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[Music] welcome to on contact today we discuss how writers are often the first to understand the major shifts in a society with the author Russell banks I just believe that if you lift the rock of bourgeois respectability you see underneath these kinds of realities on contact with Chris Hedges the Israeli writer and dissident beriev nari asked an Egyptian general how the Egyptians managed to surprise the Israelis when they launched the October 1973 war the general answer instead of reading the intelligence reports you should have read our poets the deep malaise and sickness that has enveloped American society the rage and widespread feelings of betrayal is really captured and almost never explained in the pages of newspapers or on television to grasp what has happened to the United States the savage economic and emotional cost of deindustrialization the destruction of our democratic institutions the dark undercurrent of neo listing violence that sees us upset with mass shootings in malls schools and movie theaters the rise of the militarized state and the concentration of national wealth into a tiny cabal of corrupt bankers and corporations we must turn to our artists our poets our writers to see our true nature and our true identity what it means to be human at this peculiar moment in history our key correspondent Anja param Pell looks at the cost of deindustrialization on American workers visit American cities like Baltimore Detroit or Cleveland and you'll be charmed by the architecture and spirit of this country's heyday the buildings are elegant the people welcoming yet you can't help but notice the heart which once pumped blood into the streets of these havens is barely beating since 2000 the US has lost 5 million manufacturing jobs economists often point US trade policy including the 1994 implementation of the North American Free Trade Agreement or NAFTA China's 2001 entrance into the World Trade Organization which priced out the US with it Manufacturing and the rise of Technology economists argue the weight each of these issues have had on the disappearing of manufacturing jobs but they're gone and it doesn't look like they're coming back look at how individual states have fared between 2000 and 2010 Michigan hemorrhaged almost 50% of its manufacturing jobs absolutely devastating families and the local economy today only 8% of Americans work in manufacturing jobs compared with 24% in 1960 but so what the economy evolves and adapts right wrong see the problem is manufacturing jobs required skills and actually paid well today the average manufacturing job pays 20 dollars and 17 cents an hour but as manufacturing has collapsed in the u.s. no industry has replaced it instead today the largest employer in the United States is Walmart a company people celebrated when it raised its minimum wage for part-time employees to a whopping $10 an hour at least for most workers so if this is what our economic system has left us with we have to ask ourselves is it working Thank You Anya Russell banks who grew up in poverty and after dropping out of college was himself a laborer presents an unflinching honesty in his novel short stories and screenplays the voices and struggles of those who have been marginalized neglected and demonized by the wider society he makes those rendered invisible visible like Anton Chekhov he never romanticized the poor it he writes out of a deep empathy even love as he portrays what this country has done to the vulnerable from the disenfranchised white working-class to people of color especially African Americans who have endured one mutation of slavery after another he gets as few writers do that the fundamental story of America is the long battle between the oppressors and the oppressed few writers or artists in any genre have done more to recover the humanity and the dignity of those cast aside by white supremacy and corporate there are certain common themes that run through your book there's the issue of the relationships between fathers and sons but perhaps more importantly those who have been crushed turned into forms of almost human refuse by this system we call corporate capitalism and you started early in the 80s with continental drift how would you describe what happened to the country what are the what a lot of those forces done to us as a nation and what have they done to us as individuals I guess I could reduce it to two major evolutionary steps or leaps really between say 1985 when continental drift was published and now and and one is that we have really now completely articulated and expressed in full what was hidden with reading structure corporate and economic and political interlocked structure well they hidden what do you mean well we weren't conscious up and we weren't aware it were long to them well yes in an in a in a way and through images I could say but not in such a clear fashion as one has to have today and what's also interesting to me and parallel to that is how in these intervening years the presence of that control and power has become invisible itself to those who are controlled I'm struck as I've gotten older I become increasingly struck by the fact that generations pass within 15 to 20 years and in that period of time memory is lost and and so every generation looks upon its present experience as if it had no past and and I now in my late 70s and so I can remember the six keys that I can even remember that 50s well if you go back to continental drift there is a memory because it sits in these old where I also my relatives were these old New England said in what Catamount New Hampshire yeah that's right so it's these old former mill towns where you had Union jobs it's all gone and but at least in that book the memory of that is still there by the time you get to your latest novel you're right that memory has been completely oh yeah yeah and it's been digitalized and I dick yeah yeah yeah it's it's um it's remarkable to me I guess the degree to which memory and the speed with which memory gets lost in in America and perhaps elsewhere is wherever the world has now been so decentralized and where no one lives with anyone older than they are generally Hannah Arendt writes that without memory there are no limits on radical evil that's right why yeah well it's only through memory we're allowed to compare the present to anything else and to take its measure if you can't take its measure you only can take its measure through comparison if you can't take its measure then then you can't judge it you can't evaluate it you can't take a moral position with regard to it and that's really what we're facing I think today more than ever one of the themes that you write about is the destruction of community and at the beginning of the book there is a sense of community that's about a tragedy of bus accident where ten children are killed and similar and this is Sweet Hereafter sweetheart yes right so in and then the lawyers yeah what were you saying well there's a very there various reasons for that lawyers presence in the story for one thing I was trying to write about a community and there is no central consciousness or hero in the story it's it's a community itself a small town in various there are four main characters in it and the reason there are four it was a very primitive counting system but I wanted to employ a lot more than four but one wouldn't work two wouldn't work three is just we always triangulate four implies many but I needed also a link to the outside world and the lawyer is the link he comes in from the outside and then that implies in a way a kind of relevance to this story to the outside world and yeah that's when you get the lawyer the lawyer arrives and and I suppose that I was able to through his presence begin to see the litigiousness that lies behind our inability to accept and comprehend inexplicable events disasters this was written and well before 9/11 but I in a way after a few years when it was out people started reading it and these community reads in order to talk about and think about 9/11 how do we explain this who do we blame and do we do we can we blame anybody or any man of course it is a book that has a scapegoat thanks Kate right okay so they look a little bit less driver yeah right yeah and it ends in a kind of unlike some of your other novels there is a redemptive quality I think so I mean she accepts being the the the scapegoat she accepts that as her fate and and her role in the community it's a way of retaining a connection to the community is to take the blame and so in that sense it's redemptive it's still pretty grim yeah well you have there's a self-destructive quality I mean these forces of destruction that are visited on your car not only in terms of being cast aside by a capitalist system but also so many of your characters grow up in dysfunctional households sexual abuse domestic abuse violence abandonment which are the the natural consequences of poverty very often yeah yeah yeah I mean I bet so bernard shaw's the greatest crime is poverty all the other crimes yeah well I think that's true although I'm not in a sense strictly ideological about I just believe that if you lift the rock of bourgeois respectability you see underneath these kinds of realities and it isn't as peculiarly peculiar particular to two small towns in upstate New York or New Hampshire or wherever or South Florida under a bridge it's it's true across the right across the entire spectrum of humanity and those just happen to be the worlds I know best personally and and longest so my attention tends to get focused there but I know I'm writing about really humanity at large right and I've seen critics say that you write about the outcasts yeah that's not who I think you think you're well I don't you know I always have to remind them Jesus said that the poor will always be with us but what he was really saying I think and I'm not known in the original Aramaic but but I have a feeling what he was saying is there are more of them than there are of us and there are always I feel like I'm writing about the majority of human beings on this planet more than a majority I mean my attention goes out to those people and they are everywhere and so whenever someone says yes you're writing about the outcasts and the minorities it's not true I'm right there more people of color than there are people without color in this on this planet it will come back to that thanks when we return we'll hear more from author Russell banks on contact with Chris Hedges welcome back to on contact let's get back to our conversation with author Russell banks you have the ability I think of all great novelists Faulkner a disability to inhabit the skin of people who are different from you part of that comes I think from your ability as a reporter I mean you you you will go out and listen and you set race as one of the central themes of your understanding of American society in several of your books you present lift up the voices in continental drift there's a conversion between a Haitian woman and a white exile from New Hampshire and I mean you know their lives intersect why is race so important to our understanding of who we are as white Americans well I think first of all for me it's kind of historical discovery as it were back in the in the early 1960s when I was traveling through the south and then on University the University of North Carolina 64 the height of the civil rights movement through that period where I sort of reexamined American history from that point of view and realized that my god.this it begins in the 15th century in the late 15th century with this power grab that required genocide or relation to to people who were not white Europeans and and it continues all the way up through our present which Karl Marx highlights as the birth of modern capitalism well yeah I mean it is a point at which I think and you think of Shakespeare it's a point at which the moor becomes Caliban and it's a period like that's also the rise of the slave trade coincides exactly with that 10-year period and and the portrayal of Caliban as other all is and in fact and what Shakespeare was taking off is is a Native American yeah and but but I I think it was a historical insight that I got from my physical presence in the South as a New Englander and a shock really an awakening that occurred then and my studies at the time and my physical presence in the civil rights movement I mean these things were educational experiences for me beyond that it's hard to describe why I personally have been preoccupied with these themes other than the fact that they seem to have been borne out by by by time and and and by our present lives in America all the way up to you know to Ferguson and but you talk about Americans living in a racial fantasy right right America yes right and this is this is this is Baldwin's great theme and and it's also you know persistent all the way through but you know there's another side of it too at times I've thought about it why why why is I'm this nice privileged white guy how come I get so interested I must have some particular vein that I can point to and say that's why it runs clear and I think you know I grew up in the 1940s and 50s in a in a home that was characterized by domestic violence and alcoholism and in poverty and divorce my mother was a single parent raising four kids I was the oldest of the four and I think in my earliest years I felt marginalized even though of course in racial terms I wasn't and ultimate really in economic terms I wasn't even though we were poor we weren't homeless but but I felt that way and it wasn't hard for me as I grew older to transfer that without appropriating other people's experiences to say oh I think I know what it feels like to be marginalized for whatever reason for for race or for gender or but that led you you've got very I mean you move to Jamaica yeah you immersed yourself yeah yeah I think in a study of both Jamaican and Haitian culture history religion right yeah I had traveled in Africa and so but yes I've always made it a point to like keep on keepin on and don't let it don't just sit there and rewrite your last book and so yeah that's kept me more and your great exploration I think of race while it colors most of your work is of course clouds later it's central to clouds Madrid yeah I I this is the story of John Brown told through his surviving son right oh and again you're bringing in that conflict between fathers ah dunno yeah that's the little Abraham and Isaac right or II told from Isaac's point right right I'm yes but well at that came about rather through coincidence and happenstance in this early sixties and and I was at college and I was reading the New England transcendentalists in particular I became very much in love with the writings of the New England transcendence her son yeah and most of them were abolitionists and most of home admired Brown and certainly Thoreau did you pointed out in an interview which I think it's true that while white Americans may say well yes he stood up again he was insane yeah and then your response to that well I'm not sure which would well very well the response was you can only you can only believe that if you accept that's enslaving other human beings I saying yeah that but what's fascinating about that is that is that white Americans almost always think say exactly as you quoted that John Brown was well intended but insane black Americans don't think that at all they think he was heroic I mean for Malcolm X the Baldwin to whomever you want to ask the fun I think about Malcolm said he was the only white American knew he had any respect for Italy yeah WBT voices biography of bran was the first biography of brown that was sympathetic in any way and and so it was it was it's very interesting that that there's a racial divide on this man that's so extreme and yet nobody disagrees about the facts the facts have been known since 1859 right right about Browns life and times and and what he did and didn't do and so forth no one has uncovered any new facts but but diametrically to views of history opposed view of history it's really remarkable well that you're critical in many ways a brown his Puritanism yes his I mean undeniable acts of terrorism against unarmed right pro-slavery white civilians right right that makes it a complicated yeah it's not just you know one way or the other you thought it's gone there a heroic aspects of his character there also demonic a spell as I say our you know that's true that yeah yeah and it's it's it's it's true of all humanity all right yeah but yeah I mean it's Brown were alive today he would probably be on lithium and he would have been a nice unit area creature but what you described Presbyterianism once as a theological rationale for greed or something yeah let me just ask about this book and then we'll I want to ask you a trumpet but you have written two novels in the vein of Huckleberry Finn where you have that outcasts adolescent exposing the hypocrisy and mendacity and venality of the adult world including this one this last or it's not your last book but lost memories can where you have a 22 year old sex offender although as you point out I think one of the sex offenders in the book was a homeless guy who took a piss in a parking lot you know and you can become a sex offender but you know be reported but you're saying something about the digital age the digital culture the emotional impoverishment of it the the disconnectedness uh and I think the book that's fundamentally what the book is about it is certainly central the digitalization of our erotic lives in particular and and then watches porn II write if you if you digitalize your erotic life you have a lost memory of skin and and that's really central to it to the story and to the experience of this young man or boy really he's a 22 year old boy and and that may also be part of it too is that adult evolution into adult life is made much more difficult through well the digitalization of our erotic lives as well as every other aspect of our lives our economic lives our political lives and so yeah it is I think it's a it's a it's a it's key to that to that novel he lives through his screen and and yet he's not in any sense I mean it's not in any sense a book I think focused on on that fact of life it's his environment that's all yeah and and I wanted to show what it was like to be immersed in that as an environment where you had no point of comparison yeah you had no genuine outside experience that you could compare and see what was going on I mean I have I have a nine year old grandson and he has no memory of life without it being located on the screen which I think as you point out is deeply destructive to us unless it's frightening but because it it alters one's brain and one's whole perceptual apparatus of the world let me ask at the end and I think you would agree that the problem is not Trump Trump is what has been coughed up or vomited out for a decayed Society you've been Rihanna clean now for several decades right now I think that's true I mean we have now in place a system that makes a person like Trump not just possible but probably inevitable as president and and and you can tell that by surrounding himself with billionaires in generals he's it's it's it's really an oligarchy that price has come into existence but the seeds of it were certainly there long before Ronald Reagan and it's also the narcissism the cruelty the selfishness the dishonesty he really gives an embodiment mean to forces that you've been warning against yeah once you no longer have to hide it because you're so entrenched with power then it's okay to put someone like that out in front but up to now you know we have felt I think with lesser or lesser degree that we had to hide it and now we're in trouble now we're in trouble we're in deep trouble here we are Thank You Russell q thank you for joining us that was author Russell banks [Music] the convulsions of history have illustrated that those who are most acutely aware of the undercurrent that were shaping national destiny were artists Hannah Aaron and the origins of totalitarianism wrote that the only way to grasp the nature of anti-semitism in France before World War Two was to read Marcel Proust in search of lost time by door Dostoevsky understood the danger of a bankrupt liberalism Franz Kafka foresaw the murderous impersonality of the bureaucratic state that would see his own family consumed in Nazi death camps and Russell banks as for decades shown us the human suffering engendered by a society that sacrifices itself to the dictates of the global market he is not only a great writer but he is a preacher of sorts who implores us to see in the face of the other ourselves thank you for watching you can find us on 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