, yes. 87% of Wikipedia editors are male, and so topics that would associate or correlate with being female are certainly less well covered than topics that correlate with being interesting to men. Right. We have 100,000 core editors in our core editing community, so there is a lot of diversity in that pool. But there's no question that our quintessential editor is that young male person. Would you say that 80% of the work is done by, you know, a relatively small group that makes changes every day or a couple of times a day? Yeah, I would say the majority of the work is done by those very, very committed editors. But you need the infrequent editors who just happen to know something about a particular topic area and they do 10 edits and then they don't do anything else for six months. You need those people because that's really where you get your bread. But you also need that core community to keep the machinery in motion, to be patrolling for vandalism, to be systematically fixing errors where they exist, to be doing dispute resolutions and protecting pages and all that. So you really need both kinds. That core has plateaued in recent years, has it not? Does that worry you? Yeah, I mean, the number of active editors has been flat since 2007. We don't know what to make of that because there's never been anything like Wikipedia before. There's a school of that says, of course activity is going to be highest when you're Building something out of nothing. And then once it's built, this school of thought argues it goes into kind of a maintenance mode. And at that point you need fewer editors to maintain a mature Wikipedia as opposed to building one. Do you subscribe to that school? I can't afford to subscribe to that school. So how do you stop the plateau from becoming a decline? The first thing that you need to do is figure out what are the impediments to people's editing that have no benefit and you just want to get rid of them. Wikipedia was started in 2001. At that time, everything you did on the Internet was difficult. Now, 10 years later, it's really easy. Right? Flickr is easy. Twitter is easy. Facebook is easy. Editing Wikipedia is not as easy. So the first thing that we did was kick off a project to increase the user friendliness of Wikipedia. And then the second thing that that we're doing is trying to create invitations and persuasive messages to people about why we think they should edit. Who are these people you're reaching out to? We have a big initiative called the Public Policy Project, which is a project designed to increase the quality of articles in Wikipedia on public policy topics. So we're working with, I think it's 16American universities, and what's happening is the professors are assigning Wikipedia, Wikipedia article writing as coursework in their classes. Sue. It's such a 180 from the classic professorial position. They don't trust it enough for their students to cite. But some of them want their students to participate. Yeah, I mean, my understanding is that you shouldn't cite any encyclopedia. Encyclopedias are jumping off points. But having said that, I think there's been a shift in academics towards Wikipedia. I was in Berlin a couple years ago at a Wikipedia Academy event, which are these outreach reach to schools events, and I was talking to a mathematics professor who came to the academy to learn how to incorporate Wikipedia into his classroom. And I asked him why, and he told me that he felt like if people are going to Wikipedia to get information, then he had a moral obligation to make sure that the information on Wikipedia was as good as it possibly could be. Fair enough, but it's kind of like saying kids are going to have sex anyway, so you should teach them to use condoms. Yep, yep. But I'll take that. So Wikipedia is offered in many languages and there are different editors, each with their own rules and practices. Can you talk about how different Wikipedias are different, like German Wikipedia or Arabic Wikipedia? I think it's fair to Say the German Wikipedia is the best language version. It's accurate, it's comprehensive, it's well maintained, the articles are longer, the articles are well referenced and so forth. It's. Germany is a wealthy country, people are well educated, people have good broadband access. So the conditions for editing Wikipedia are there. And the fact that German people were able to meet face to face and talk about policies and talk about procedures and so forth, because they're geographically located in a relatively small area for the most part. And they may also have to do with the German national character, I wouldn't speculate, but they might. Careful. Yeah. We know, for example, that the folks from the French Wikipedia have told me that in their early, they allowed recipes in the French Wikipedia. As far as I know, that's the only language version that actually allowed recipes. Eventually, they did not allow them. But it's interesting, right? It may mean something, it may not mean something, but it's interesting. Talk to me a little bit about the occasional power struggles that arise between the hardcore editors and the administrators of Wikipedia. Craigslist had some scandal with sexual material on the site, and Craig Newmark just took it down. Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, in response to the Fox charge of child porn being on the site, unilaterally stepped in and deleted content. And in the wake of that, he got slammed by the hardcore that charged him with enforcing a kind of editing superpower. That wasn't fair. Doesn't having so much power spread out among an editorial hardcore hobble Wikipedia from being able to respond quickly to a crisis? No, they respond very quickly. Let me give you a tiny example. One of the first things that happened after I joined Wikimedia was I got a phone call from an old friend of mine who said, this guy I know is being maligned in Wikipedia as a polygamist, I think. And so I left my office and I said to one of our staff, I said, what do we do in those instances? And they said, I'll just go on IRC and tell somebody. And in seven minutes, that piece of the article was gone. In a newsroom, it would still take some time, right? Like, you'd want to talk to your lawyer, you'd want to check your sources. You want to have a couple, right? But your friend had an inside track. She got to call you. She did. But there are lots of ways to communicate with Wikipedia. There's an email queue that you can write to, right? There's always somebody awake and there's always somebody looking to see how they can help. Consensus decision making can take time. But they also have a really terrific bedrock of policies and procedures that guide them and enable them to make quick decisions. Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales was just on the Daily show saying that the essential nature of the enterprise will stay the same. But I'm still wondering, can you balance this kind of anarcho democracy with order and accuracy? See, I don't see those two things as in conflict. When you allow people to contribute information freely, they will. We couldn't have predicted it, but now we know they will come together and create an encyclopedia. 17 million articles, a thing that's useful enough that 410 million people every month use it like it works. There's a famous sort of joke on Wikipedia which some editor made in the early days, which was, wikipedia cannot work in theory. It can only work in practice. Yes, there are tiny errors. Yes, there are typos. Yes, sometimes the writing is not fabulously smooth and engaging, but it gets better all the time, and the proof is that people use it. Sue, thank you very much. Oh, you're very welcome. This was a pleasure. Sue Gardner is the executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation. Coming up, Blue Valentine's screenwriter on getting her movie made. We knew her when she was Nothing. This is OnTheMedia. Support for OnTheMedia comes from constant Contact, offering an event marketing service that provides registration tools to small businesses and nonprofits. Constantcontact.com the Kauffman foundation, working to advance innovations in education and entrepreneurial success. Learn more@kauffman.org and the Langloth foundation foundation, supporting innovation in physical and emotional healing for underserved populations@langloth.org this is NPR. This is on the Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone. And I'm Bob Garfield. In 2003, we aired a story about a nearly impossible feat trying to get an unknown screenplay by a nearly unknown screenwriter made into an actual movie. Everyone's got a screenplay, right? Very, very few end up on the big screen still. Screenwriter Cami Delevingne and director Derek C. In France set out for the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah, that year, hoping for a deal. They came back with no money and no deal, but with a glimmer of hope. Here's Derek Cnfrance talking to his mom. I won the award, and then I'm flat broke. That's why I'm signing with an agent now. Mom. He's thrilled. Jack thinks it's just what we needed to do, you know, jumpstart Blue Valentine. I said, okay, well, I just want to know if Radical is going to put Blue Valentine on the front burner now. And he says yes. What did he say, Cam? He said yes. He said yes. The big movie deal didn't happen for us at Park City, but it didn't mean it was never going to happen. On the bus ride to the airport, Derek said, this is the dream, so I'm going to go and live it. We knew that we were going back to New York, playing a whole new ball game. Seven and a half years later, Derek and Cammie now are living the dream. Blue Valentine with Michelle Williams and Ryan Gosling opened recently to rave reviews. So we asked Kami to come back to talk about the very long road to the silver screen. She says coming home from Sundance was a reality check. We came back expecting that the phones were gonna start ringing off the hook and it didn't happen. And you wait and you hustle and you rewrite and rewrite. I think that the count for the number of drafts that we had of Blue Valentine stands at about 66. Is the film that was shot more or less what your last draft looked like? It was always the intention in the writing that it was going to be a blueprint. And the director improv'd a lot of the scenes with Ryan and Michelle, who, I have to say, took the skeleton of what we wrote and gave it the real meat and bones and did an amazing job. At any point as you were viewing the edited film for the first time, were you going, no, no, no, no. You completely missed the whole idea I was getting at. Oh, you. If they did miss the whole idea, I would have done that. But they didn't. They got exactly what this movie was intended to be. And there's only one so small. But my dad used to cheer me up when I was a kid by telling me he was gonna eat my toes. And in the opening scene, Dean, Ryan Gosling's character, he tells his little girl, who's sad, he's like. He's like, I wanna eat your hand. You know, I'm so hungry I could just eat your hand. No, no, just let me have a bite of your hand. Okay, Just one bite. That was the only time that I was like, what? Why didn't he just say toes? Because that's what my dad used to say. But that's. Yeah, I mean, it's obviously perverse. I mean, who eats a kid's hand? I know. Piggies. Gobble piggies. Next project, I have just completed a TV pilot called Whip Smart about a kindergarten teacher by day, dominatrix by night, which is Very, very fun. I'm also working on a comedy about a kind of a luckless talent agent out of Queens. This conversation is going to send many, many, many people back into their desk drawers for the screenplays so that they can enjoy the spectacular success that you have with Blue Valentine. Have you any advice for those. What do you call it, Suckers? People who, like, tell me, oh, I want to be a screenwriter, and I say, I'm sorry, don't do it. You know, it's kind of like graduating from college. You graduate from college and you think that the world is waiting for you. Getting into the film world, you think that there are all of these people with money out there that are just waiting for you, and they're not, and you have to make everything happen. And for the director's part, he has believed in this project and hustled for it for 13 years. And you talk to everybody you can about the film, and eventually somebody will hear and somebody will make the first initial investment or it'll get into the hands of the right actor and they'll say yes, and then that's the whole new ball game. Well, Kami, it's so great to catch up with you, and I, you know, wish you all the best with Blue Valentine. Seems like you're off to a very good start. Reviews? Fantastic. Thank you so much for having me back. Cami Delevingne is the co writer of the movie Blue Valentine. It has opened in New York and la. To hear how the odyssey began nearly eight years ago, check out the link to Kami's piece on our site on themedia.org you always heard the ones you love you shouldn't hurt at all you always stay late. In the afternoon of August 28, 1963, a young preacher stepped to the podium on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial and looked out over the assembled crowd. Then Martin Luther King Jr. Did what many preachers do, but never so memorably. Using a blueprint he'd prepared in advance, he built a sermon. The Circumstances were exceptional. 250,000 people a time, tactically chosen, a show of strength and purpose, an implicit threat. But for King, it came down to a moment and a process he'd spent a lifetime learning on. The media's Jamie York anatomizes the process that made the moment. Working from his notes, King started moving quickly through themes and invocations he'd used many times before, starting with the Emancipation Proclamation and the Gettysburg Address, a reference to the Gospel of Matthew. And by the fourth paragraph, the idea of the uncashed Check. This was an idea invoked most recently by James Baldwin and Malcolm X. The check uncashed a debt still owed, in a sense, We've come to our nation's capital to cash a check. When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note. Then King moved on, deploying the full range of his voice through a series of references to Gandhi's soul power, back to the Bible, repeating key phrases and pausing to hear the crowd's response so he could react accordingly. In those pauses, he came to grips with the conclusion he'd outlined in his notes. And around minute 11, he decided to improvise. He's able to sit there, listen to what the crowd is saying, and realize that his conclusion is terrible. I mean, it's not going to work. Drew D. Hanson is author of an analysis of the speech entitled the Dream. And so, right there, he's looking out at the crowd, Mahalia Jackson's behind him, saying, tell them about the dream, Martin. Tell them about the dream, Martin. And he just. He looks up from his tact and says, and so I say to you today, my brethren, so even though we must face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream. And Clarence Jones is one of his aides. One of his speechwriters is looking at. He's following along with the text. He looks up at that point and goes, he's off now. He's on his own now, and he just flies. Will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character. I have a dream today. On the one hand, King had acted on a spark of inspiration, and on the other was employing a skill he practiced and honed. What many scholars believe King did in that moment was to abandon his written remarks and draw on one of hundreds of ideas, references and sources that he'd committed to memory. In this case, an idea he'd been workshopping in front of audiences. The idea of a dream, a prophecy, joined with the riff on the song America, My country, tis of thee, with lyrics Samuel F. Smith wrote in 1831, this will be the day when all of God's children will be able to sing with new meaning. My country, tears of thee Sweet land of liberty of the. There was a tradition of referencing the song's irony in the face of racism. Ida B. Wells and W.E.B. du Bois had both done it, but King wasn't going that Far back, King was recalling a speech black judging clergyman Archibald Kerry had given 11 years prior at the Republican National Convention. Another memorable riff on America by Samuel F. Smith. There's no question you look at the two together. King's depending on that as his source. I mean, in some speech, King talks about how he gets this line from a great orator. He doesn't try to hide it. But then you look at what King does, and the material is totally different. I mean, Carey talks about the Green Mountains and White mountains of Vermont and New Hampshire. Well, that's a handful of words if you ever saw one. Kane makes it the prodigious hilltops of New Hampshire, right? He gets the internal rhyme on the short eye of prodigious and hilltops. It's this nice quick little phrase. I mean, there's no repeated phrase in Carey's original. Well, King takes it, and he puts in, let freedom ring from the prodigious hilltops of New Hampshire. Let freedom ring from the mighty mountains of New York. Let freedom ring from the heightening Alleghenies of Pennsylvania. Spend his entire life studying techniques of preaching. And for the rest of his life, I mean, he and his friends from seminary kept on this running correspondence about the preacher's art. I mean, one of them would write to him and say, hey, I tried the latter sermon, where you take an idea and you gradually increase the level of your examination at it. Or the jewel sermon, where you look at a theme from a number of different angles, like facets of a jewel rabbit in the bushes, where if you start going on an idea and you feel the audience responding, then you keep shooting at it, just like a hunter would keep shooting at the bushes when he sees them rustle to see if there's a rabbit in there. Thank God Almighty, we are free at last. But what are the ethics of constructing your sermons from the raw material of any ideas you encountered? Keith Miller is the author of Voice of Deliverance, the Language of Martin Luther King Jr. And its sources. There were hundreds of books of sermons published by liberal Protestants before 1950, 1960. And in my research, I traced not only King's use of sources, but these preachers were borrowing from each other. So you can read one book of sermons and there's a quotation from Shakespeare, and you might think that the person was standing up all night reading Shakespeare, but actually the same quotation from Shakespeare shows up in book after book after book of sermons by different people. And that's just the references found in the published sermons of white and black preachers King, of course, came out of a parallel oral tradition of African American preaching. There's a long tradition of African American folk preaching starting in slavery. Most slaves were forbidden by law to learn how to read and write. So they developed this oral tradition of songs and sermons. And the sermons, some of the sermons during slavery were still being preached in the 30s, 40s, and 50s, and were recorded on blues labels and soldiers. Somebody would find an unusual piece of scripture that people hadn't used much before, and then they float from one book of sermons to another, and one imagines from one oral sermon to another in different contexts. King saw the whole world as his sourcebook. He didn't make some great fine distinctions between what was his originally and what was someone else's. He would take the material and he would transform it into his own, no matter where it came from. Preaching, then, is an art whose first and foremost aim is to exalt God and move those in the pews. King used his oratory to construct common ground, drawing on references to political and religious morality that spoke to both blacks and whites. But the rules of preaching are in profound conflict with the rules governing intellectual property. King himself copyrighted the I have a dream speech in 1963. He directed all proceeds to the civil rights movement. But since his death, his estate, first his widow and now his children, have struggled with how to apply the law to King's legacy. Lewis Hyde is the author of Common as Revolution, Art and Ownership. He says it's a real puzzle deciding how to treat Martin Luther King Jr. S famous speech. Whether it should be a public, like a public park open to all of us, or whether it's a piece of private real estate that it's appropriate to charge fees to enter. I guess I first knew about this because it came up in regard to the famous civil rights documentary Eyes on the Prize. And in that instance, you find one case in which people wanted to use Martin Luther King's speaking and image and found it difficult to clear the rights for reasonable amount of money. Eyes on the Prize is but one example of King's estate monetizing and restricting access to King's written words, speeches, and likeness. Likewise, the estate has sued or demanded steep fees from academics, journalists and news organizations charging intellectual property violations. And almost without exception, they've won. Martin Luther King's heirs have treated his created work as a commercial property. They have used King's work, sold it to advertisers. One example is Cell Phone Co. A cell phone ad from 2000 in which King's speech is juxtaposed with Kermit the Frog and Homer Simpson. And so this is a reformulation of King's image and message, moving it from the political and spiritual sphere in which it began into a completely commercial sphere. Before you can inspire, we hold these truths to be self evident. Before you can touch that all men are created by, you must first connect. And the company that connects more of the world is Alcatel, a leader in communication networks. Hyde makes the point that the snippet of that speech that was sold to Alcatel is only 65% King's. The rest of the words are Thomas Jefferson's. No one I spoke to disputes that the King family have every legal right to make a living from the estate they've inherited. And where the line of commercialism should be drawn is a complicated debate. A 2008 study found that the speech was more recognizable to Americans than any other, and 97% of American teenagers recognized the words as Kings. But authors like Michael Eric Dyson, author of I May Not Get There with youh, the True Martin Luther King, Jr. Fear that the recognition is actually counterproductive if documentarians, journalists and researchers are denied reasonable access to the rest of King's legacy. As a scholar and as interested citizens, certainly I think that it would serve Dr. King's ultimate interests for the broader public to have access to his intellectual vision. And I think that's critical if we're going to combat some of the vicious mythologies about Dr. King that prevail. Lewis Hyde thinks the risks are greater still that King's speeches, the tradition he comes out of, makes an even larger point about how ideas and ownership enable or disable certain ways of being human. And in particular, I'm interested in collective being. I'm interested in making it easier for people to be public and social selves, as Martin Luther King certainly was. The risk is that if we turn everything into private property, it becomes harder and harder for us to have these common or collective selves, which is something we need. In anthropology, there's an interesting resurrection of an old word, which is the word dividual. So we live in a nation that values individuality. We live in a nation of individuals. But a dividual person is somebody who's imagined to contain within himself or herself the community that he or she lives in. So it would be nice if we began to have a better sense of how to own and circulate art and ideas, such that we could be present in our dividuality as well as our individuality. King was a genius as an activist, poet and preacher who, to borrow a phrase, made hope and history rhyme. But for Hyde, genius like King's can only be fully realized when it has access to the world of art and ideas that King swam in and sampled from. This is our public selves, where our unique gifts contribute not simply to our individuality, but to better our community. And for Hyde, this potential is lost when we confuse categories and place ideas like King's ideas he himself thought were divinely inspired solely into the category of commerce. For on the Media, I'm Jamie York. That's it for this week's show. On the Media was produced by Jamie York, Mike Volo, Nazanin Rafsanjani, Alex Goldman, PJ Vogt and Sarah Abdurahman, with more help from Andrew Parsons and Carlin Galetti, and edited by Brooke. Special thanks this week to WNYC archivist Andy Lancet. Our technical director is Jennifer Munson. Our engineer this week was Dylan Keefe. Katya Rogers is our senior producer. Ellen Horn is WNYC's senior director of national programs. Bassist composer Ben Allison wrote our theme. On the Media is produced by WNYC and distributed by npr. I'm Brooke Gladstone. And I'm Bob Garfield. Support for on the Media comes from the Ford foundation, the Jane Marcher foundation, the Overbrook foundation, and the listeners of WNYC radio. This is NPR.