Autograph with Finger Made Easy

Autograph with finger

[Music] hello i'm dianne kresh director of arlington public library and welcome to the opening of arlington reads 2021 arlington reads is made possible by the friends of the arlington public library whose continued support enables the library to provide the resources and services that build and sustain a vibrant community of readers thinkers and doers we would also like to thank the columbia pike revitalization organization cipro for sponsoring tonight's program please visit columbiahyphenpike.org to learn more about the incredible efforts and offerings provided along arlington's oldest and newest main street and thank you to you our library patrons we have been humbled by your continued patience and good will as we navigate this bewildering time we have booked several thoughtful and engaging programs for you this year to stay up to date on all library offerings please check out our website and remember to rsvp for the full roster of the amazing arlington reads 2021 lineup the theme for arlington reads 2021 is food for thought in homage to our local restaurants and food service personnel the pandemic has put a strain on most economic activity but it's the restaurant industry that has seen some of the worst fallout copied 19 has ripped open the seams of our fabric of factuality to quote hannah aaron it has exposed long-simmering isms like racism and sexism and illuminated social and economic inequities and while we have witnessed grace and compassion as our neighbors provided mutual aid we have also witnessed a corrosive rise in dehumanizing otherness a willful disregard for science and an allegiance to lies turn to words to help us see a way forward stories place our experience in a broader context the wider arc of history that compels us to acknowledge our shared purpose even if forces are at work to disavow our connectedness our resolve has been shaken our nation is not yet broken perhaps it is only unfinished as amanda gorman the nation's first youth poet laureate suggests in her poem for the inauguration of our 46th president perhaps this time is but one of many wrenching way stations on our path to becoming the nation we were always intended to be here to help us make sense of where we are now is masha gessen one of the most trenchant observers of russia and its history masha gessen is the author of 11 books including the national book award winning the future is history how totalitarianism reclaimed russia their latest book surviving autocracy is a bracing overview and essential reading for a citizenry struggling to wrap their heads around the unimaginable corrosion of the media the judiciary and cultural norms how do we move forward as masha says to be a democracy a country has to be engaged in the pursuit of imagining a democracy in times of crisis we need to be doing the work of imagining a staff writer at the new yorker they have covered political subjects including russia autocracy lgbtq rights vladimir putin aids medical genetics the intersection of art and politics riot and donald trump among others with that it's my pleasure to welcome masha gessen i'm thrilled to have you join us on the day after a historic occasion here in the united states the inauguration of our 46th president but before we talk about yesterday and your book surviving autocracy i'd like to cast your mind back two weeks to january 6 and get a sense of what was going through your mind as the events were unfolding at the u.s capitol um so first of all yeah it's great to be doing this event uh now and i haven't from most of the events obviously that i've done in the last eight nine months i wish that i could be there physically but but i particularly wish i could be there physically today so um what was going through my mind i mean um i had spent several months talking and thinking about political violence in the united states partly because i had written this book but partly because i was just in a few groups that were getting together before the election to try to talk through the scenarios of what would happen after the election and political violence was very much on my mind and very much a part of those conversations because it had already been happening because it was very clear that we have we had a president we had a president who was delegating political violence and that's also something that i thought about a lot right um it's uh you know because i spent 20 years writing about vladimir putin and at the same time in the fall i was writing the story of alexey nevane's poisoning and was talking to him and it's not an unrelated topic in my mind because for so long the the the political violence perpetrator in russia had that flavor of plausible deniability right um and it was a kind of delegated violence right it was it was always a sort of indirect incitement but but incitement nonetheless and a very clear message from the kremlin that there would be impunity for political violence and i thought that we were seeing the same thing happen here with a different flavor different sort of emotional valence as everything with trump but the same mechanics of of broadcasting this message that um that political violence is patriotic and there will be impunity so the other thing that i um i have spent even longer thinking about and it's really like my personal and write early obsession is the in between times like from the time i wrote my uh my first sort of commercial book which was 20 years ago and it was about my grandmothers and how they survived hitler's war and stalin's peace and i was i spent so much time thinking about how history collapses entire periods into an event but i thought you know what like what was it like to be in poland between september 1st and september 17 1939 like what did that feel like what was the expectation what did you think was possible and you know it doesn't take a genius to to to understand that that period between the election um and the inauguration was that kind of in between time that would eventually be collapsed into some one idea one line we still don't know exactly what right um but it was very clear to me that the fact that we hadn't seen any political violence or major political violence right around the days of the election or the initial announcement of biden's victory didn't mean we weren't going to see political violence right so that's that's part of what was going through my mind but that said right there there's a whole category of events that are surprising that are shocking but not surprising and this was definitely that it was shocking to watch it made my stomach churn even though it wasn't surprising and i certainly couldn't have predicted that it would look like that right so i i saw you do an interview with andrea bernstein many months ago i think shortly after the publication of your book in which you talked about the upcoming election and would it lead to violence and what were the conditions under which it would lead to violence if trump won by only i don't know a few thousand votes then probably lost yeah and then if he won by some millions of votes which certainly he did in the popular vote it would uh militate against that kind of response and yet he did lose by millions of popular vote he did not prevail in the electoral college and yet he had predicted all along that he would contest the outcome and and he did in ever more chilling and threatening terms and quite apart from the folks who were storming the capital that day and what their motivations might have been what about what i'll call for lack of a better term trump's enablers his cabinet the congress other people who knew that the election was fair and had been administered fairly and yet oh give him some time to get used to it oh it's okay oh it'll be fine what what do we say where's where's the responsibility and accountability for people other than trump who allowed this to happen i think that's that's two different questions so one is the question of what constitutes the landslide and i should have been more precise when i was talking to andrea um because because millions of votes as millions of popular votes don't necessarily constitute a landslide and what i mean is very simple you know uh if you look at the percentages uh the percentages of the vote that um that buy it in won by the popular vote it looks like a normal american election and that's the terrifying part to me right it's not even like the to me that's that's scarier than thinking about the 72 or 74 million votes that that trump got right it's it's that this looks like it's still happening within a kind of normal paradigm you know american elections for the last generation have looked like a coin toss 51.49 um and um before that you know we used to have just to see larger percentage margins but really you know for the last generation they have looked like again this one looks like so in my book it doesn't constitute a landslide and i think that's part definitely part about enable trump right i think in inner sense that there's a possibility that he could have won and i think you know just the awareness of the 70 plus million people who would cast their votes from but of course also the awareness that uh that he had effectively destroyed the system checks and balances he hadn't despite packing the courts he couldn't prevail in the courts but it is congress's actual job to exercise checks on the president like that's their actual job um and we saw before the interaction and after the insurrection the majority of house republicans refusing to do that job right um explicitly in the name of enabling trump right uh and explicitly in the name of rejecting the validity of the mechanisms that put them in in congress in the first place right right um i'm sorry go ahead timothy snyder uh wrote an essay in the new york times oh 10 days ago or so america abyss and he talks about gamers and breakers and the and roughly loosely characterizing the republican party in terms of those two camps the the gamers who just want to hold on to power at any cost the breakers who are anti-institutionalist etc um and and the question like where do you go from here because now the congress has changed hands the senate now is in the majority there were people in that body who stood up and chose to invalidate the the vote of you know many many many thousands of people and how do you pick up the pieces um impeachment is underway or will be shortly you wrote a piece in the new yorker what requirements do we make of our elected leaders at this point to say no we can't just brush this aside that was trump this is now healing move on what do you say to those uh elected officials who are now about to begin on a an impeachment inquiry so on the one hand i want to acknowledge how great the temptation is even for me right uh who spends their life writing about autocrats um to just never say trump's name again like that would be great um i feel physically freer today than i did for the last four years um and so the the the pull of that and the emotional um i mean the joy of it right is undeniable um and that makes it very very difficult to to call for something else and i think uh i'm gonna start sounding very strange i think but um but i'm i'm trying to describe something big and a little bit shapeless um you know i think that joy somehow has to be a part of that project and a kind of it has to have a liberatory goal i think that if i think it'll be wrong and and and counterproductive to think about the upcoming trial in the senate as a punitive project right that's how we tend to think of trials i mean that's how america we think of justice in america unfortunately we think of justice as sort of identifying the measure of guilt and assigning appropriate punishment that's really how our courts are designed to function they're not designed for what we need in this in this case which is a truth-finding storytelling project um it's a very different goal right um i mean we um the way sort of we think legally is uh is to brush aside anything that is not directly relevant to the charges at hand and we have to think in the exact opposite way i think when we think about the senate trial and that means it has to be much bigger than the second trial so despite the temptation to never say trump's word again trump's name again we actually i think have to commit to a giant storytelling project on a national scale that has to be led by the president and you know my my biggest argument in favor of that is that brushing things aside and sort of letting sleeping dogs lie and saying just let's just move on which is very much part of the american political tradition uh and very much i think a part of biden's sort of instincts uh that's never worked for a country it's never worked for humans individuals you know to just kind of say okay well yes that was you know years of trauma but i'm going to pretend that it never happened today is a new day and it's never worked for societies what has worked for societies and um you know we actually as as rich an experience that the 20th century gave us of totalitarianism autocracy it also gave us a very rich experience of post-autocratic countries post-totalitarian countries right and i think that they broadly fall into two categories countries that came up with a story and countries that didn't um and that's very much what the future is history is about uh it's you know it's about that absence of story in russian and in the sense that the story is even possible but to give you an example and this i'm going to just completely oversimplify but to give you an example of what i mean by story is you know the baltic states all basically chose a similar national story after the soviet union collapsed and the story was we used to be good we had a good society that was based on trust and then the soviets came and then the nazis came and then the soviets came again and we had five decades of occupation and all the terrible things that happened to us and all the ways in which we became our worst were a result of the occupation and now that the occupation is over we can be ourselves again and we can be you know we we can have a society based on trust right um i'm oversimplifying but also and of course that story is a myth right it wasn't quite so simple but broadly it's true and um and i think we need a broad true narrative that will propel us forward right and that narrative has to include a reckoning what with what happened during the trump years but also what made the trump years possible right and it's that last piece uh the preconditions that existed to create a climate in which we could have a donald trump or somebody worse than a donald trump and i'm i'm interested in your idea about story because i would say that right now we have two stories we have two competing stories there are the people who believe this and then there are the people who that who believe something different um and i am struggling both as a citizen and as somebody who works in a public library that that promotes truth and understanding and democratic values of education and information and fact-based information most of all and i don't know how to bridge that chasm and you've you've talked about story it sounds great i'm assuming that reconciliation or reckoning has to take on a form other than let's bring civics classes back to school because i don't i mean that that's important uh but i think we are well beyond that and just this morning in the washington post i read an article where someone was going over uh dan zak the writer was talking about the last 24 hours of the trump presidency checking in with various people both great and small and one person uh with whom he had a brief conversation said i will you know it's all nice that biden wants to do xyz but i will never ever ever ever ever not believe that the election wasn't stolen that wow like how do you begin to bridge something that is diametrically opposed um so you know honest answer i don't know if it's possible but i have a hypothesis and you know and i and i've heard that sort of thing as well i mean i i was listening to the new york times podcast the daily the other day yes and they were checking in also with a variety of trump supporters and there was this one woman there was this amazing moment for some reason that struck me the most but she wasn't like one of those really uh you know she was one of the insurrectionists or even the supporters of insurrection but she was convinced that the election had been stolen and the reporter asked her well what kind of evidence do you have to see to convince you otherwise and i think she answered very openly very honestly and she kind of went well i don't know a lot a lot i mean really there isn't that kind of evidence that that would convince me otherwise um that's you know that's all true i think that that um there's there's a kind of commitment to that narrative at the same time there's all this inspiring news from yesterday like you know a picture of a lone pro trump protester on the steps of the new york state um saying that he thought that there were going to be thousands tons of thousands of people there and he drove 45 minutes and there was no one there he was the only person there um there's there has been there have been reports that the proud boys are turning on trumpets calling him a loser right um i mean these are small information points and they may be inconsequential but it would be strange if that story weren't experiencing some kind of crisis at this point um he kept saying that he he won he kept saying that they would prevail and he he didn't even get his military big military sound send off right he really kind of had to slink away in in in shaming humiliation and um there is a kind of way in which charisma works the kind of charisma that can that can fuel a story sure that just has a way of draining away when when when we see the power has drained away right so this is a moment of incredible opportunity um and i think that there have to be people among the people who you know who live in that reality that doesn't overlap with fact-based reality who are there because they have a desperate sense of not belonging because latching onto any narrative is is better than than having no narrative right because they have in fact lived for a long time with a sense of overwhelming anxiety sure economic anxiety social anxiety racial anxiety um and and that anxiety can be addressed by more than one star and i think if there's um there's a non-uh non-uh honest way of sort of reaching across the aisle but not by saying you know um we're going to validate your racial anxiety right but by creating a sense that you can actually wake up in this country in five years or ten years and not feel that overwhelming that there is a belonging available to you um and you know and it looks pretty good it looks pretty appealing and it does give you a sense of the future that doesn't overwhelm you and fill you with crap i want to talk a little bit about your book uh surviving autocracy and i and i must admit when i first picked up the book it struck me a little bit as a self-help manual maybe like for those of us who are in the trenches trying to survive autocracy what are the what are the how-to's but i did have a moment particularly over the last week where i was wow we maybe almost didn't survive autocracy and i'm getting ahead of myself so let's talk a little bit about the construct that you used to write the book like what motivated you to write the book the construct and then i want to break it down a little bit further um yeah it's funny i i think i think of the original essay on surviving intoxication as a kind of self-help essay i don't think of the book as a self-help manual but um so on the day that donald trump was elected i started getting phone calls and text messages from people uh saying you know what do we do now you've lived in uh you know in putin's russia you lived in the soviet union what do we do now and i thought well that's a ridiculous thing to ask me because obviously i'm living in in exile so whatever it is i know how to do is not a recipe for success but then as i was riding my bike home from from this disastrous election party i was thinking it was a very long ride and i was thinking you know are there things that i know that americans just have no idea about like and i was really concerned about sort of how our perceptions of the world were going to change and also some of the assumptions i'm in the biggest assumption that i uh um well two two of the biggest assumptions that i led with that were so sort of prominent in uh in in the conversation at the time that i thought were just completely wrong right one was oh he doesn't mean it uh and so rule number one so the essay uh was called autocracy rules for survival and rule number one was believe the autocrat um and you know to me that's probably still the most important rule because part of what living in autocracy makes you do is it makes you always look for sort of the hidden secret the key to everything because reality get gets so hazy and overwhelming and like you can't get your bearings you're always feeling like you're living in a in in in a polluted information environment so like there's this idea that maybe there's like something behind the scenes that will explain everything and i think it's super important to just keep focused on what the autocrat or the aspiring autograph says because he will tell you exactly what he means and the other rule that to me out of the six rules is most important was institutions one and say um and and this is something you know because at the time if you recall people were saying well yeah trump okay but our institutions are so strong that he can't do much damage but institutions are strong only as long as everybody is acting in good faith institutions democratic institutions cannot protect themselves against bad actors um and i'm just going to anticipate your follow-up question because you know weren't we safe for our institutions in the end and i don't think we were like we barely scraped by and you know institutions cannot be destroyed overnight but they have huge institutional inertia and even in observing the spectacle of uh of of putin's response to navanee in the in the last couple of days right and like the the ridiculous spectacle of navalny being arrested under false pretenses and then tried in a police station i thought but here's the important thing they're still staging a trial there's so much institutional inertia even after 20 years of destruction that there's you can still see sort of the the sediment of institutions that should not reassure anybody that is not a sign of institutional health that's just a sign that it takes it takes a while to establish an autocracy and so so to the second part of your question what is the the structure that i use so i used um the the work of a hungarian sociologist valent majir who is one of my absolute guiding lights intellectually who has written a lot about autocracy and he also pioneered the concept of the mafia state and he says that autocracy has three stages autocratic attempt autocratic breakthrough and autocratic consolidation an autocratic attempt is the stage when autocracy is still reversible through electoral means and autocratic breakthrough usually happens around the time when the autocrat or the aspiring autocrat secures or enters his second term and that's when structural changes occur that make it impossible to reverse the autocracy by electoral means and so you know what i think we're living through between november and january 20th was trump's attempt to to forge an autocratic breakthrough so the autocratic breakthrough made manifest by the siege of the capital however there were many other steps along the way the court packing the disavowal of the rule of law i remember early days in the administration when uh there were comments made about obvious ethics violations nothing to see here people were going to the trump hotel the family was becoming enriched nothing to see here and it really looked like just about nothing would stick there would be no measure of accountability so yes it it resulted in a horrible event at the capitol but there were so many steps along the way and one there's a word that you've used um i'm going to the the definition is rule of the worse uh i just doctor said right and and that's where he put in place people in his key cabinet positions who had no business being there you know they they had no experience they had no uh understanding of what they were supposed to do i i guess a number of them were political favors they were donors obviously uh and and it just it made a mockery of the fact that we in theory have strong institutions that will quote protect us i would submit as as i believe you are as well that our institutions frankly let us down um i think our institutions shared their flaws and weaknesses to you to your list i would add um the destruction of the system of checks and balances you know trump fired pretty much all the inspectors general right uh he did it within an existing legal framework the president actually has the power to fire the inspector's general the president had never done that before because it's obvious right in the in the spirit of the of the institution that inspectors general are put there to exercise oversight over the executive branch and the executive branch has no business firing them but it is legally possible and he did that he also did things that were illegal and to me one of the most important if not the most important is that not only did he assign the appoint the worst people um and people who were explicitly intending to destroy whatever agency they were appointed to lead but increasingly in the last couple of years of his administration he appointed acting's right and a lot of the actings were appointed illegally right there is there are laws and regulations that that dictate who can be an acting secretary and who can be and how long an acting secretary can serve so for at least i think the last year chad wolf the acting secretary of homeland security was serving illegally serving in violation of those of the relevant laws which um which legal scholars knew and were writing about and then eventually it made its way through the courts and the courts ruled that yes indeed he was he was acting illegally and it was still a couple of months before chad wolf resigned he resigned just uh i believe right after the instructions before i mean it was very very recent right um and and so that um you know that to me is is a very clear illustration of how you know institutions can't protect themselves right uh laws can't enforce themselves they're ultimately protected and enforced by humans and if humans act the way republicans did in the house or the way that you know that even like even the way that the democrats actually acted in the house when when they accepted trump's i'm starting to rap but that's it's another it's another huge example right trump's refusal to cooperate with impeachment proceedings the first right his refusal was illegal right congress had the power to subpoena white house employees and from himself and the power to enforce the city right but congress didn't choose to do that and that's you know this kind of you know testing institutions by game of chicken and somebody like crumble always right well he's he has no fear and he there's there's there are no boundaries there are no limits to what he's willing to to do i'm i was interested too though in the role of the media particularly in early days of of covering trump and uh the the the unwillingness to call lies lies right um yes the the pinocchio thing in the post that's that's cute but i but i think uh the the belief that oh well he doesn't mean what he says his people would say that always just kidding the word salad that was left to other people to figure out and interpret uh you i believe it's the subtitle of your riot book about words break uh cement wars will break cement yeah we'll break cement and it's it's almost as if he took that subtitle and his words had the power to break through institutions norms checks and balances rule of law to where nothing mattered and one of one of the conversations over the last couple of weeks that people have been having about to impeach or not to impeach if this is not impeachable inciting riot is an insurrection oh against your own government doesn't rise to that definition than frankly what does and and i i i struggle with that as well because even after the insurrection in the capital there were how many members of congress who went right back in to disavow to disenfranchise voting in america and i like how do you walk that back yes there were more than 120 members of the house right who went right back to that and there were 197 republicans in the house who voted against impeachment right uh even after not only you know looking at all the available evidence the evidence didn't have to be presented to them because they were themselves witnesses they had and they were themselves victims they had been there during the insurrection um and that you know i mean i think we've seen that with with the coronavirus and we we saw it again with with the insurrection that um when when the desire to hold on to power is stronger than survival instincts than any you know and you desire to protect your own safety it's it's a very frightening thing to watch uh there's also been a great deal of speculation uh trump flew away by just trumpism or does trumpism is it is its uh dogma predicated on him being the continued leader of that quote movement i'm not convinced that uh the trump was necessary for trumpism uh and this is this is where we get back to the to the subject of what made trump is impossible um i think that there are two competing narratives uh in in that um in that area as well and i think they're you know they're two competing narratives in our own heads one is trump was an anomaly it was unlike anything that had ever happened before he was he might as well have come from russia or outer space and now that he's gone i think that narrative gets stronger because like okay now he's gone and we can go back to normal so nothing had ever happened and the other is uh much you know much less common but this narrative that trump is just another republican president and i don't think either of those is accurate uh i think it's a combination of the two i think that um i think there's some validity to the narrative that he's just another republican president in the sense that uh if trump himself wasn't predetermined certainly the conditions for the election of somebody like trump were laid by the the marriage of money and power by the uh by the increased polarization of the parties by the utter failure to address the anxieties uh the economic anxieties that followed and the you know the psychic trauma of the financial crisis of 2008 and of course the securitization of the state and after 9 11 the um the sort of the reshaping of the american identity of us against the world as a nation under siege and the concentration of power in the executive branch all of those things made trump not entirely surprising and yet he was like no president who had ever seen and very much a president intent on dismantling government as it was constituted and i think that in the now the narrative that we can just go back to the to normal and that was an anomalous event is going to become increasingly strong we really have to fight it we really have to um to address all of those preconditions and um yeah you you you were talking about the media so you know the media i hope that the the section on the media um in in my book which is kind of the the the central part of the book is makes it clear that i don't think there's any good way for journalists to deal with a president-elect trump like it's always a net loss for journalism to to deal with the lying president to deal with the president with the administration which there's no transparency and accountability in which there's no meaningful access i'm not counting the access to leakers in the white house but i mean you know the kind of access that that gives you accountability it's still a loss and we saw some amazing stuff done you know some incredible investigative work and some great collaborations that wouldn't have occurred without trumpism but in the end i think it's still a loss and it's an existential threat to journalism right the dilemmas of covering trump are very real like how do you cover a president who lies and who says things that mean nothing when those things have real life consequences so when he says inject bleach right uh you could just dismiss it as a nonsensical statement but he can't because people were ending up on poison centers or calling poison centers so and then the next day he says i didn't mean it um and what do you do with that and no matter what you do you're going to contribute to the harm that he is doing by being president so the question becomes harm reduction how do you contribute least to this harm and i think there are some answers to that and i think there are some great failures and in particular i've pointed the finger at at the new york times and national public radio uh for their tone of extreme restraint for their ongoing normalization of trump and in the case of national national public radio for their stalwart refusal to use the word lie right um all right continuing on that uh the the the constant focus on trump voters in diners do you still like him do you still like him i mean i did um change my allegiance to some local news sources after a while as a result but i'm also talking about this concept of both scientism well blah blah blah but hillary's emails well but what about and they're um they're not the same but we don't take the time to say well how they're different and so that's that's one issue the other issue is the the lack of restraint provided by the social media uh twitter uh facebook why did it take so long for them both dorsey and zucker zucker zuckerberg and uh company to take uh some kind of action to say oh no no no uh given given the following uh given the numbers of people who get their basic news from facebook and twitter why did it take so long to put the restraints there and say oh no this is this is disinformation this is not correct not just this is disputed but this is disinformation and we're going to remove it well the reason it took them so long was because there was no reason for them to do it uh because they're monopolists because they're unregulated and because their motivation boils down to making money um and i would actually take the what we think of us as traditional media and social media as a single problem and the single problem is that we talk about the media as being essential for democracy we talk about the media as the fourth branch of government and then we entrust it entirely to unregulated profit-making corporations expecting them to contort themselves in a way that is not consistent with their motivations right for no reason um there's nobody to hold them accountable uh there's they're they're no they don't even have competition there are no laws that that apply to them and um and there's you know there's there's just no reason for them to uh to to drop a trump uh or or another source of disinformation and i also want to i don't think we've talked about this enough sort of as a public i've only really heard one person mention this as an important factor in why twitter and facebook dropped trump after the insurrection which is liability concerns uh and the person i i heard say that was kara swisher the great tech columnist for for the new york times right uh but you know we shouldn't buy into this story that they finally stepped up civically and acted inconsistently with their business interests that is not true they've stepped up to protect their businesses because they saw the potential for being held liable in incitement of violence and we can't you know not even because it's morally wrong but because it's completely practically stupid to continue to entrust the public sphere to money-making interest right the the the the adverse motivation is just always going to be there and it's always going to trip us up and finally the dependency that we have on private corporations is too significant because democracy cannot exist without media but media can exist without democracy these companies can continue making money sure in an autocracy sure well i can also point to the rise of say fox news cable news 24-hour news and the concomitant demise of local news people used to get a variety or at least have access to a variety of opinions uh and and information whether they chose to act on it or not that's been consolidated um and and that is is not good for anyone and i and i worry that that will only continue because newspapers don't make money again you know same root problem right uh we uh you know and and the solutions that we keep talking about to local media and i you know i think that the absence of local media is absolutely one of the reasons that we got donald trump and absolutely one of the major reasons um why we have these non-overlapping realities right because the disappearance of local media has had two i think really significant events one is that you know people unless they are wealthy people in new york city do not do not see themselves reflected in the media uh and you know i actually came up through community media not local media but gay community media but when i when i was young i read a lot about sort of the ideas behind local newspapers and community media and you know i remember reading that the goal of any small town newspaper is to make sure that every person in town appears in the newspaper scenario uh and you know that's very much how i thought about gay community media when i was editing gay newspapers and magazines um that's our goal right is to reflect every person in the community you know in in like a changeable way not just like through some other representative but like directly and um that's disappeared and i think that's you know part of the need to latch on to a sense of belonging to something greater comes from not belonging to anything smaller not seeing your own reflection right and anything um and a related problem is that you know people used to they see themselves reflected and be no journalist personally everybody knew somebody who worked in the media because they were media locally and now most people don't journalists know each other and and people who are who consume the media are far removed from the people who make the media which of course creates this incredible gap of trust right and you know i think the loss the general loss of trust in the media tracks the disappearance of local media directly so another fundamental principle i guess of democracy is the free and open exchange of information which is what the library and particularly the public library stands for so as we move through uh we we barely survived um the autocratic breakthrough uh but what role can libraries play in bringing about the reckoning that you referenced in your new yorker article of a week or so ago how can we help catalyze or create the climate for conversation so that we learn from what we just experienced collectively understand the harm and and come up with that common narrative or common story that you were referencing earlier in our conversation that's such a great question and i would love to turn it back on you because i think you probably know much more about that than i do but my immediate idea is that you know once uh i mean i wrote about i've written about the need for i can reckoning in the new yorker a couple of times so in one of the pieces i wrote about sort of the different formats that we may have for this uh not just the the the trial in the senate this was before before the impeachment but um you know when we think about countries that are recovering from autocracy we hear about truth and reconciliation commissions and i think that's it's a complicated idea applied to american reality because a lot of the time truth and reconciliation commissions were used in countries where the thing that needed to be addressed wasn't properly addressed through existing laws and i think that a lot of the things should not be taken out of the courts we should think of the courts as sort of stereotyping mechanisms but i think that the american tradition of town meetings is actually a great way to think about sort of this this um what i imagine as the great narrative recovery project or the great narrative rebirth project um and i've been we're going to have i'm the vice vice president of pan america and we're going to have actually a um an annual meeting next week at which we'll be talking about this idea of reckoning and i've been trying to push this idea that maybe writers uh maybe maybe penn can sort of put out a call to writers to to make this push towards storytelling maybe we could team up with libraries assuming that in the next in a few months it will be once again possible to gather together physically and and talk about narrative approaches um in a narrative people who work with collective trauma and this is also something i write about in new yorker and in the future is history people who work with collective trauma the approach that they use most often is called narrative therapy right and it's the approach of creating rituals and language and narratives and sort of repeating narratives [Music] to create a a story that that makes what happened comprehensible and visible what do you think uh i would love for libraries to play a role as a full partner uh frankly the series that we have arlington reads is is a part of that bringing together authors who are commenting either through fiction or non-fiction on the salient issues of the day so that we can spark further conversation in the community and regionally so it isn't just well we're a library and we have authors there's there's an intention behind that and i think uh you know libraries still enjoy that reputation of being trusted advisors neutral space welcoming inclusive everybody has has a place in the library we work very hard to both uh promote that as well as support it and we would be beyond thrilled to play any kind of role that we could in advancing this concept because i i think you know the american story um it's obviously still evolving but what has been missing over the last four years is the shared story and it would be terrific to play a role in in getting and getting that back as we as we wind down i'm just curious uh this book is uh so important you're the author of many others what are you working on now i'm working on a book i've been working on it for years but i've only actually been able to start writing writing this past week okay and it's a book about imaginative political projects so it's very much a book about about how people create sort of pilot projects for the future now did i read that you described this work as parallel polis yes yes can you give us uh an insight into what that actually means so um parallel polis is an idea that comes from the the czech mathematician and philosopher vatsalabenda who wrote a short essay in 1977 uh about what you know the the the czech dissident movement led by oslob havel was really concerned with the question of what can you do when there's nothing to be done what what is what resistance can uh exist in a totalitarian society and so uh havel's the power of the power of the powerless which is a great book length essay is about that and then bender's much shorter parallel polis is is even more specific and so what he suggested is that what you can do is is create a a small project a parallel polis that lives differently from the dominant society in at least one respect so either it's organized differently economically or socially or religiously or politically and i think the word police is very important because it indicates that it's not your your chosen family right it's not your best friends it actually has to involve some kind of conversation across difference and and then when the larger system collapses under its own weight you have a working model of the future so that's uh that's the idea that i use and so i start with uh with some stories from eastern europe and what i think was the most successful parallel polis project which is poland where there was indeed uh this um this kind of parallel polis created by the war intelligence and the gdansk trade organizers and um and they did step in when the totalitarian regime collapsed uh and um but then i take it much further because i don't think it has to be um [Music] i i don't i don't think it has to be under conditions of totalitarianism i think we have parallel police projects many of them in the united states and in other countries uh that that are not totalitarian and i also want to be very clear that i'm not advocating some sort of libertarian self-sufficiency right it's not anti-state projects um and so the one of the projects in the book is actually the public transit uh system in medellin colombia um which is a state project right but it's uh but it's a kind it's a project of willing something into being so that's what the book is about it's been really really fun to report although i had to stop in the last nine months understandably sounds exciting i would love to have you back on the program to talk with us about that book because i think there's some some wonderful lessons learned and uh i the opportunity to take imagination and create something new and innovative is uh exciting and intoxicating frankly um i have thoroughly enjoyed this conversation uh it's exactly what i was hoping for it feels like exactly what i needed both after november 3rd january 6th and now and now yesterday and i would love for us to check in again on your thoughts as we move through this next phase of narrowly missing an autocratic breakthrough but uh perhaps not yet having come to full terms on what we escaped and and how and what we can do differently going forward so you have helped illuminate a path for us and i i loved every second of the conversation i could continue for many hours but we'll leave it here again your book is surviving autocracy we will continue to promote it on our website um many of us follow you on twitter uh and read you in the new yorker and we look forward to more of your pressions and uh and thoughts about the next period of our um somewhat troubled history so thank you for your time this afternoon and uh hope to see you again soon thank you so much for having me it's really been a pleasure and and i'm so happy that this is the first public conversation i've had since uh since the inauguration um and i hope next time we'll meet in person i look forward to that thank you very much [Music] you