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The New Yorker Radio Hour
Episode 61: Jeanette Winterson’s Christmas and Obama’s Legacy
00:55:34
The New Yorker’s political reporters assess the successes and failures of Barack Obama’s Presidency; Jeanette Winterson celebrates Christmas; and a poet visits the food court.
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- [00:04]
Jeanette Winterson
Floor 38.
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It's very exciting to be having a.
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Deborah Treisman
Conversation with someone when they have that revelation.
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Jeanette Winterson
I mean, it'd be good if you.
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Ryan Lizza
Have a source for it.
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Jeanette Winterson
Yeah. The telegraph from one World Trade center in Manhattan.
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Deborah Treisman
This is the New Yorker Radio Hour, a co production of WNYC Studios and the New Yorker.
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David Remnick
Welcome to the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. Today we're going to do a kind of status check on progressive politics. We'll hear from the director of MoveOn.org about how that group is responding to the challenge of Donald Trump. And I'll talk with some of the New Yorker's best political thinkers about the successes and failures of Barack Obama's presidency as it draws to a close. But there's more to life than politics, even now. So we're going to start off with Christmas. Christmas Days is the title of a new book of stories and recipes for the holiday. And its author might surprise you. Jeanette Winterson has been writing for 30 years about feminism, queer identity, sex and class, and she's written novels and essays and a memoir with the simply unbeatable title of why Be Happy when youn Could Be Normal. The New Yorker's fiction editor, Deborah Treisman, sat down with Winterson to talk about the new book.
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Deborah Treisman
You know, somehow I wasn't expecting a book of Christmas stories and recipes to come from you. So how did that come about?
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Jeanette Winterson
Well, look, I love Christmas because when I was growing up, it was the one time of the year when my flamboyantly depressed mother was actually happy. And that makes a huge impact on you when you're a small child. I mean, the house was warm, it was light, it was decorated. Instead of being, as usual, freezing cold, gloomy place of perdition and punishment, because, you know, she was Old Testament through and through. And I've carried it with me instead of, you know, kicking back at it. It's something that I've always delighted in. I like writing Christmas stories. And I realized earlier in the year that 4 already existed and somebody had asked me to write a fifth for this Christmas. And I suddenly thought, this is only February because we really crashed it through. I thought, hold on a minute. If I write one a month and I deliver in August, can the. Would the publishers like to do this? And they said, okay, you're gonna do that. So summer I've been writing Christmas stories, and I had to wait till it got dark or draw the curtains, then put the carols on. You know, sitting by the fridge with it open, thinking I must Pretend it's chilly having little. Little decorations and bits of robins hanging about to put me in the mood. But it worked. And then at some point I thought, hold on, there's. There's some recipes here, like my mom's mince pies and dad's sherry trifle, Kathy Acker's New York custard. And I realized they all had a story around them. I saw suddenly that the book, this is real knit your own Christmas book, that it was actually expanding and Grove Press, New York were having nervous breakdowns and saying, we can't do this. But actually everybody could do it. You know, it was absolutely not corporate publishing. It was back to the old days where you could do something because people were small and flexible rather than big leviathans. And. And we did it, and I got such pleasure and delight out of it. And I thought, actually, this is a fun book to have in your kitchen, you know, in your bathroom, and have a little bit of the season that's pleasurable rather than just miserable, you know, because all the news is so miserable. And actually, that's not the truth of life. There are good things, too.
- [03:23]
Deborah Treisman
Yeah. Yeah. Well, you know, I like what you're said about it not being a corporate book, because these recipes are not. They're not for the professional cook. This is just sort of.
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Jeanette Winterson
Are you trying to tell me something.
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Deborah Treisman
You happen to throw together when you dig into the fridge and you find some old cake.
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Jeanette Winterson
That's right, because that's. That you have to. You have to have old cake for a proper sherry trifle, otherwise it doesn't soak up the sherry, you know, I mean, most things are about how can we make do and mend, Aren't they? When people were inventing recipes. Exactly. Was that, what have we got in the garden? What have we got in the fridge? What can we throw together? You know, And I love that.
- [04:00]
Deborah Treisman
Well, let's go back to those Christmases when your usually miserable mother was happy. You said that, you know, instead of leaving out a treat for Santa Claus, you were putting out treats for the four horsemen of the apocalypse. So it wasn't all fun and games.
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Jeanette Winterson
Well, if you're a child, you know, anything's exciting. Because my mother and I were living in end times. She believed that it would happen at any moment. She longed for it and she thought it was a good thing. She wanted heaven and earth to be rolled up like a scroll. She wanted to start again. She hated her life. We used to have a drill whereby we'd practice for the apocalypse, which Meant I'd be asleep and then she'd come to the bottom of the stairs. We didn't have, you know, the Last Trump or anything like it. So she'd bang a saucepan or whatever, and then I'd have to rush downstairs and hide in the cupboard under the stairs with her, with all the tins of food that we'd stockpile, presumably, for when this event took place, and leave out these little gifts when the Four Horsemen passed through, you know, it's a bit like the plagues of Egypt and daubing the doors, they wouldn't come and touch us. And we would go to our mansion in the sky, Right.
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Deborah Treisman
So you wouldn't be instantly raptured, you would just. You'd be under the stairs.
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Jeanette Winterson
We'd have to wait for an angel to liberate us, she said. And that used to bother me because I thought, how are the wings going to fit? You know, these kids are very literal, aren't they? I knew angels have big wings, but she said the angel wouldn't actually come in under the stairs, he'd just knock. Which seems very polite for an angelic being.
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Deborah Treisman
Well, you've also. You've written a lot in the book about this. Not really the pagan aspects of Christmas, but just the kind of hodgepodge that was thrown together from different traditions and myths to form what we now call Christmas.
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Jeanette Winterson
Yeah, absolutely. And I've done that so that people can feel liberated about making their own Christmases. It doesn't have to be something which is bought off the shelf or handed down to us on tablets of stone. It comes out of the Roman Saturnalia, it comes out of the Celtic feast of Samaim, which begins on All Hallows, Leave the Feast of the Dead and goes on until February. You know, the Christian church and part of its success was always going and. And appropriating other people's festivals and then giving them a makeover and selling them on as their own. And they did that brilliantly with Christmas. I mean, there's no December 25th in the Bible and clearly it was not snowing. I mean, that's the Middle East. It just wasn't going to happen. And now, you know, we've just got this great tradition now where we got Joseph and Mary standing in the snow in some place giving birth to the Christ Child. I love all of that, but I also love the. That we've made it up as we've gone along. And also the power of Christmas that the Puritans, both in England and in New England, banned Christmas for years, precisely because they thought this is too pagan. What's it got to do with Jesus?
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Deborah Treisman
You kind of carry that sort of paganism over into the stories. A lot of them have this kind of ghost story, supernatural, eerie, fairy tale elements to them.
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Jeanette Winterson
I think Christmas does, doesn't it? I mean, it's a time when you can legitimize magic, when everybody's just hoping for that little bit of sparkle and that somehow reindeer can fly. But ghost stories in particular have a resonance. And I think that's because Christmas, to us, whether you're in America or you're in England, seems to come out of the 19th century with the greatest Christmas story of all, Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol, a story so powerful it can survive the Muppets still being the best ghost story ever. Those visitations from other realms. And I think partly there's a great theory about this, that it was because the 19th century was a century of specters and visitation and ghosts and apparitions, is because everybody had low level carbon monoxide poisoning as they were all sitting over their coal fires and under their gas lamps. You know, and I have tried this, and actually you do go pretty wuzzy and fuzzy. And if you add to that thick fogs outside and out of industrial quantities of gin, you probably are going to see something.
- [07:48]
Deborah Treisman
Yeah.
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Jeanette Winterson
But also, you know, that 19th century, it's a century haunted by itself, isn't it? Because it's incredible wealth, but also such devastation of the human condition there where human beings were looking themselves, like living spec, you know, ragged, half clothed, underfed, the legacy of the factories. And so that century of haunting, I think, projects forward its own ghosts, its own terrors. And I love writing ghost stories. I like that shiver and shudder, you know, I want to frighten myself, so I thought, let's put some in here. You know, the point is that we. Not that we believe them, but that we have a good time.
- [08:26]
Deborah Treisman
And in a way, the whole sort of, as you said, the whole Christ story, the birth of Christ story, is. Is a sort of fairy tale, you know, that's been re. Situated and relocated in our minds.
- [08:39]
Jeanette Winterson
Yes. I mean, all superheroes have to have a divine father and an earthly mother, whether it's Hercules or Superman. You know, we know all of that, that somehow this person will have extra powers, superpowers that will save the world. And so it's something our consciousness seems to need. And, you know, sadly, we're seeing it now in a very baleful form, you know, in the search for the strongman. That myth has Never gone away. And there's no point not looking into our psyches and pretending that we've developed because we haven't. We have to look into our psyches and say, hey, how come we still want this? The Christmas version, at least, is much better.
- [09:17]
Deborah Treisman
At least Jesus wasn't tweeting.
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Jeanette Winterson
Yeah, he wasn't. I guess he would be, though, if he could have been.
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Deborah Treisman
Going back to your own Dickensian childhood, you said somewhere that when you were locked in the coal hole as a child, you had two choices. Either either count lumps of coal or tell yourself a story, and you chose the latter. What were you doing in the coal?
- [09:40]
Jeanette Winterson
Well, you know, it's a limited activity, counting coal. Once you've done it a few times, you know, it loses its charm. But the unlimited world of the imagination was different. I don't think my parents thought they were cruel. I think, you know, lots of other kids were being locked in coal holes. Look, this is. It does look Dickensian. This is a long, stretchy street of small, low, huddled terrace houses. A Y with an outside toilet and a coal hole. That's what we had. Do you know, there's no heating, there's no nothing. You know, we didn't have a fridge until I was in my teens. I'm being brought up in the 1960s and even when the fridge came, nobody knew what to do with it because, A, the house was so cold, so what? You didn't need to put anything in the chiller, and B, if you had food, you ate it. You know, that's how we were.
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Deborah Treisman
Yeah. Now you were a reader as a child, but you didn't have any books in the house, really. You had the Bible.
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Jeanette Winterson
No, no, no. We only had the Bible because she didn't want me to have influences. So. So what I used to do is go to the library because like, like most people, Mrs. Winterson was contradictory and also a hypocrite. So although we weren't allowed any books, she had to have her murder mysteries. And I thought, what is it about books that are so powerful? And, you know, she did have this great phrase that the trouble with a book. That's how she pronounced it, you know, your listeners will manage this northern accent. She said that the trouble with a book is that you never know what's in it till it's too late. So books were forbidden. And of course, anything that's forbidden, you want, don't you? So when I went down to the library, it was an old fashioned Carnegie library. Andrew Carnegie's money paid for it. And there was the Great Wall of books that just said in English literature, in Prose, A to Z. And I had no idea what to do. So I started at A. What would you do?
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Deborah Treisman
What was the beginning?
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Jeanette Winterson
Well, you get Austin, the Brontes, you get Dickens, Elliot. It's really good. The beginning of the Alphabet. And things were going fine to your comrade. And then I got to N and I got to Nabokov and then things fell off a cliff a bit and I thought, wow, what's the matter with the mature female body? I think that's when I discovered my feminism for the first time.
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Deborah Treisman
You know, I haven't ever heard anyone say that Nabokov incited feminism in them.
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Jeanette Winterson
It was the disgust about the mature female body, which I'd always found very attractive. I thought, what is this revulsion? So that made me start thinking about male attitudes to female bodies and most importantly, female sexuality. I mean, proper grown up female sexuality, not kind, come on, teenage stuff.
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Deborah Treisman
And how old were you when you read it?
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Jeanette Winterson
16. Yeah, so I was, you know, I was having sex myself and I was very into, into that passion intensity that you have in when you're young and you're, you're finding out about love and sex and your body and what it means. But I've always found women beautiful and I've always struggled with the idea that at some point they're not, at least in the eyes of men. And that that was a problem. But it was also a good problem to have because then that set me thinking.
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Deborah Treisman
It also sent you away.
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Jeanette Winterson
Yeah, inevitably, because I did fall in love with another girl. And when, you know, Mrs. Winston found out, you know, the first time, we got over it after a horrific exorcism and I tried to be good and fit in and be in the church, but inevitably it happened again, you know, and I might as well said that I was going to marry a goat. And that's when she said to me, look, you either have to give up the girl or you have to leave home. And I think your listeners will understand that. You never give up on love, you never turn away from love, you never take the easy option or you always have to cross the borders of common sense because otherwise you'd be betray your heart. So I thought, right, well, I'll leave home. But I was 16, I didn't know where I was going to go. I ended up living in a car for a bit and my mum said to me as I was leaving, you know, why are you doing this? And I said, look, I don't know but it makes me happy. And then she came out with her classic line, why be happy when you could be normal?
- [13:31]
Deborah Treisman
Yeah, yeah.
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Jeanette Winterson
She was a violent philosopher.
- [13:34]
Deborah Treisman
And now as a child you'd been writing sermons.
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Jeanette Winterson
Yeah. I mean, there isn't much else to do if, you know, if you're stuck in the church in that way and that's the only outlet for you.
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Deborah Treisman
Yeah. But do you think that style of writing and all of the Bible reading and so on was what started you off on writing fiction?
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Jeanette Winterson
Definitely, because it is the grand fiction, isn't it? And still well worth reading. And it also has such economy of style. So in a very few short verses and in language which is exact and quick but also poetic and unafraid of meaning, you get the story. And you also get something which is deeper than the story, which is to me what matters.
- [14:14]
Deborah Treisman
What will you be doing this Christmas?
- [14:17]
Jeanette Winterson
We'll have a big party on Christmas Eve, which we always do for anybody. It's open house, really. And I have a ritual on Christmas Eve which I always start with, which I say, there's a. There's a program on the BBC Radio 4 which is Carols and Nine Lessons and it lasts for 90 minutes. And I always do the same thing every year. I make my own bread in the morning. I get some smoked salmon, put it all together, make it beautiful, have a bit of pink champagne, light the fire. And that's the beginning of my time of reflection and contemplation, remembering the dead. And then, of course, yeah, I go out and party. And why not, you know, life should be joyful where we can find it. And listen, I'm really lucky I'm not in some miserable, horrible, dead end northern town counting coal. I got away and I was able to tell stories. I've got a lot to be thankful for. So for me not to be thankful will be a kind of sin against the like.
- [15:11]
Deborah Treisman
Well, thank you so much, Jeanette. It was great to talk to you.
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Jeanette Winterson
Thank you. I've loved it. And can I say happy holidays. Merry Christmas.
- [15:19]
Deborah Treisman
It's allowed. Merry Christmas to you too.
- [15:23]
Jeanette Winterson
Thank you.
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David Remnick
Did you hear that, folks over at Fox News? The war on Christmas is officially over. You're welcome. That was Jeanette Winterson talking with the New Yorker's Deborah Treisman. You can find out about Winterson's new book, Christmas days@newyorkerradio.org this is the New Yorker Radio Hour. More in a minute.
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Jeanette Winterson
Sam.
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Deborah Treisman
David.
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David Remnick
This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. As we wrap up this month and get ready for the holidays, the new year and all of that. We should pause and take some stock of a momentous eight years coming to a close. The end of the administration of Barack Obama. Like so many people at the magazine, I've been writing about Obama for quite some time. And I'm going to get a chance now to talk with two very tough minded political observers, Ryan Lizzo and Amy Davidson, staff writers who cover politics for the New Yorker. And I think it goes without saying that we're talking from the vantage point of right now. We're not trying to predict exactly what happens after January 20th and Donald Trump takes the oath of office. We have all been, I think it's fair to say, covering in one way or another, Barack Obama for the better part of a decade. Ryan wrote the seminal profile of Barack Obama and his years as a politician in Chicago. Amy has been writing so many columns about Barack Obama. When she first began writing them and I encountered the president, he looked at me very sternly and said, who is this Amy Davidson person and why is she in my face so much? So we all have a fair amount of experience writing about this president. And I recall an anecdote before he became president and Barack Obama was walking around a gallery of portraits of the presidents. And he said to the person he was with, he said, I don't want to be just one of those normal presidents. I want to be a consequential president. When we think of consequential presidents, we think of Ronald Reagan on the right, Franklin Delano Roosevelt on the left, Teddy Roosevelt, Lincoln and all the rest. I want to begin with that. Do you think it's a lock that Barack Obama will be considered by historians as a consequential president?
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Ryan Lizza
I do, actually, I do. And I could just start by telling one quick story. I first met him in early 2004 when he was a state senator in Springfield, Illinois. And I remember walking into this committee room to watch him oversee the very important issue of whether a toy known as the Yo Yo Water Ball was too dangerous for kids to purchase. That was early 2004. He would be president, elected president four years later. But after that yo yo waterball hearing, we walked around Springfield and he showed me some of the sites, some of the sites that Lincoln made famous in Springfield, including a window where Abe Lincoln allegedly crawled out of to avoid a tough vote. And I asked him what the Democratic Party, what the future of the Democratic Party is. And even then, what was on his mind was that Bill Clinton's presidency, whether it was his own fault or the Republican opposition's fault had descended into small ball. And that progressives and Democrats needed to come up with a governing philosophy that could tackle big, big problems. That was all the way back when he was not even a US Senator. He was thinking about how the Democratic Party could achieve big things. You don't get to do that unless the circumstances are right and timing is everything in politics. And he came along at the right time and I'm sure he didn't think it was a great thing at the time. But the financial crisis of 2008 and, and this sort of devastation of the Bush presidency and the massive Democratic margins that were swept in with Barack Obama in 2008 really did give him a historical opportunity, and he used it. Those first two years will go down in history on par with FDR's most successful legislative period and LPJ's.
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David Remnick
Let's pause on that. So that was probably the most dramatic opening of a presidency in American history, which is FDR's. And you think that the Obama experience in the first year or two was the equivalent?
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Ryan Lizza
I wouldn't say it's the same, but the fact that he passed the Affordable Care act, which changes one's relationship with insurance companies, you can no longer be denied insurance because of a preexisting condition. That's important. The Dodd Frank reform bill that really did change a lot of the rules, the way Wall street works, that's a big deal. An 800 billion stimulus that first year that was stuffed with Democratic priorities that would have made Bill Clinton tried to pass a $16 billion stimulus when he was president and barely got it through. So I think the enormity of those first two years often gets lost because there was so much going on, there was so much legislation being moved that we would forget how important some of that stuff is. Throw in the automakers, bailouts, things ground to a halt after that. And there's no doubt that those first two produced a dramatic conservative backlash that defined the next six. But those two alone, I think, mean that he will be regarded in that pantheon that you talked about at the beginning.
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David Remnick
David and yet those first two years are often pointed to as the source of so much resentment that the economic rescue program by the Obama administration is often pointed to as the source of white working class resentment because jobs were not the priority so much as financial repair, that the repair was done by people from Goldman Sachs, et cetera, et cetera. You know, the outline of the campaign message in this last go around, Amy, how do you assess those first Two.
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Amy Davidson
Years in particular, I think that Ryan pointed to two really important moments of, of forgetfulness. Things are sometimes strangely harder to remember when you're closer to them than when you're farther away. I think we might find that with exactly how precipitous the moment was and how much was accomplished in terms of stabilizing the US Economy and getting it back to a place of building. But also the forgetfulness of what Ryan mentioned, that moment in 2004 where this guy was going to be president in four years. And that's not just about a remarkable personal story. It's also a reminder about the possibilities of politics and the upsets of politics. It's a pity almost that the Democratic Party in the years that followed kind of forgot that, as if Obama was a one off. And that idea that politics has had unexpected possibilities was something that they could really, really push and build on Ryan.
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David Remnick
We hear a lot about the temperament of Barack Obama, a certain kind of dignity that's now being contrasted all the time with someone who tweets about a steel union president or has things to say on Twitter at the middle of the night. There's a big contrast between the Trump temperament and the Obama temperament, by the way, both of whom won national elections.
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Amy Davidson
As Obama would say, twice.
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David Remnick
Yes, but in the Obama case, was there any downside to that temperament of restraint, subtlety, elegance, and the rest when it came to politics itself?
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Ryan Lizza
Yeah, I think that's a great question, because if there's one downside to it, you might argue that Obama was. Is cautious to a fault. We'll probably talk some foreign policy, and I think that's where that may have come into play a little bit more. But I think there's a decent argument actually from progressives that he didn't take advantage enough of the majorities he had in his first two years.
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David Remnick
On what issues in particular?
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Ryan Lizza
The two big ones. And look, there's only so much bandwidth that Congress has. So the response to my argument would be, no, no, no. Nothing else could have passed in those first two years, but the two big domestic priorities that he had that never had another chance were immigration reform and the climate change bill, the cap and trade bill. Now, I've argued in the past that he didn't push hard enough on the climate change bill and he actually could have passed it. Others who know the Senate very well think that's wrong and that there's no way some of those coal state Democratic senators ever would have come around on that issue.
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David Remnick
This is an existential issue. I mean, no matter what we're hearing from the new EPA person under Trump and so many climate change deniers, I think it is widely understood, widely understood, that this issue come 20 years from now or 50 years from now, we will look back and rue the day that we didn't pay sufficient attention to this. Did Barack Obama move quickly enough or did we fiddle while Rome burns?
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Amy Davidson
I think that there is nobody on this planet who has done enough really for this. Maybe a few scientists, but he can point to things, to boxes he's checked on climate change, but no. And to make it durable, to make it something that even Donald Trump can't roll back, to get it going. I mean, he's been mocked for saying that climate change is a national security priority. He obviously believes it's. I think we're all going to be a little bit ashamed as a generation, as a country, as these things go on. Has he done enough on climate change? Nobody has done enough on climate change.
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Ryan Lizza
It really is the trickiest political problem because it's short term pain. And you do have to admit that there's pain associated with addressing climate change economically for a gain that to most Americans won't really be seen or felt except that we will avert catastrophe. And that's such a difficult political case to make because as you both know, nothing gets done in Washington unless there's an acute immediate emergency.
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David Remnick
Then the question is, what is with these pathetic people?
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Amy Davidson
This is a human question about politics. You heard it during the campaign. This politician has no choice. This politician has to do this. He has this position in the Republican Party. So he has to back Donald Trump or he has to say that this sense of what idea that politicians have.
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David Remnick
How is that not pathetic?
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Amy Davidson
It's utterly pathetic. And it's something that has to be challenged at every turn. And I think in the next four years has to be more. And I would put this on, there are areas where, where Obama has suffered from this too, not just in climate change. Guantanamo, the idea that it can't be closed politically.
- [27:47]
David Remnick
But I'm going to risk your ire and maybe those of our listeners for saying Guantanamo. Well, it's absolutely an issue that's deeply troubling in legal terms, civil liberties terms. We're talking about a very small handful of people and not an existential threat to the planet.
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Amy Davidson
I would agree in that you could say that about almost anything in climate change. You could say that about Obamacare and climate change on some levels. But I wouldn't underplay Guantanamo. When we talk about Guantanamo, we're not Just talking about X number of people in this space.
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David Remnick
You're talking about principles of.
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Amy Davidson
We're not just talking about principles either. We're talking about legal mechanisms that have been put in place and in some ways fortified under Obama. We have now, so a process for indefinite detention without trial. You don't need a lot of people in Guantanamo for Guantanamo doesn't matter. You make an excellent point.
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David Remnick
You make an excellent point. Now, Barack Obama came to the presidency and managed to win in his campaign against Hillary Clinton in 2008 with a great difference on one issue. It was Iraq, it was foreign policy. And he leaves office now, now claiming to have ended the wars in Iraq, in Afghanistan. And yet the legacy is much murkier than that. We have a situation in Afghanistan that's incredibly perilous. Iraq, we are right now helping in an attempt to regain the second biggest city in Iraq, Mosul. ISIS is still not defeated. And ISIS 2.0 will probably look a lot like Al Qaeda as a kind of underground terrorist organization with a tax abroad. Syria, where we decided to opt out for all the reasons we know and understand, is a catastrophe of the largest proportion. Not only is the country destroyed and fractured and there's a half a million people dead, the resulting immigration has destabilized politics throughout not only the Middle east, but the European continent and changed politics there and pushed it to the right.
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Jeanette Winterson
Right.
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David Remnick
How can Barack Obama leave office, in your view, and just feel that retrenchment vis a vis the Bush administration and the American tradition is an unalloyed success?
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Ryan Lizza
Yeah, I think this is. Foreign policy is the area where caution has served him well in a number of cases. But he was cautious to a fault in some other important ones, including the ones you mentioned. His entire political identity when he came into office on foreign policy was that he was the guy who was against the Iraq war, who called it a stupid war. Stupid war in that famous speech when he was a state senator. And I do think that reputation pushed him to not take as seriously what would happen if he pulled out of Iraq prematurely. I do think that there's a credible argument that ISIS's rise was enabled by the vacuum that was created. I mean, if for no other reason, the fact that we had no more leverage over Maliki as he pursued that awful sectarian campaign that only helped isis. I know the White House disagrees strongly with that assessment, but I do.
- [31:24]
David Remnick
Well, what the White House will say, what Barack Obama will say, and there's. There's legitimacy to this point, is that just in conventional foreign policy, Establishment terms, the only way for the United States to assert itself legitimately is through the use of force. And we are going to break that pattern because that pattern has sent us into all kinds of conflicts that we are now deeply sorry for, whether it's Vietnam or Iraq or the rest. Why are they wrong? Why is Obama wrong? Obama says that one of his sources of greatest pride side was to put down the so called red line and then not cross it after the chemical weapons moment.
- [32:03]
Amy Davidson
It's a tricky thing. Now, one thing, it's become sort of a shorthand that Obama was unwilling to enforce the red line. But remember how he did it? He said, if you want me to do this, Congress has to be behind me. And Congress was like, oh, actually we thought maybe you could just do it.
- [32:21]
David Remnick
So that you would take the out.
- [32:23]
Amy Davidson
And so in that way, it was also a statement about executive power and, and war waging. That's part of the legacy and not only the fact that our hospitals aren't full of American soldiers who were wounded in Syria and a war in Syria that didn't take.
- [32:41]
David Remnick
Amy and Ryan, what was Obama's biggest accomplishment and his biggest failure?
- [32:47]
Amy Davidson
Well, preventing a real breakdown after 2008 and coming in and doing it quietly, doing it efficiently. You know, we're stronger now than we were in 2008 and I think better able to deal with Donald Trump. If we had a demagogue like Donald Trump with much higher unemployment, much greater poverty, we'd be in a more dangerous place. At the same time, inequality has to.
- [33:09]
David Remnick
Be the greatest, greatest failure.
- [33:11]
Ryan Lizza
Ryan and I think the biggest accomplishment are just the things that he prevented from happening. It's hard to argue a counterfactual, but the fact that the economic crisis in 2008, that he did not worsen that, the fact that we did not not go to war with certain states where if someone like Bush had been in office, we might have, I think his biggest failure. And I say this as someone who's very sympathetic to why he failed but was not putting in place a climate change policy that is sure to outlast the next president.
- [33:51]
David Remnick
Amy Davidson, Ryan Lizza, thank you so much.
- [33:54]
Ryan Lizza
Thanks, David.
- [33:55]
Amy Davidson
Thanks, David.
- [34:09]
David Remnick
You can read everything Amy Davidson and Ryan Lizza have written about the obama administration@newyorkerradio.org I hope we've got a few months to get through it all. Now, having lost the White House, both houses of Congress and the chance for a Supreme Court justice, the Democrats have quite a task ahead if they're going to matter in Washington at all. And meanwhile, a lot of liberal voters are feeling confused, angry and adrift. One of the people who has to lead this effort is Anna Galland, the executive director of MoveOn.org MoveOn is a civic action group. You've probably seen there are petitions for progressive causes popping up on social media all the time. It was one of the very first groups to recognize the possibility of online activism, starting by email. Back in 1998, Anna Gallen spoke with the New Yorker's Evan Osnos about where the left goes from here, here, and how.
- [35:11]
Evan Osnos
What's so interesting about this moment is we all remember that when Barack Obama was elected in 2008, Mitch McConnell famously said basically that they would do everything they could the Republican conference, to try to interfere and to obstruct his presidency. And now we find that on the left, there is a similar argument about Trump's presidency. Is there an argument to be said, well, what happened to when they go low, we go high, and trying to figure out some basis for. For cooperation?
- [35:40]
Jeanette Winterson
I mean, look, Donald Trump lost the national popular vote by 3 million votes. He has no mandate, and he's going to be trying to do the most extreme things in recent memory. And I think it's not just a policy problem, really. We're talking about, are we going to make it through the next four years with our constitutional democracy intact? That's the level of conversation we need to be having. We need to not just block Trump's policy agenda. We need to have a clear, movement, grounded strategy to survive the Trump era with our constitutional democracy and civil liberties intact. The order of the day here is to first stand up and project a clear moral opposition to what he's proposing to do to our country. That's actually pretty simple. It's just make sure that people hear and see from people that they can relate to that. I disagree with what this man and his administration are proposing to do to us. I'm standing, standing up. I'm being visible.
- [36:39]
Evan Osnos
What about the argument, though, that if Donald Trump, in fact wants to do things that are consistent with what liberal groups would want to see accomplished, for instance, a big infrastructure push, what's the argument against cooperating in that sense? I mean, is there room to work with him on things where you might have some shared objectives, even if you might object to him on the level of values and the things that he ran on in the campaign?
- [37:04]
Jeanette Winterson
I mean, there's both a moral case and there's a practical case against cooperating with Trump on basically anything. The moral case is you can't play footsie with a white supremacist. You just can't get into a situation where you think that you can work with him on some bill, but then look the other way when he's trying to deport millions of Americans or block an entire world's religion from entry into the United States. So there's a moral case that's just. You can't go there. You can't be in bed with this guy. But then I think the practical case is there's no way that an infrastructure bill or any other initiative from Trump is really going to advance progressive values. There's just no way. Maybe we'll get, like, three jobs out of it for communities that are looking for jobs. Maybe we'll get a few roads repaired, but at the end of the day, it's going to be a giveaway to billionaires and investors and not the kind of initiative that really is what we desperately need, which is, yes, a progressive, populist infrastructure bill for the people, not for billionaires. We do need that, just not Trump's flavor of it.
- [38:02]
Evan Osnos
One of the critiques of progressive politics at this moment is the sense that it is too easy to simply forward something or to sign it online by clicking on it and to feel as if you've taken meaningful action for your values. You've thought about this more than anybody else, really, in this business. You've been working on this for more than a decade. How do you square that problem of whether or not clicking on a petition or signing something online constitutes meaningful sacrifice in service of your moral commitments?
- [38:35]
Jeanette Winterson
That's a great question. So my thought on petitions is always, it's a step in the direction of the road we have to be traveling together. It is not the end of the story. It's not actually much of a sacrifice, although it is for some people who feel like making a political statement is uncomfortable for them. It is for some people, a step forward. But, I mean, the frame I almost want to use for it is necessary, but not sufficient. It's necessary for you to connect with communities that share common values. A petition is one way to do that, and it's one. One way that we can build big groups of people who share some common moral commitments. Right. So the petition, what it does functionally, as the person who runs MoveOn, what I can tell you is when you sign a petition, one thing that happens is we have a way to follow up with you and tell you, hey, there's a mass day of action that you can be part of that has this theory of change that will connect with these inside decision makers. And by being visible to the media and to each other and to decision makers, we have a chance of swaying the outcome. So the petition is like a. It's like a door through which you can walk into a room where you're in conversation with other people who share your values. And I do think one challenge that groups like MoveOn face right now is finding new ways to put our members in touch with each other so that they're not just signing petitions and thinking that they're done, but really entering a meaningful conversation about what we do from here. And I think that the level of creativity and the level of peaceful direct action that's going to be required in the days ahead is such a. That I want people to take that gateway drug. I want you signing those petitions, because that is a way that you're putting your marker down and saying, I believe this. I believe this with a lot of other people. And now let's move to action together.
- [40:16]
Evan Osnos
As we talk about digital organizing in this day and age and also protests, it's worth remembering that there was a time when there was a much more demonstrative, more vigorous kind of public protest when you had, for instance, activism around aids, when people went and literally laid down in the lobby of the fda. What's the prospect for the need for a much more vigorous kind of activism today?
- [40:44]
Jeanette Winterson
Yeah, boy. I think if you look actually at an example that's a little orthogonal to the Trump moment, although clearly the Trump moment relates to everything we care about. But if you look at what just happened around Standing Rock in North Dakota, I think that's a really interesting case of how frontline direct action is going to characterize the protests and the fights ahead. You know, that was an incredible example of people power winning. They won. We won. MoveOn members, you know, signed petitions. They made phone calls. They've contributed $100,000 directly to the tribe from small donor donations. And so we're proud to have been part of it. But it was a much broader moment that happened where, you know, led by Native American activists, tribes, supported by environmental activists, veterans, and others, a direct action with people putting their bodies on the line helped to drive policy in a different direction than it was headed. And I do think that's an example that we should keep in mind as we look at the days ahead.
- [41:50]
Evan Osnos
One of the questions that I hear a lot these days is whether people say, frankly, that the Democrats and progressives have been too gentle, frankly, in the course of the last few years and Whether there's something they should be learning from the nra, whether they should be learning things from anti abortion groups. What do you make of the argument that in fact there are some political arts that have been perhaps that have not been taken up as forcefully as they could?
- [42:18]
Jeanette Winterson
So your question is, are there dark arts that progressives and Democrats have not yet learned that we should be embracing?
- [42:24]
Evan Osnos
Right. Your word's not mine. But I'm genuinely curious whether you see there's an argument to be made that the NRA is the most effective political organization in the country today, whether or not you agree with their policy objectives.
- [42:35]
Jeanette Winterson
I do think we need to be fierce and fiercely committed to our values. And I do think we need to be creative, and I do think we need to be unrelenting. Sounds a little scary, but I think we need to be totally dogged and committed to the organizing a mass resistance, a mass peaceful resistance that can stand up to the gravity of the threat that our democracy faces. Does that mean. I don't know if that means I want to hire seedy lobbyists in state capitals who go around throwing money at legislators, but maybe all of that, except for the seedy part, is needed. So, yeah, I think that what can we learn from the nra? I guess I would say we can learn that big money can buy some things, but people power is often still stronger. There have been victories by gun control groups even in the age of a completely out of control NRA at the state level in particular. And I think we're just gonna have to keep being creative and dogged and we're gonna have to figure out how we use people power in strategic ways that wedge the Republican base against itself where we can.
- [43:45]
Evan Osnos
I'm curious, when you look at the Democratic Party today, or you look across politics generally, are there people, are there names that really excite you? I mean, let's be blunt here. If you look at the leadership of the Democratic Party, there are a lot of people of an older generation. Bernie Sanders is 75, Joe Biden, Biden is 73. Elizabeth Warren is 67. Where do you see the future of the party and who are you excited about?
- [44:12]
Jeanette Winterson
There's a real need to build up the pipeline right now. And I do think that needs to be a priority for progressives across the country. We need to be surfacing new talent, investing in up and coming leaders and building the bench so that we have someone ready to go who's an inspiring movement connected candidate as we get ready for 2020. And I think that work is already beginning. There are.
- [44:35]
Evan Osnos
But can I gently interject here and note that you didn't name anybody.
- [44:39]
Jeanette Winterson
So, Pramila Jayapal, let me give you one example. Yeah, it's a good challenge. I guess I just want to say that because I don't think I have enough names to give you right now, and that's a problem. Pramila Jayapal is one. Lucy Flores is one. There are leaders across the country, of course, Elizabeth Warren is someone that MoveOn members were thrilled about and invested in early. But there are others who are up and coming, and we're going to need more.
- [45:00]
Evan Osnos
Anna. Anna Gallon, thank you very much for joining us.
- [45:02]
Jeanette Winterson
Thank you so much. Really appreciate the work you do.
- [45:09]
David Remnick
That's Anna Gelan, the executive director of MoveOn.org Civic Action, talking with the New Yorker's Evan Osnos, who's based in Washington. I think that's enough politics for today. So let's take a break and go out for Vietnamese food in Flushing, Queens.
- [45:28]
Ocean Vuong
You can almost tell when the duck skin gets crispy at the rotisserie over there. It starts to change. And all of a sudden the air gets richer, a little more pungent when they put the garlic and ginger on.
- [45:41]
David Remnick
A trip to the food court with poet Ocean Vuong. That's coming up in a minute on the New Yorker Radio Hour Stick. I'm David Remnick. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. Ocean Vuong is 28, and he's had two poems published in the New Yorker. His first poetry collection has just come out called Night sky with Exit Wounds. Vuong was born in Vietnam and his work is full of images of that country. Although he grew up in the United States, now he's a New Yorker, and he recently took us out to Queens to one of his favorite places there in the neighborhood of Flushing, which is a hub for immigrants from all over Asia.
- [46:35]
Ocean Vuong
We are in the New World Cafeteria in Flushing, N.Y. and my friends and I, my Asian friends and I joke, this is the real Chinatown. They call it the People's Republic of Fluxing. You imagine the food court of any American mall. You have, you know, Taco Bell, Wendy's, you know, except here it's like every region. There's kimchi, there's spicy pho. Dumplings are really great down there, my favorite. But I used to come here when I used to live in Flushing. It was the first place I lived in New York. It was 2008. I just asked around. I said, where can I go grocery shopping for Vietnamese food? You know, Asian food, just a bottle of fish Sauce. I'm vegetarian, except for fish sauce. I can't give a fish sauce. I lose my vegan, Vietnamese part. It's almost very much like life in Vietnam. There's little malls like this with little stalls. Here you have Korean food, Vietnamese, Chinese, and not to mention different provinces and the politics around that. I immigrated in 1990. I was two years old. And the space reminds me of my childhood growing up in Hartford, Connecticut, living in a one room, one bedroom apartment with seven of my family members who initially immigrated with me, most of whom were women. And essentially the apartment, it was a small Vietnamese village. English was not spoken and they were all illiterate down there. There's a noodle shop, these little stalls, you know. So when I grew up, I started reading books at the kitchen table. We didn't have a desk. The dining table, that was it. When I started writing, that became my desk. And I would always be surrounded by the women who cooked and the smells and the gossip, gossip, the stories that they would tell while they were cooking. And that's where you get the fresh basil and cilantro. They were all poets. They just didn't write it down, you know. And when I would read, my mother would come and look over my shoulder and she'll say, she said, they look just like ants. What do you get out of it? It looks like a bunch of dead ants. Don't your eyes hurt?
- [49:27]
Amy Davidson
Right?
- [49:28]
Ocean Vuong
And I couldn't explain it to her. How do I explain to someone who has never read? And quite frankly, they do look like dead ants. But this, for me, when I got here in 2008, I was just so happy to find this place. I couldn't believe it was. It existed, you know, because even in Hartford, there was only two Vietnamese, two Asian grocery stores. And that's where, you know, I remember my mom and I would shop as slowly as we can in the tiny little store just so we can hear you hear the gossip of the. Between the aisles and, you know, check up on people back in the old country. And so we would shop very slowly, slowly, you see that the beef over there is smoking up the steaks. And after a while you start smelling that and the ducks. You can almost tell when the duck skin gets crispy at the rotisserie over there, it starts to change. And all of a sudden the air gets richer, a little more pungent when they put the garlic and ginger on. It's actually quite great to be here when it's really busy because you see all the energy and the shouting. People argue and gossip you know, and I would just read here, I would just take out a book, you know, like this, and I would just pretend that I was back in that kitchen in Hartford with my family. You can sit here for hours without here hearing a lick of English. Me as a Vietnamese person, I don't understand completely what they're saying, but I've always felt, you know, estranged as an immigrant in America. But here it's like another level where you are estranged within people who are also estranged. Roland Bach, the French philosopher, says, if you do not have. Have a language, you must steal it as men steal bread. And that's perfect in a way. I was sitting here borrowing and stealing language, trying to find a little piece of home.
- [51:47]
David Remnick
Ocean Vuong, talking about the New World cafeteria. You can find the address at New Yorker Radio. And if you got a little hungry, hearing about the crispy duck skin, among other things, I'll meet you there in an hour. Now, six weeks ago, we did an episode of the program devoted entirely to the crisis in Syria. Over the course of the hour, we heard from policymakers and journalists and an innocent bystander living in the midst of a nightmare. That was Omar Daoud, who was stuck with his family in Aleppo as bombs rained down on the city and reduced it to rubble. This is Omar talking with the New Yorker's Adam Davidson. Yasmin Al Sayyad is translating. Your six year old has only known this life. Your ten year old maybe remembers a little bit before, but probably not much. Do you try and explain to them what life is like outside of a war?
- [53:11]
Amy Davidson
We don't talk about what life was like before the war. For example, when we're watching TV and a picture of an ocean or a sea comes up, they usually ask me, what is this, dad? What's that sink or basin looking thing.
- [53:29]
Jeanette Winterson
With water in it?
- [53:32]
Amy Davidson
There are a lot of things that they don't know.
- [53:35]
Jeanette Winterson
So I talk to them a lot.
- [53:36]
Amy Davidson
About how life was in Syria before and how that one day after the war is over, I would take them to the sea and we would go and take walks around the streets. I try to give them hope so that they wouldn't just give up completely on the future.
- [54:03]
David Remnick
The scale of the catastrophe taking place in Aleppo right now is unthinkable. We last heard from omar Dawood on December 3. He said that he might have a way to get out of Aleppo, and we're praying that he did, but he hasn't responded to our communications yet. If and when we find out what's happened to Omar and his family. We'll let you know. I'm David Remnick. Thanks for listening and we'll be back next week with the New Yorker Radio Hour.
- [54:42]
Deborah Treisman
The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co production of WNYC Studios and the New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Meryl Garbus of Tune Yards, with additional music by Alexis Quadrado.
- [54:54]
Amy Davidson
This episode was produced by Alex Barron, Emily Bottin, Ave Carrillo, Rhiannon Corby, Jill.
- [55:00]
Ryan Lizza
Duboff, Karen Frillman, David Krasnow, Sara, Sarah.
- [55:02]
Deborah Treisman
Nix, Michael Rayfiel, Mythali Rao and Steven.
- [55:05]
David Remnick
Valentino, with help from Becky Cooper, Rob.
- [55:08]
Deborah Treisman
Byers, Casey Holford, Corey Schreppel and Johnny Vincevans. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherina Endowment Fund.