When I heard that Leo XIV’s first encyclical, “Magnifica Humanitas,” was about “Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence,” my first reaction was dread. Turns out I was wrong; always something new out of Chicago.....

This is an experiment (akin to Books in Dark Times and Recall This Story and Recall This B-Side and to JP's earlier Hannah Arendt articles) in soliloquy. You can consult footnotes and read a transcript by heading back to the article in its original form here.

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Elisa Tamarkin, an English prof of high repute (Anglophilia and Apropos of Something: A History of Irrelevance and Relevance) at UC Berkeley, joins RTB to discuss Done in a Day: Telex from the Fall of Saigon. It is an extended reflection on the last day of the Vietnam War, set against the imminent disappearance of war coverage in the nation’s city newspapers, and framed through her own stepfather's experience covering the war.

Tamarkin anatomizes curious forms of self-delusion that flourished in the American Me generation and traces the subtle trajectory that stretching from the journalistic autonomy of the mid-century to the "embedded reporters" of the US war in Iraq to today's implacable governmental hostility to truthful reportage. Back in the 1960's Hannah Arendt and others warned that bubbles of non-information and delusive self-deceit got propagated within the corridors of power and out in the larger public realm. Now cloudy misinformation is the property of a near-ubiquitous social media realm whose corrosive effect (the power to unthink) is far less circumscribed.

Mentioned

• Hannah Arendt, "Lying in Politics" (subject of an earlier RTB episode) and "Home To Roost".
• Frank Kermode Sense of an Ending (1967).
• The philosopher John Pollock published a book called Knowledge and Justification in 1975.
• Jamie Cohen-Cole The Open Mind
• Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death (1973).
• Ursula Le Guin The Lathe of Heaven 1971 (Elisa also mentions John's book on Le Guin).
• R. A. Lafferty, The Fall of Rome (1971).
• Thomas Harris, I'm OK, You're OK (1967).

Recallable Books:

• Adam Phillips, On Giving Up.
• Graham Greene, The Quiet American (1955).

Read the transcript of the episode here.

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For our pandemic-era Books in Dark Times (our first ever Special Series!) Elizabeth and John discussed books that were keeping us afloat, barely afloat, way back in April 2020. Memory lane, here we come!

A book you might not think would be so comforting starts it off, Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year (1722) about the plague in London “during the last Great Visitation in 1665.” Classroom resource for Great Plague of 1665-1666 here

Probably based on the journals of Defoe’s uncle Henry Foe, the Journal comforts Elizabeth by its similarities to our current situation, providing a sense of continuity to our forebears. Even if that continuity is through our epidemiological vulnerabilities and our incapacity for coordinated action.

Second, because some aspects of what happened in 1665 seem so familiar, from detailed discussions of the “weekly bills” of dead in each parish and how to interpret them, to arguments over social isolation, contact tracing, the ethics of leaving London for second homes in the country, and the devastating secondary effects of lost commercial activity:

Thirdly: at least it’s not the bubonic plague.

Elizabeth’s love for the 47 novels of Anthony Trollope (or 35 of them, anyways) kicks off a final foray into the deeply comforting books of our childhood–and a discussion of how fantasy nestles into the ordinary.

Mentioned in this episode:

• Daniel Defoe, The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1719)
• E. M. Forester, The Machine Stops (1909)
• Anthony Trollope, The Warden (1855)
• Frank Capra, It Happened One Night (1934)
• Richard Llewellyn, How Green Was My Valley (1939)
• Louisa May Alcott, Little Women (1868)
• E. Nesbit, Five Children and It (1902), The Railway Children (1905)
• Read the transcript here; Episode 26 Ferry Plotz

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