Anyone can answer questions; but it’s much trickier to ask them. So what questions should one ask an old-pro like Chris Matthews? For all his “hard-ball” spiel, Matthews was a master interviewer because he somehow automatically established an intimacy with his guests. It was as if he’d known the guest forever. I hope I did a little bit of the same in my KEEN ON Interview with Matthews below.
Sometimes, however, the questions almost seem to ask themselves. It wasn’t difficult, for example, to find the right questions to ask the U.S. Congressman, Ruben Gallego, about the American war in Iraq. Gallego, the Democratic Congressman from the Seventh District of Arizona, whose tragic involvement in the Second Iraq War is memorialized in his new book, was astonishing candid in the KEEN ON conversation below.
It’s not just Gallego who has spoken to me about the disaster in Iraq. Indeed, as both Robert Draper and Juan Cole have argued on KEEN ON that this was the most disastrous war in American history. And the catastrophe in Iraq was only underlined in my conversation this week with Tom Clavin, about Lightning Down, his new WW2 book about a young American airman from Kansas imprisoned in Buchenwald. I guess Americans still need the nostalgia of these kinds of books to remind themselves that they were once innocent, perhaps even good. But in a contemporary America struggling to reinvent itself in our new multipolar world, Ruben Gallego’s truth-telling is way more essential.
Everything, I suppose, can be explained as a kind of war - even music. As Led Zeppelin biographer Bob Spitz told me this week, what made the British band so popular was their transformation of the 60’s gig into a 70’s teenage male testosterone driven kind of war. Up to Zeppelin, it was only girls who screamed at concerts. Zeppelin changed everything. Stairway To Heaven, indeed.
Fortunately, most musicians aren’t soldiers. And I particularly enjoyed my KEEN ON interview below with Mike Mattison and Ernest Suarez about the poetic origins of the blues.
Other KEEN ON highlights last week included:
Pulitzer Prize wining writer and New York Times columnist Linda Greenhouse on the Supreme Court crisis.
A history of both public and private libraries.
Four 20th century English women who reinvented the philosophy of ethics.
Upcoming KEEN ON interviews this week include with Neal Stephenson about his eagerly awaited new novel Termination Shock. So please remember to subscribe to the KEEN ON podcast as well as the Lithub YouTube page. You can also watch KEEN ON live by following me on Twitter or LinkedIn or by subscribing to the Lithub Facebook page.
Enjoy the show!