A Culture Trying to Happen

Christopher Lydon: Lowell Lecture, May 7, 2002

Introduction

Christopher Lydon

View the lecture on video.

The Lowell Lecture, sponsored jointly by the Harvard Extension School and the Lowell Institute of Boston, has for more than 30 years been an annual event devoted to exploring major issues in our society and our world. Previous Lowell Lecturers include McGeorge Bundy on foreign affairs, Gloria Steinem on feminism and democracy, Carl Sagan on nuclear winter, Art Buchwald on Washington politics, Ken Burns on the documentary as history, Gore Vidal on American politics and religion, and Thomas O'Connor on personal perspectives on Boston. This year's Lowell Lecturer was Christopher Lydon, who spoke on "A Culture Trying to Happen."

Christopher Lydon has been a familiar and provocative presence in the field of journalism, both print and broadcast, for more than three decades. He has had for his beat presidential politics when serving with the Washington bureau of the New York Times. He has been the anchor of the Ten O'Clock News on WGBH. He has done pioneering work for public television in Boston. And he was the creator and co-host of a popular public affairs radio show, The Connection, on WBUR from 1994 to 2000.

Christopher Lydon was born in Boston in 1940. He graduated from Roxbury Latin School and Yale College. In 1993 he was a candidate for mayor of Boston on the ticket of a citizens' campaign for radical school reform.

In his introduction of Mr. Lydon's topic, Dean Shinagel was reminded of an event he witnessed in the mid-1960s, when he was a junior faculty member in the English Department at Cornell University. He was dispatched in the university president's plane from Ithaca to New York City to meet and shepherd through customs a distinguished couple from Britain who were scheduled to deliver a lecture series at Cornell: they were F. R. Leavis and Queenie Leavis from Cambridge University, and this was their first trip to the US. When Shinagel met them at customs, Dr. Leavis was carrying a string bag of apples and oranges from England that was promptly confiscated. Shinagel ushered the Leavises to the customs officer, who asked Dr. Leavis the purpose of his trip, whereupon Leavis drew himself up and announced loudly, "I have come to bring culture to the US." The customs officer responded, "That's okay, doc. We need all the culture we can get."

Lowell Lecture, May 7, 2002

May I mention in dedication three men without whom I wouldn't be here: the sine quibus non. First, my father, who didn't get to finish high school but got his taste of university education through the Lowell Institute in the 1930s and was very grateful for it. He would be proud of his Lowell Lecturer tonight. Second, the late great Tom Winship, my first newspaper editor and the best. He was the embodiment of local journalism, a tremendously energetic citizen on the pulse of his town, and a global citizen as he grew older. And third, Charles Nesson of the Berkman Center at the Harvard Law School, the sponsor of my travels in local-global radio these last few months, a fount of ideas and enthusiasm, an enabler in the mystery realm of cultures and other good things that are trying to happen. Thank you Dad, thank you Tom, thank you Charlie, for--as Yogi Berra said--making this occasion necessary.

So, what is this "culture trying to happen?" We had to go to press with a title before I was entirely sure of the answer, but I had a glimmer. We had embarked on a series of local-global radio shows, "parachute radio" dropping into Jamaica, then Ghana, then Singapore--call-in talk shows for local broadcast and the global Internet. Landing like the martian and saying: "take me to your interesting talkers." This is becoming my habit now, a different way of visiting the world. As the revolutionaries used to say: "first, seize the radio station," and then we start asking questions. Paul Theroux has a famous way of kayaking about a faraway place to get to know it. Johnny Apple of the New York Times is making a new career eating his way through the wilds of Australia or Wales and reporting on a country and its culture by its food. Once upon a time as a political reporter I would have been trying to interview the prime minister in these places. But the mode I've fallen into is talk radio--strange host in strange territory--engaged in local chat but listening for global resonances.

The premise, or the glimmer, was that there is an unmet appetite out there, and in here, for another conversation. I observe now that the appetite is ravenous. Not for CNN, and not for the voice of the New York Times. Not even for the BBC. But for an interactive, live, noncommercial, anti-imperial, democratic exchange, across the color line, across the political lines, across the poverty line in the world--a conversation that might be about anything, and is open explicitly to cultural issues and identity questions. This is the culture that's trying to happen. Shall we talk about it?

I could also say: when suddenly you haven't got your real radio show, try a fantasy radio show. And then bring the fantasy to life.

Part of the motive in this mission for me was a palpable polarization of the world since 9/11. Official America, it strikes me, is in the grip of a neo-imperial impulse that's both cultural and commercial. We want all the oil, and we want all the air-time. We feel omnipotent, at the same time we feel deeply wounded. We point fingers at axes of evil, and we suspect billions of people of terrorism. We seem to lust after a clash of civilizations. I feel a fantasy lurking inside the Bush Administration that we can somehow recapitulate several centuries of the Portuguese, French, Spanish, and British empires--turning the world that doesn't look like us into those colonial "others," what the Brits called WOGs, "wily Oriental gentlemen," though there are more unpleasant names for them. Do we suppose we can lord it over so many people we do not know? Are we mindful that by the middle of this twenty-first century, the European and North American populations will account for roughly ten percent of humanity. Do we care to get acquainted with the other 90? I felt, in any event, an urge to eavesdrop and share what I heard. And the Internet, as an infinite extension of radio, is the means of making any conversation global.

So this was the mission: to slip in under the official radar and find what people wanted to talk about, and how. I wasn't looking for anti-Americanism, and it's not what I found either. But the perspectives on us are startling. In Jamaica last December, an eminent local painter went off on the subject of John Walker, the young American who'd gone native in Afghanistan and had just been brought back for trial. "A great American heeeero," this painter raved at me. "And your people want to hang him at Ground Zero." He said John Walker "wanted to understand the Arab mind--by learning their languages so as to penetrate their religion. They should make him US ambassador to the whole Arab world. He's an old-fashioned American adventurer--and they want to kill him!" This crystallized for me the notion that the world is not against us, but it doesn't see things our way, either.

I'm remembering an English Ghanaian I met, a white man named John Collins, who made it into a Ghanaian guitar band as a teenager long ago, went native, and became a significant player and writer in the African music scene. He said to me in the nicest British way, "you know, the Brits in the imperial days sent out ethnographers and artists and reporters and novelists to send back stories on the lands they came to rule. The Americans want to rule the world without knowing it." But the world knows us too well, and has come to know itself too well in these postcolonial years to be "otherized" again, to be reduced to much less than full citizenship.

When I got to Singapore three weeks ago and walked into News Radio 938 where I'd be working, the first thing the program director said after "hello" was "do you understand about the OB markers?" The OB what? I asked. I was thinking: Obi-Wan Kenobi? "The out-of-bounds markers," she said, meaning the things we don't talk about. "And just where are they," I asked. She said she couldn't say because nobody knew precisely, but we'd all find out afterward if I hit one, or shot beyond them. The short form was: "You can't have the opposition on the air, and you can't talk politics." The rest was for me to discover.

I found a hero in Singapore who became my guide to the OB markers. Jack Neo made his name as a slap-stick comedian, a clown on Chinese-language television, but he has grown into an independent moviemaker who can make you cry as well as laugh, the Charlie Chaplin of Singapore. He has a huge hit in the local market, called I Not Stupid. It has made movies the place where Singaporeans do the impossible. They talk back to the nanny state and make fun of themselves.

The movie is about three miserable underachieving boys in a pressure-cooker of a school. The parents scream that they're hectoring, spoiling, and controlling their kids for their own good because they want them to grow and be happy; and the kids whimper that what they'd really like is "freedom."

Nobody denies, especially Jack Neo, that I Not Stupid is all about the superbly efficient, enveloping, stifling Singaporean state, and the citizens who are never let out of their political adolescence. On our program Jack Neo said, "we all telling these political jokes, but not openly. So I say, why not? I think it is my duty to tell the authorities, the relevant people, to let people know the problems we face." He said, and many callers to our program said, that "this [movie] is the voice from the Singaporeans' heart." And wonder of wonders, the censors passed the movie uncut, and now the Singaporean government--in a typical spasm of self-improvement--is urging people to see it.

This is a piece of the culture trying to happen. And if it can happen in Singapore, you'd think it can happen anywhere.

We did two weeks of radio in each of three cities: Kingston, Accra, and Singapore. The Caribbean, West Africa, and Southeast Asia. Developing, underdeveloped, and overdeveloped nations. Each of them 40 years, give or take, out of British colonialism, all English-speaking. Jamaica one of the most deeply indebted countries in the world. Ghana officially HIPC--a highly indebted poor country--on the World Bank sick list, poorer today than when Kwame Nkrumah celebrated independence in 1957. Singapore debt free, with per capita income approaching $30,000 a year, and more BMWs and Armani outlets than you'll find in New York. Jamaica and Singapore at the poles made a pair: island nations, still curiously, at least superficially, British. One bursts with music, one bursts with money. Each covertly admires and maybe envies the other. Singaporeans worry that with all that stifling order they're facing a creativity crisis, in entrepreneurship as well as the arts. Jamaicans with all that macho vitality worry that the Kingston murder rate has dimensions of a civil war.

Forgive me if I think of this less as a lecture, more as a radio program with myself. I'm still unpacking my head of the things people have said to me. And I'm still reeling from Singapore: the air-conditioned nation, the perfumed cage, the mightiest little city state since imperial Rome, or perhaps Venice in the fifteenth century, and a curiously unhappy place.

I'm thinking of the eminent architect who views the Disneyland malls and very un-Asian, untropical skyscrapers of Singapore with dismay. "Kitsch," he said, "is very big in Asia. It works as a narcotic--it dulls the senses in a pleasurable way. It's an anaesthetic, in that it prevents you from knowing what is going on, and so it has political value."

He said, "people mix up the words modernity, modernization, and modernism. They're three different things. We have had modernization, but not modernity. Being modern is about autonomy. We don't have it."

And this was the killer line as he drove me around the shining streets of Singapore. "We know now from a lot of history that the human spirit is invincible in the face of adversity. But I've decided that the human spirit is defenseless in the grip of wealth."

Here's the very hot young poet, a medical student with Malayan roots, Alfian Saat, writing about the lords of the endless construction, the creative destruction, that is day-to-day Singapore. He writes of "the pawns of the Upgrading Empire who plan Lego cineplexes, Tupperware playgrounds, suicidal balconies, carnal parks of cardboard and condoms--and before we know it we are a colony again."

The young playwright Chong Tse Chien said on our program: "It's difficult to define the Singaporean metaphor, the Singaporean voice. And even if we find this voice, we wouldn't want to recognize it unless someone from the US or the West would give us a prize for it. . . . In a sense we are spoiled here because we have everything in the world we could possibly have, but nothing that we can claim that truly belongs to us. I think that so far has been the struggle and the metaphor."

Mind you: these are all committed Singaporeans, patriots at heart, in the spirit enunciated by the playwright Kuo Pao Kun: "Some people say, 'Can't write, lah, you know, censorship too strict.' I say, 'Come on, man, if you are worth two cents you write because you want to write, not because people allow you to write.' As they say, freedom is never given, freedom can only be gotten." And these Singaporeans keep writing.

In this culture that's trying to happen, what is it that people want to talk about? Here's my answer: the great hunger in the world, among the lucky people who have enough to eat, is for an authentic voice in this global culture. Singapore may be an acute instance of people yearning to be heard and treated as grown-ups. The Founding Father and now Senior Minister Lee Kuan Yew brags, with that great Singaporean touch for commerce, that Singapore is a "brand" in the world, but this quest for voice and identity runs deeper than branding.

The very last thing I want to do is average out the experience of these places. But of course I ask myself: of all those voices, which ones would anybody remember forever? And are there connections among them? There may be no theme here at all, except the universal love of gab. Yet there are threads.

One is my impression that some of the most important subjects in the world are things we don't yet know how to talk about. Slavery seems to me the outstanding example. If there's a line from the last six months that's going to stick with me forever, it's the observation by a great young Ghanaian poet Kwadwo Opoku-Agyemang who teaches at the University of Cape Coast, hard by the Cape Coast Castle where captured Africans were warehoused for the Middle Passage to the New World. "Slavery," he writes, "is the living wound under the patchwork of scars. A lot of time has passed, yet whole nations cry, sometimes softly, sometimes harshly, oftentimes without knowing why." It is not just the great crime that has never been redressed; it's a story not yet half told. We have many slave narratives, but very few from the families left in Africa who found themselves suddenly and forever fatherless, or brotherless, or motherless, or daughterless. In Ghana I interviewed a Harvard professor of history, Emmanuel Acheampong, back home in Ghana on sabbatical, who told me a remarkable thing. He got his BA in history at the University of Ghana, but was introduced to the history of slavery in graduate school at the University of Virginia. "That was where my learning process began," he said on our program. "West Africans are different from Americans in that way, in that they choose not to talk about unfree ancestry."

It was Jamaican dancers, invited to an arts festival at Cape Coast Castle in the mid-'90s, who went on strike against this silence. They would not dance, they said, on the bones of their ancestors at that castle, and they didn't. But they broke a certain collective amnesia in Ghana and started a conversation that is still building today. It was a privilege to have a piece of it on our air.

The idea of slavery as a living wound extended a point that struck me in Jamaica, from the spiritual leader inside the prisons of Kingston. A man named Desmond Green is the rallying point inside Jamaica's teeming prisons of a broad movement toward individual rehabilitation and social recovery. "Jamaica," he said to me, "has yet to forgive itself for being born in slavery. A culture of violence comes naturally," he said, "in a nation that thinks it is bad."

People want to talk this out, however many decades it takes. It is humbling and sad to remember that it was the white folk, led by the Bush administration, who bailed out of the UN's Durban Conference on racism and the legacies of slavery last summer--so soon, as it turned out, before 9/11. It was as if we had nothing to contribute or to learn. I suspect if we had another chance, after 9/11, to get in on that conversation, we would find a way to go. So let's open the discussion again--not to get stuck on reparations, but to dig into the inescapable moral and emotional burden of our past.

So many other talkable subjects are barely tapped. The easiest way to get a revealing, wide-ranging conversation going, anywhere, is to play some version of the BBC classic program Desert Island Discs and ask people to name and play and argue, say, their five favorite Ghanaian recordings, or reggae bands. These conversations invariably buzz with overtones beyond music of some other unearthly, invisible, impalpable, and powerful mystery. Love, God, truth, that sort of thing. And they always work.

People want to talk about globalization not only the economics, yes, the marketplace without borders, but also the global human genome, the global environment, and the imbalance of voices in the global culture. People long for countervailing voices in the one-hyperpower world. Not that they miss the Russians especially, but people old enough to remember Nkrumah, Nasser, Nehru, and DeGaulle miss the symbols of alternative visions of the developing future. Just to say, first, in a summing up of impressions, there's so much to talk about out there.

Second, cultural identity feels like the most precious thing in the world, and the Africans I met are superabundantly blessed. African culture is under siege, as ever. Guiness beer billboards are everywhere in Ghana. So is international trash music. The strangest thing to hear in the land of the drum in Ghana, the proudest rhythm culture in all of Africa, is the sound of the computerized drum machine, which is inescapable on the commercial airwaves. You just have to pray, alongside African musicians, that this scourge will pass. And I expect it will, because not just the tradition but the history of adaptation and reinvention in that tradition runs so strong and deep.

We've had many conversations in this series about voices in the global culture. None was more confident than the comment of the Ghanaian polymath Amos Anyemadu. What was Africa's "comparative advantage" in the cultural marketplace, I asked him. "Africa has all the content," he said, simple as that. "You talk about music or design . . . we are significantly endowed," even though many of those fashionable Kinte stoles sold in New York are manufactured now in Korea. "The system that generates the content will always be with us." He added, as an afterthought, "the challenge is how to make money out of it."

Third, the neo-imperial pretensions of the US government--the carpet bombing of mostly innocents in Afghanistan, the Freudian slips about a crusade against Islam, the blank check for Israel in a one-sided war with Palestinians, these and many other symptoms of xenophobic superpowerdom run amok--look from the other end of the scope not just obnoxious but vain to the point of absurdity. Who really doubts that our war on terrorism is seeding new generations of hatred and desperate vengeance? Are we on for an eternal war with the children of this battle today?

It's been fascinating these last three weeks in Singapore just to sit there and try to absorb a little of the Southeast Asian perspective. In the Singaporean view it's a Chinese world: fewer than four million smart, busy Singaporeans looking at 1,200 million smart, busy Chinese. The Chinese have got their world-trade act together and their factories humming, and they are fully capable of out-producing the high-tech Asian tigers in volume and at much lower unit costs. Four million looking at 1,200 million: it's a prospect to concentrate the mind. But it scarcely enters our American consciousness or conversation.

Fourth, the internet possibilities in serving this project, this culture that's trying to happen, are infinite.

We heard the headiest dreams about the Internet in Africa, which is just getting wired: Africa's hope is to leapfrog the industrial revolution into the new webzone that doesn't know origin or color or race; where a Ghanaian student or researcher is instantly on the same page with a German; where a musician or a pineapple farmer can market his wares to the world. It is so unlike the British colonial railroads that pointed one way from the cocoa fields and the goldmines to the harbor.

We heard least about the Internet, oddly enough, in Singapore, which is wired to the nines, but hasn't figured out the implications for freedom. The websites of the political opposition were shut down before the last election, just in case. OB markers are up around the deeper internet discussion, but the ban can't last forever.

On the internet end of our local-global radio conversation, we're not out of the "technical difficulties" stage that television came through. There are great technical minds in this room who can testify how chancy it was to receive our webcasts from Singapore, though there were breakthrough moments, and we've saved it all for the archives. But the technical obstacles aren't as big as the imaginative openings. In media land, we find ourselves at a new intersection of local broadcasting and global electronics. We have yet to find out what sort of environment this might become, what sort of ecology this crossroads--these crossed wires--can produce. I want to nudge the answer in the direction of civility, openness, and substance. I think of us building a new coral reef of conversation, in a new sort of ocean.

Which brings me finally to the point that has come to me slowly in this fallow year since we lost the old Connection. The gift we found in that wonderful space was not so much for radio as for community-making. For sustaining a network, well represented in this room tonight, of strong-spirited folk, talkers and listeners, who love building this rather mysterious but precious house of conversational cards. Out of the blue yesterday came an e-mail from a regular old caller, Zerminae, who's moved from MIT to Pakistan and now to Houston, but wanted to remind me how those radio mornings had colored her whole Boston experience, she said, in an unforgettable way. The technology of radio and of the Internet is crucial in a sense for that culture that is trying to happen. But the essence of it is nonetheless the many-layered magic, the grit, the variety, the dynamic range, the accent and authenticity of free voices--vox humana--as the master Studs Terkel puts it. So count me in on all we can do to liberate and extend all the power for good, and the pleasures, of that fabulous instrument.