who was rachel carson? >> guest: rachel carson was first of all of course the scientist for the fish and wildlife department of interior. she was in author, a gifted writer. i read silent spring when i was in college and i read the crm bus and they captivated me.

she was a mesmerizing writer and able to take scientific, dry scientific information and put it in a vibrant and colorful words that just captivate you. >> host: was she well known before silent spring came out in 1962? >> guest: she had "the sea around us," which was a pretty big seller. that is what got me interested in marine biology and scuba diving. >> host: that was published in the early 50's? >> guest: i believe so. i should have checked before i came on but i'm quite sure of that. >> host: what was the impact of silent spring in 1962 when it came out? >> guest: it was pretty serious impact. it touched on a lot of themes that had been on people's minds. it created alarms. it presented in a political way and alarming way what might be happening out there, and was

almost presented as it was happening even though much of it was conjectural and speculation. it was presented as this is happening. we are using so many chemicals, so many insecticides we are going to kill off our songbirds, we are quick to be left with a silent spring in which there are no songbirds to read we are gwen to kill off the bald eagle with our insecticides. and they got people scared. she did a marvelous job of raising people's awareness that a lot of what we were doing was poisoning the environment. the air, water, the land. she did it in a way that got people emotional, made them want to get involved to solve the problem to end the despoliation of our environment. >> host: was this new at this time? >> guest: the modern

insecticides were to read the used pretty nasty stuff for a long time, copper sulfates and a wide variety of other things -- >> host: and we don't use those today at all? >> guest: the use copper sulfate and organic farming but the use a lot of pretty toxic chemicals not only to control insects but to take care of the diseases people had. they would in jest stuff of almost be worse than what you were trying to get rid of yourself. but modern insecticides came about essentially in world war ii, ddt was probably the first one and was effective. we dustin our soldiers with it in the pacific and the cicilline campaign in europe. we dusted millions and millions of germans and italians and holocaust survivors after the war to prevent typhus. they used ddt vary widely in the pacific to prevent malaria to kill the miskitos and after the

war basically 1945 was the first test case of ddt in the tennessee valley area. beyond that they decided it is so effective against mosquitos we can get rid of malaria in the united states and europe. so they start its bringing it all over. it was also used a lot for agriculture. >> host: what are the effects of ddt? >> guest: the known affect where you want to talk about real scientific evidence are slim. rashes on your skin. there's a lot of conjecture. but ddt is probably the single most studied chemical in history -- >> host: because of "silent spring"? >> guest: partly. "silent spring" was followed after rachel carson's death by a concerted campaign by environmental defense fund and other environmental organizations and essentially to launch the environmental movement to give it a

prestigious power base funding base it never enjoyed before. so those things in combination and the pressure brought against the ddt eventually got a band under president nixon. but in the meantime it was used all over the world. it was used tremendously in the united states. you can see old video or film footage of people dancing and clouds of ddt and swimming pools with clouds of ddt often are held them. people at picnic tables. so it was very widely used and the which was studied and studied, nothing more than tangential and speculatively next to the diseases and cancer and so forth were ever established. there were concerns about eggshells and we can get into that if you wish, but again a lot of conjecture, not a good solid proof.

>> host: and we will get into that but good evening. this is book tv in primetime. and tonight's discussion, life call-in program is about rachel carson and her book, "silent spring," published in 1962. we are joined by paul driessen we've been listening to. he's a senior committee of constructive tomorrow we with congress for racial equality. he has a degree from the university of denver, be a infield ecology from lawrence university, and this is his book, "eco-imperialism: green power, black death." and we are also joined by linda lear in charleston, south carolina who is rachel carson's biographer, and her book is called quote code rachel carson witness for nature" and she has written the introduction to the new addition of "silent spring" that came out in 2009. linda lear, what got you

interested in rachel carson? >> guest: well originally it was because i was teaching environmental history of the university level and when we got to talking about "silent spring" in 1962, my students looked at me and said rachel who? and i thought mauney we have to do something about this. so i set about trying to write rachel carson's biography which had never been done. >> host: we want to get you involved. this is a call-in program. we will put the numbers on the screen so you can talk to linda lear and paul driessen 32,027,370,001 if you live in east times over, 737-0002 if you live in the pacific and now to three sunday a mile at c-span@book tv.com or a tweet at book tv@twitter.com.

was it a best seller when it came out in 1962? >> guest: in the it was. it was a blockbuster in had been serialized in the new yorker magazine in three parts beginning in june and there was nothing but a stunning, anything but silent summer. when the book was finally published in september of that year it was already a best seller. john f. kennedy helped a lot to call attention to rachel carson's ideas by commenting on them in a press conference and setting up a presidential that 53 committee to look, presidential led by sri committee to look into her claims about the massive contamination of the environment by chemical pesticides. >> host: when you say her claims where did she get her knowledge? >> guest: kurson had studied,

she was ecologist by training, marine biologists and ecologists. she had impeccable credentials and was an m.a. from johns hopkins. she didn't have a ph.d. degree but she had worked all her life of fish and wildlife service and in government and had read and studied the ocean for per great best seller, "the sea around us" and then subsequently "the edge of the cp quote she did impeccable research. she was not a person who was writing for the academic community. and the remarkable thing was that rachel carson insisted on writing for the public. she wanted the public to know what was happening in their world. >> host: paul driessen, she was a marine biologist and writing here about non-reena issues; is that correct? >> guest: euskadi much the same. i was a fresh water ecologist

major in college along with my geology and there is a tremendous cross over land to water you look, your door and they are interconnected and the marine aspects are interconnected. so, she was drifting a little bit of yield of where she was trained but not all that much. the bigger problem that i found with rachel carson and some of her work is that she tended to go on the basis of punches and speculation and conjecture or anecdotal evidence and not always well backed up and sometimes she was not that familiar with or ignored the very good literature about ddt for example the was out there and she made some conclusions that were not based in the science available at that time. >> host: linda lear, which has been the impact of "silent spring" and rachel carson? >> guest: well first of all i

want to say the airline would disagree with what paul driessen just said we can go back to that perhaps later. i would say the impact was immediate. it was to have a lot only presidential science committee which found that until rachel carson's "silent spring" the public did not know pesticides for toxic. that is an astonishing statement. and until it rachel carson's book, "silent spring," the public did not understand following a mosquito, trucks spraying for mosquitoes on a path and spraying the children might be dangerous to your health or might not be good for children. but pesticides were ubiquitous. it was a science claiming the world after world war ii and was

the end to insect problems. her book, however, after it came out was the first of all the chemical industry thought she was probably a lightweight and they considered that she would go away. she didn't. and as information gathered and she began to talk further about the book and what she was trying to argue that we were over using pesticides she did don't claim that we should never use them. she claimed we were misusing them and as that began to roll on into the public to take notice then congressional hearings were called. rachel testified before both the senate and house and 1963 and the hearings were held that would go into creation finally of the environmental protection

agency. >> host: let's take some calls for the guests. but before linda lear comegys did you disagree with something paul driessen said. what was that? >> guest: well, that rachel carson based her claims of false teeth science or had overstepped the information on chemical pesticides was very hard to get. the agricultural science agency research agency of the department of agriculture was closed. they wouldn't speak to her. they wouldn't let the material out. the national cancer institute have similarly closed its doors to anybody who asked questions that might provoke maybe what was happening to people who were subjected to the dry cleaning fluids and had developed lymphoma and problems with blood disease of all sorts, rachel carson was against a wall of

silence that people did not want to give her this information. so, while she -- the cancer chapters in "silent spring" came after she had begun the book. she was first of all starting to talk about air, water and the ground pollution and it was only later that she realized she had to talk about human health and that the skin of the human body was permeable. it wasn't as people thought, something the would keep chemical's out. >> host: paul driessen, final comment before we go to calls. >> guest: bear in mind that before she was writing that book and the pesticides were ubiquitous, it was mostly ddt. there wasn't much else and in terms of toxicity it was pretty low toxic as i mentioned it caused skin rashes but not much else. people in just trying to kill

themselves that they've been unable to. there's been scientists who would give talks about ddt and tsp of ddt and eat drink their talk to make the point that it wasn't as toxic as it was reputed to be. but there is -- you have to bear in mind we were also using a lot of other chemicals and still do and there wasn't as much care for the use of those chemicals as there should have been and people were getting sick and there are pesticides out there that one drop on your skin can kill you but those were not available at that time. >> host: and this is from "silent spring."

our first call for the two guests, linda "silent spring" and paul driessen collagen in omaha nebraska. please go ahead. >> caller: i remember when i was a kid and we used to play outside going up and down the streets trucks were spraying and when you look at the life expectancy we have right now it's kind of amazing you could draw the conclusion that was dangerous, and also how many deaths do you think can be attributed to ms. carson for not using ddt? >> host: we will start with paul driessen dividend linda

lear. >> guest: excellent points and a good question. i have seen all kind of numbers in terms of the deaths attributable to not having ddt available or talking mostly about malaria in the context of disease that affects 300 to 500 million people in here causes permanent brain damage and makes people unable to work for perhaps three, four, five weeks at a time. it is a disease that leads people permanently brain damaged. so, it is something you want to get rid of as quickly as you can and the lack of ddt mosul much as an insecticide but as a repellent to keep mosquitoes out of homes according to the various estimates has cost ten to 40 millions unnecessary deaths so it's a very serious problem. >> host: is lear? >> guest: i don't have -- i thought your question was very good but i don't think that rachel carson was saying that

ddt cause death or chemical pesticides necessarily caused death. what she was arguing was that we were prolific and kleeb misusing pesticides, particularly in agriculture when we didn't know the long term affect of the pesticides. and what was just read from the table for tomorrow and rachel carson's book was indeed a fable where she had taken many towns and put them together in a compound of evidence to say that some of these incidents have happened everywhere and that we aware of what we were doing to the total environment, not just the human environment but the total site as it, the biology of the environment and what were we thinking that we could control or not control. >> host: linda lear was the common misperception she called for the banning of all pesticides? >> guest: well i don't know how that perception came about because that is not in "silent

spring" and was never rachel's testimony or her idea. her most was to call attention to the fact that there was a prolific use of pesticides in the environment when we did not know what the total outcome was and when the public did not know that their homes and farms and animals were being sprayed from the air by airplanes in the fields and they didn't know when this was going to happen and it did indeed kill certain wildlife, birds, fish, certain mammals and there was a prolific use without the public permission and we didn't know what the total -- what the outcome would be. she never called for a ban on pesticide use. >> host: from "silent spring

mr. driessen? >> guest: one of the hard things to gauge in all of this is what is the difference between the effect that rachel carson had as an individual, her book had as a book and then the environmental groups especially after her death, what they did to campaign against ddt first and foremost but also other pesticides and chemicals. and that is where a lot of the what linda was talking about where the misinformation came in, rachel carson didn't call for the elimination but she did take some of her speculation beyond where the science back it up. she, for example talked about

the ddt as something building huge resistance in insects at an early time when she was really talking about mosquitos for example avoiding it much as they do deet, off four other republics. that is ddt's most prominent role. it doesn't compare to what we have today that time it was the best we had and we used it profitably as linda pointed out. but it's also the most powerful appellant that has ever been developed, the most powerful and long-lasting, and that's why we want to keep it in the malaria prevention arena now because spraying it once or twice a year on the walls of the house keeps 80% of the mosquitos from coming in. >> host: what developed it? what company? >> guest: it was defended to the invented by paul mueller

back in their early 40's -- >> guest: [inaudible] >> host: thank you. >> guest: thank you. of the germans had evicted and what to do with it and the americans got it and we started using it in places where we were confronted with a lot of disease, mosquitos and malaria and yellow fever and so forth. so mueller got a nobel prize for his development of this. but nobody at the time knew exactly what they have on their hands, good or bad, and even though the information about the ddt repellent was available back in the early 1940's, people didn't appreciate that value right away and rachel carson interpreted that as assistance rather of an avoidance mechanisms. >> host: lucille samet calls new york. >> caller: hi. this is for either of you although i have to say i kind of

agree with linda at this point. i am a casual bird watcher and i noticed last summer i have the woods behind my house, pond next to my house which i affectionately call a cesspool. and i noticed a lot of birds just disappearing and i went out and got her book and read it and made perfect sense to me. i'm especially interested in eagles. we have a wildlife refuge your our finger lakes butter now polluted and it's worse now. i read her book about our lakes are polluted. you can't eat the fish. the birds to me are diminishing. the geese and ducks, i haven't seen a starling all winter. and i got concerned. >> host: linda lear? >> guest: and you should be concerned.

the system is here that rachel was pointing out right up route 95 from where she was was of course the fish and wildlife refuge and they were working on feeding ddt two birds, eagles, pelicans, the nesting birds that fly. and these birds were showing signs of various reproductive problems. these birds were sort of the tip of the iceberg and then came the robins and whether or not the eggshell thinning can be proven to the ingestion of pesticides i am not sure it has never been clear. but resistance and pesticides are persistent and water soil and air. they don't go away and that was one of rachel's big points in

silent spring and i sure paul doesn't disagree with this. you can't wash away so the leaks are polluted. all of the leaks are polluted and the birds and fish have ingested not just ddt but a whole lot of chemistry of pesticides and pollutants of all sorts. so there is going to be a change in the boyda and what is happening to nature. it shouldn't be lead just at the door of ddt by any circumstance but it should be laid up the door of this barrages of pesticides and chemicals that we've put into our environment. >> guest: i will agree up to a point but i think that you are dealing with mother nature in a very complex ecology out there. i live on a pond in a wooded area as well and right along the i-95 quarter that we are speaking of i have seen far more keys in the most winters

recently than i remember growing up or being around the virginia area when i was first here. they tended to winter over because they find a lot more food than they used to. and this winter has been a rough winter. a lot more snow, a lot colder, the crows and the starlings have largely disappeared from the area for the time being. but when it warms up a little bit on the m amazed that the hundreds of birds that suddenly come out of nowhere and just last week when we had some patches of bear ground in the backyard we had 20, 30 robins not there that i haven't seen for weeks so i think you are dealing with a very complex situation. the of reproductive issues going that to rachel carson's time i think it's really important to recognize that back in those days we were dumping of justin

insecticides but chemicals and they were interacting, there were synergisms. nobody could figure out what was affecting what. >> host: a quick question to the both of you. is our environment cleaner today than it was in 1962, paul driessen? >> guest: i would say absolutely yes. you look at the air quality, the water. you can measure things out there and detect them to the equivalent of one second in 32 years with modern detection technology. that wasn't the case back then. ddt actually does break down very rapidly in the environment not so much in the soil in the water and in the sunlight it breaks down into various other components. but the question becomes what level does something like that have an affect and what about all of the leal and other things in the environment? >> host: linda lear, same question. >> guest: same question. i feel we are in the much worse shape than we were when rachel

brought them here in a charleston for example we are not able to dredge the ashley river out to where the boats can actually lead anchor the cause of the leaders of pollution and toxins that would be released into the water if the dredging occurred. that is just a small example. i don't see the gallinaceous birds down here that i used to see to it i think the whole buy order has been poisoned and continues to be poisoned. >> host: clermont california thanks for holding. you are on with linda lear and paul driessen discussing rachel carson's "silent spring" on booktv prime time. >> caller: thank you. my question is primarily for mr. driessen. it reminds me of the slander against rachel carson and the 60's and 70's by the agribusiness industry. number one ddt is extremely

toxic. i spent 25 years with u.s. environmental protection agency. the ban did because it was a potential human carcinogen killing in number of birds all over the country especially the golden eagle but it showed the part of the ddt that disrupt the hormones so it was a technical hormone disrupted and carcinogen so it seems to me mr. driessen this doesn't make any sense because 48 years now after rachel carson and we have a problem in the environment. >> host: paul driessen? >> guest: we think would have

to recognize is ddt and others are toxic more to some species than others. for a simple as cats and fish are more susceptible to ddt in the and the province or equals three the rahman populations rapidly increasing during the time when we were screened the most ddt and they attribute that to the fact, when ddt was coming in what insects and mosquitos carrying the avian diseases and to link the insects feeding the birds food as to the eagles. the interesting thing is before 1922 the ottoman society in ecology magazine said that the eagles were threatened with extinction but by the 1960's when ddt was being used the most the eagle populations were up 25% and what happened in the interim was people stopped shooting the eagles. we passed the bald eagle protection act and the that was a huge difference and we amended

to cover the golden eagles as well lead that is when the eagle population started coming back and it happened in the midst of using ddt. >> host: linda lear? >> guest: what about the republicans when we finally stopped using ddt as much as we have, the brown pelicans once again began to combat. these are birds, there's a difference in the kind of birds and how they hatch and later eggs and they were the most affected by ddt. i want to just say that when the congress after the hearings rachel creston testified with, but congress band the production of ddt in this country but they never band the sale or distribution of ddt abroad. we have had 50 plus years, almost 50 years since of the distribution of ddt and all with its sister chemicals abroad.

so the dispersion of the multiplicity of pesticides, chemical toxins in our environment has accelerated, not a decelerated since rachel carson's time. >> host: linda lear, with the founding of the epa, the environmental movement, the effect or of of what we give to the environment today recycling, taking the lead out of gas, removing phosphates from the water product, would that have occurred in your view without rachel carson "silent spring"? >> guest: that's really almost an a historical question and it's hard for historians to answer that. i feel what rachel carson was trying to do is bring awareness to her readers and the world that we need to ask the question

always what is still long term affect of what we are doing ek if to the environment to human and nonhuman environment by putting these chemicals into our wiota. did that was her primary concern. it was the interlocking ecology of life. what has happened since and whether or not she would approve of various acts of the epa or of an environmental activist groups whether they be pro or con is impossible to conjecture. i think that rachel carson would be very concerned about our environment today that we need to do better than we are doing. but that certainly she would be pleased with any steps taken to make our planet seaver and a better place for the whole of the biota. >> host: mark in west palm beach florida. you are on with linda lear and

paul driessen. >> caller: thanks for taking my call. interesting conversations. i just wanted to make a couple of points. one is that of course the falcon was one of the test cases for ddt banned in california where they are able to measure the shells in the 12-foot wingspan and the 70's. the other thing is the coinciding news headlines smith the blocks so klein announced in january they are going to make available information on the hundreds of compounds that can address malaria. these are natural compounds. it's everybody's right to make money in this country but why is it mccaul companies can make whatever they want and these corporations shom were this stuff, they do their own testing. nobody knows whether or not this

stuff is harmful or not we find out later, maybe it causes problems, maybe they fudge the numbers. at any rate -- >> host: we got the point, thanks. paul driessen >> guest: let me jump back just a second to the earlier point about the epa banning ddt. when they did they had a seventh month study and it was determined that ddt was and carcinogenic or causing the problems but william said i have a political problem and i'm going to solve it. let's go to mark's comment. i think you were talking about the convert, it is a separate situation and there were still a lot of problems of people shooting them and hope habitat losses and other things like that. joel dittman was the guy that did the calcium -- the ddt thinning studies initially. he concluded ddt in fact this

caught the thinning but that was pointed out that his studies were using by it's deficient in calcium. he ran the tests because he was a darn good scientist right here in the maryland area and lo and behold there was no impact on the eggshell thinning. my big concern with ddt and keeping it out there and using it when it is appropriate and use it responsibly and by trained personnel because i think that should be done with all chemicals is the death of children. these are 25 kids out of 50 who died at the course of one year in a one school in ugonda. friends of mine are supporters of the school so imagine in this country 10% of a class of kids just being did from one disease in one year it's just a tragedy we don't want to repeat. >> host: lee in south carolina. you are on booktv.

>> caller: i would like to challenge a few things mr. driessen has said. when ddt was used in the second world war, it was used in a power perform and it's extremely hard to absorb through the skin when it is a powder but once we started spraying get on crops in the neighborhood of the mix with oil and becomes highly toxic. another think he is overlooking is he's isolating the ddt and dr. linda lear is exactly right. what happens if you are exposed to ddt and are taking antibiotics, other drugs, what happens in your body when this mix is, does it make your antibiotics toxic and that was certainly something she asks magnificent questions and then there were other chemicals at the time, there was dieldrin --

i'm probably murdering the pronunciation -- there were some of those much more highly toxic than ddt. >> host: paul driessen and linda lear. >> guest: i agree those are far more toxic and why there are more controls on them and clearly when you mix ddt with oil because it isn't soluble in water you exit -- it was busted as a powder troops and holocaust survivors so you are right. when it's mixed with leal id is absorbed more into the skin but even then there have never been a single study that conclusively shows any carcinogenic effect or other toxic effect on human beings that doesn't say that there is not an impact on some species and the environment generally the certainly with all of the other chemicals we are putting in including birth control pills from women putting all sorts of things into the environment and i don't think

anybody can separate what one chemical out of the mix has an affect on various species or the ecology as a whole. >> host: linda lear. >> guest: i have to say it depends on whether we are taking a at a look at our world or whether we are talking about the whole of life. rachel carson was talking about whole of life and she also observed technology was on a fast trajectory than the moral responsibility. what she was hoping by her book was to galvanize people to take moral responsibility for the whole of the wiota. humans as well as the rest of nature and i agree with paul in this since the use of ddt or whatever the best and tight malarial chemical might be in a

specific contained use to prevent these diseases like malaria is an important thing and rachel wouldn't be against it but ddt has been used in agriculture and once used prolific currently in agriculture and the other ones that this caller, thank you very much, as specified that once you use it all. the agriculture and the insects have different chemical compositions and find you can use it inside a tent. it's very effective but that doesn't mean it's effective loophole of the landscape and what she was saying is it isn't just one place. it's the whole world we are talking about and we have to be concerned about the stream of life, the whole stream of life. and what you think about the current movement of the last couple of years to reintroduce

the ddt to combat malaria? >> guest: i'm not a scientist. i would put that to paul driessen. he would be able to answer that better. i am not antichemical and i don't think that rachel would have been but we need to know what its long-term effects are. we can't just be so blind as we were with the line for example that can at the same time and put out there and then say oh no because once you put a chemical out into the society into the stream of life if you will you can't take it back so we better know what we are doing before hand and that is what her point was. >> guest: that is my point, to match. all chemicals the to be used carefully by trained people. people need to be aware that you are dealing, you are handling of

things that either in the very immediate term with some chemicals or in the longer term can have a serious deleterious effect on you as a person or the people around you or the environment around you. in terms of ddt for malaria control what i was explaining before is what you do now is not about and spray the environment to kill a mosquito. ddt has never been good at that, the slow acting compared to dial treynor icon or some of the others used today. what they do is the spring of the walls and the eaves of parts so that the mosquito's don't come in. if they come when they get excited, agitated and mostly leave before they buy it and if they do happen to landaluze all then they die within a couple of minutes other chemicals used in

a mosquito control in the united states is instantaneous. the chemical comes in contact and the microscopic drops and the mosquito is dead. what i recommend is a broad based approach to malaria we need the bed nets and the drugs. we need the mosquito killer is to keep them under control and better treatment drugs and hospitalization in the countries and we need ddt to serve as a sort of long-lasting whole house bed net that you don't have to worry about putting on each night. it's just there and you don't have to have it only when you're sleeping. >> host: a quick housekeeping noted. i've been calling you paul driessen -- it is driessen. good. ann in north carolina. you are on with linda lear and paul driessen to a >> caller: think you for taking my call. on was 7-years-old when her book

came out. i don't have any questions just more comments than anything. pesticides, herbicides, homicide, suicide, they are all in the same family. and that always struck me as kind of an interesting thing to think about. there are many chemicals into rivers and streams and what's happening down here on the appalachian mountains is mountaintop removal and that is just atrocious. nearly 500 mountains have been removed in the appalachian -- >> host: tell you what we appreciate the comments. we are going to leave it there. linda lear, this e-mail kinver martha who lives in charleston south carolina where you are right now. if you could respond i have the feeling rachel carson's love was the earth see in her books. my favorite is "the sea around us." she also wanted children to experience a sense of wonder and

nature as her posthumous books state. please comment, linda lear on the silent spring research and writing almost being forced upon her when she preferred writing about the earth and its wonders. >> guest: marcella is certainly right that rachel didn't come looking for "silent spring" as the book to write. she was hoping to write about evolution actually and to continue on with her book on how to teach our children to wonder therefore love the natural world and to want to keep it because they loved it. you don't work for something that you don't love. but i don't believe on the other hand that rachel carson wasn't wholeheartedly involved in this book, speak or that she gave up the love of her seat because she

didn't. the 1961 preface to "the sea around us" is a preface in which she talks a great deal about the threat of atomic dumping into the ocean. she was one of the earliest people to call attention to what kind of contamination ocean dumping what do to the biota, to the oceans and global warming. she actually wrote something about because rachel had studied and was on the board of trustees in the oceanographic institute. she had kept up in her research. she actually wrote about the incipient rising in ocean temperatures and what that might do. of course it was very speculative back then. but owls martha says she had a love of the ocean.

but carson was passionate about the ongoing life and the whole of the biota and the interlocking this of life. so one couldn't go on without the other and that really was her love. >> host: here is the post script what happened to the fish and wildlife pamphlets for the government. doug brinkley the historian commented recently her work there was destroyed. >> guest: no. i don't believe that -- i haven't seen that from him, but her work on those pamphlets has been considered some of the best writing efficient way of life ever had. they may have lost the pamphlets but they're certainly in the archives and interregional archive -- rachel carson archived at the college. >> host: rachel carson for 1907 by 1964.

"silent spring" published in 1962. barry in norfolk nebraska. good evening. >> caller: thank you for taking my call. one comment and a quick question. i was 16-years-old in 1962. and i grew up on a farm here in nebraska. this very apparent that in those days and even for years thereafter that the wildlife was disappearing as a result of the chemicals which we are using here in agriculture and i went into the service and spent 27 years in service before i came back while i was in service i dealt with agent orange. my comment is there was a lot of wild life lost in the nebraska

and it's apparent the streams are delayed of what we used to have when we were kids, salamanders, turtles, toads, frogs, plus the song birds are just wiped out and they never have come back but my question is what you might making a couple of comments about agent orange? >> host: paul driessen? >> guest: i am not willing to cross into that because that's something i've not studied. i've read all sorts of stories about it but i'm not an expert on that and i wouldn't want -- >> host: linda lear? >> guest: i'm not an expert on that either. i just know quite interestingly enough, several of regional's scientific experts, frank and ruth scott in particular have been using the four of the roadside for the rights of way for telephone poles and railroad sidings and so forth and ruth's

got a great pennsylvania conservationist and frank both concluded that these agents, these herbicides which i think our relatives of agent orange or so detrimental to the vegetation and bird life or the insect life on those rights of ways that they advocated and hoped rachel would advocate against their use. to her, to the rachel it was all one of a peace. you don't put it out there when it is clear you are harming the whole of the biota. >> host: paul driessen use if you are a former member of the sierra club and of the zero population growth group. why former? >> guest: i came to the conclusion having worked in these areas for a long time that part of much of what they were

telling me was not totally in sync with what i was studying and i was being fed information that simply wasn't correct and there were times in discussions and things like i conclude they flat out were misrepresenting the facts about a wide variety of issues and i just had a parting of ways on different topics. most of it having to do with activities out west when i was living in colorado and wyoming. >> host: where did you come up with the name of your book "eco-imperialism: green power, black death"? >> guest: as i indicated earlier, i grew up kind of in the environmental movement. rachel carson was a huge inspiration for me. it changed a lot of my thinking that as i traveled more and more in the other countries of the world and came in contact with the impoverishment of the communities and the diseases that we don't even see here

anymore i realized that as much as the environmental movement has improved things in many ways, some of the antitechnology and antichemical positions are detrimental to the development and the health of people in these other countries. malaria is a good example. the opposition by environmental groups like the sierra club and greenpeace for example to the use of biotechnology in agriculture is something i've never been able to understand and my friend, patrick who is a co-founder of greenpeace and i are on the same page. we just don't understand what the opposition is. the opposition of fossil fuel with a lot of these countries where they just don't have electricity. 95% of people in sub-saharan africa still don't have electricity and i cannot imagine my life without electricity. so these are the issues i brought up in foia

"eco-imperialism" three >> host: peter in greenwich connecticut. you're on the air. >> caller: thank you. actually rachel affected the. i'm an architect today because she mentioned my home town where i still practicing greenwich and i witnessed the spraying to save the entries of ddt. it seems a conversation on both sides here is the theme that seems to go through is antibig business but not holding government out the task. it seems like we've trusted them with protecting us if you will and it seems example after example of the business is trying to do things better is either sorted or put back by government regulations that are too quick from the hipaa -- >> host: peter, you said that

you are a landscape architect. do you use insecticides and chemicals in your work? >> guest: >> caller: i use them sometimes, yes and especially working in the golf world and would be shocked and amazed at how absolutely precise and terrific the united states golf association in particular has studied this carefully because they were put on the rack as bad boys and they've come back and studied this very carefully. it seems the political fix to ban ddt as mentioned earlier is something that comes easily and quickly. >> host: linda lear if you would come you live in charleston south carolina, a lot of golf courses in your area. did you have any comments regarding that? >> guest: note. i have to quickly say that i am this privilege to be down in charleston south carolina part

of my life and the rest i live where paul lives in bethesda maryland, and so i don't have any comment about the golf courses but i -- nor do i know if they've improved things or not. i'm not a golfer. >> host: darnell in maryland please go ahead with your question. >> caller: as far as the chemicals we use, there are always side effects just like the medicines we take and they don't care how many people get sick, how many people die as long as it doesn't affect their bottom line. they will not tell you the truth until they are forced to. as far as the chemicals being sprayed from the trucks that come around in the summertime and kill the mosquitos my neighbor was sitting outside last summer and started getting a headache. i suggest because the truck just came and sprayed you. that has a bug killer and people act like they are so shocked and don't know what is going on but if you try to get the information about what they are

springing out of the trucks he speeds off and will give you a number. i live in a waldorf maryland and they've been doing it for years. i try to get them to stop and it's very hard. >> host: okay. got the point. linda lear, let's start with you and then paul driessen. >> guest: i couldn't agree with you more. we haven't come that far where we care more about how to clean our lawns are as opposed to how many songbirds we have or whether the worms and other drugs under the ground or in good health or in poor health. i just want to say that carson's whole point was about humility and arrogance that so long as humans act as though they can't control nature we can spray away this and the drug away that. we are not going to have a cleaner world or a world that will sustain our planet for very

long humans have to have some humility. we are not in control of nature and we can't control where it is going to go. we have to be humble and we have to think about the whole of nature and that includes all the little insects in people and yes media or green lawns and golf courses can't be so green but maybe we can live happier and longer without them. >> host: paul driessen? >> guest: i think the use of chemicals is very important and they have to be used carefully to die you need to take continuing approach to evaluating the impact of evaluating how much you need, what should be used with it is ddt or anything else but there are benefits to having these chemicals in all aspects of our lives. we wouldn't be -- we would still be living at -- don young at age 47 as we were around 1900 if it were not for some of the

chemicals and other things we've developed over time. we have to be humble and recognize, to back that sometimes say things government does is very bad. the ban on ddt by william buckles house contrary to his own scientific advisory panel recommendations and conclusions was for many people in the world one of the first things that could happen because of lead eventually to an almost international ban or did facto ban against using a chemical that could save millions of lives. if we want to take one other issue that were where peter brooke the government versus corporations, one of my big has been the cafe standards. we do them corporate automobile efficiency standards. we do it to save gasoline. there are questions about that but the big question from my perspective is here government came along and made some decisions to enact the mileage

standards and various people that have studied this say that three to 4,000 more americans are dying every year because of the cafe standards. we downsized and plasticized the cars so these are all things we should be thinking about in the context of our human environment and the broad natural environment and i hope we will continue studying them for a long time to come and making some wise policy decisions right from the get go. >> host: lancaster p.a.. you are on the air. >> caller: we need more informative programs like this. anybody know anything that the cycle of plays -- of police in? is that still applicable? you can't find in the winter and the north grapes or berries or fruits from other than chile or

mexico. >> host: cycle of plays in. >> guest: everything we create has a half life and termination point. various levels of toxicity. it depends on the type of poison, the type of exposure. so all of those things get rolled into an analysis of what the cycle of plays and actively is and we have to of laid the speculation and extrapolation and actually deal with the scientific fact. .. the biggest impact on rachel carson and "silent spring"? >> that she allowed us to think about our future, about the world, and that we would question authority, that we would ask what is it that you are doing? why is it helpful? and who is it going to hurt? and who is it going to benefit? >> host: linda lear and paul

driessen. if you want to hear more, you can talk to her. you can also go to paul's web site. thank you for being on booktv and primetime. we have two more hours of programming coming up. :

to this manhattan institute's event for nicole gelinas, the author of an import new book, "after the fall." we bulk of new new yorkers, the manhattan institute friends in c-span viewers. i don't know how many of you have seen the new chanel movie. that is the movie about the designer, coco chanel. janell was unjustly designer. she was the designer. she pinpointed what was wrong with the 19th century by pinpointing what was wrong with their skirts. then, with another set of markers chanel blocked out the 20th century, what it should be, women sits, clothes you can wear and what can, ideas that change culture, politics, technet genomics all due to the utter precision of the artist.

nicole gelinas is the chanel of financial government. [laughter] in her sharp but, with her after the fall -- the book we are going to talk about this morning she marks the spots in our past history that took us to the current financial crisis, that made inevitable in fact that they would come this way with equal mastery. she pencils the pattern for the reform. you didn't know what was right until you saw it. so, we want to welcome you all to hear this. nicole is the cyril freedomfest fell at the manhattan institute, a contributing editor to their magazine. nicole is also a chartered financial analyst, i.e. master of her craft. two-word three things i want to mention before she comes up to talk to you. one is that this book, "after the fall," is a history book.

today we have our assumptions, deposit insurance is good, we just need more of it may be. another assumption that we have is that the world will implode if we don't say the institutions that are too big to fail. unless you go back to history you will know that these are new and controversial views. your irony, your sense of irony won't work for you and there is irony. that you about deposit insurance until just a few decades ago was that it should be limited. as recently as 1989 the head of citicorp, john reed was warning we have to cut back deposit insurance, have lessor we would have financial crises including for his bank, later. people, the cut back deposit insurance people would know what they were risking when they put their money in an institution. they would have to evaluate the institution. there was a time too munley didn't believe in too big to

fail. the united states as nicole talks about but an important bank failed in the 1980's, pence wirer of oklahoma. the second achievement of "after the fall" is it solutions. nicole does not lay out absolute answers. she doesn't call for more bailouts either. she goes for the logical middle ground, the classical solution that sits many. like, making the rules of market clear, applying the same rules to everyone, no special friends, no more too big to fail special new york category. it is wrong to have sars sitting on thrones to make the king the more nervous. we will later lady's out for you and then howard from the manhattan institute will help nicole take questions. welcome, maestro. [applause]

>> thank you amity for that generous introduction and limiting deposit insurance to actually insure deposits is a radical concept. now, going with amity's chanelle metaphor, coco chanel said in the 1920's that simplicity is the key note hovel attends endic she was not talking about financial markets, but she may as well have been, as hopefully if i do my job right, you will see at the end of my little talk. so, a failure of free markets. that is what the last two years look like to many people. we have had the financial system destroys itself so thoroughly that the government had to come along and provide it with

essentially nationalization of all of its risk, so that money and credit would not disintegrate. now we have unemployment and underemployment at 17.5%, but yet goldman sachs says that it has to pay it least $16.5 billion worth of bonuses so that its own employees don't leave the firm. now, goldman seems to feel bad about this. it wants to donate $500 million to small businesses. what kind of free markets that we have when small businesses have to depend on a rich company treating it as a hobby in order to get capital financing? but this in fact has not been a failure free markets. the past 25 years are the story of what happens when the government does not understand its proper role in the free markets. and that is to provide a level,

predictable, consistence system of prudent regulation so that markets can discipline themselves without causing unacceptable harm and destruction to the broader economy. now we know how to do this. we did this for 50 years more less well from the 1930's until the 1980's. how did we learn how to do this? we learned lessons of the 1920's now, the 20's were wonderful innovative decades as amity has noted in her own work. the problem with the 20's is it relates to the financial markets, innovation creach optimism, optimism creates excess optimism and when you have financial markets that don't have any meaningful regulation other than monetary policy, you have financial ferc send people borrowing against every last dollar of optimism projected decades into the

future. you have got layer upon layer of debt upon layer upon layer of assumption going out into the future and that means when you have the slightest falter in expectations of the future, you have got, you are pulling out one little assumption. the whole tower of the assumptions and that collapses, and then you have so much on pay debt that the banking system is effectively bankrupt. we saw this happen in the early 1930's, not just with borrowing nickens the stock market of course but against all kinds of asset markets. and what could be learned from this? weave learned that markets have to discipline themselves but not that the price of unacceptable destruction of the economy. the first elegant solution to this puzzle is out to allow market discipline without economic destruction was the fdic. this is acceptable moral hazard

or fdr and his policymakers decided, we can eliminate panic, reduce panic in the financial system by protecting small depositors but we are not going to protect that banks against their mistakes. they can still fail otocystic the small depositors will be protected so we will not see the destruction of money and credit again. but the most important thing that fdr realize was that you don't want to eliminate risk in the financial markets. you just want to protect the economy against the natural and inevitable excesses' of optimism and captain azzam. how do you do that? to limit borrowing first of all i and to limit borrowing predictably inconsistently. fdr did not set up a systemic stock regulator to figure out which stocks are safe and which are not and which ones you can borrow against unlimited and which ones you cannot. instead, they said that the fed and the fcc would say you can

only borrow half the price of a stock. you can speculate all you want, pick your own risk but when you are wrong you will lose but the economy will not the bankrupt. then they also said you have got to consistently report market activities, corporate activities of people have a level fighting chance of understanding what risk is out there if they choose to do so. now the system worked well again, until the 1980's and then the financial system started to escape prison regulations and escape market discipline. we are going to the results of that right now. so, how did this happen? we go back to 1984, may of 1984. bang called continental illinois. this was the eighth largest bank in the country at the time and continental illinois was the pioneer of the banking industry.

continental was a pioneer in that it did not follow a business model of solely keeping long-term loans on its books, but in the profits as people and companies repaid the loans and having a very slow business model insulated for the most part from acute panics and fluctuations in prices and the securities market. instead continental purchased loans that had been securitize. that meant that they were vulnerable to fluctuations in prices day to day and continental book the profits from the fluctuations than those prices. that is one way that they made themselves and multiplied over many financial it's a tuitions in the future, they made the system of credit more vulnerable to financial excesses. the other way was that they depended on short-term financing, uninsured short-term

lenders provided a good deal of their money so that made themselves vulnerable to short-term panic in a second way because the short-term lenders could pull their money out overnight in a crisis. now, the governments in 1984, the market started to panic in the spring once they got wind that some of these securities that continental had for going back. the government decided that continental could not fail, that the price would be too high for the national and indeed the global financial and economic system. so, the reagan administration did something that was unprecedented that the time. they came out, the fdic and treasury came out and said that none of continental illinois's bondholders, the uninsured bondholders, they would not take any losses in the continental failure. this engendered quite a debate within the reagan

administration. don we can who was at the time the treasury secretary, said, he wrote this in the memo to his colleagues. we believe that is bad public policy when it seems to be unfair and represents the amount of authorized and on legislated the expansion of federal guarantees in contravention of executive-branch policy, so he was against this. president reagan himself never said much publicly about the bailout but an unnamed white house official said the president's thinking was that he agreed with regulators compelling argument that the only other choice was to rich wild -- worldwide financial have that. at the time the fed chairman paul volcker said this bailout would not set a precedent that the market's new that it set a precedent. we got a new phrase in the financial industry but not yet in the public lexicon which was too big to fail. the independent bankers association which represents

small banks understood the implications of this. its president at the time what these big banks have the ultimate anti-competitive government subsidy. they are too big to fail and regardless of how mismanage they may become, the bug will stop the taxpayer. so, when the government wants more of something it subsidizes it. if you want more corn, subsidized corn. if you want a financial crisis built up over decades based on the banks and other financial companies borrowing for the purpose of reckless speculation, then subsidize banks and other financial companies borrowing for the purpose of reckless speculation and that is exactly what the government did with this new policy. banks and later other financial institutions could borrow at rates that they could not otherwise borrower that's because their vendors knew that this was in effect lending to the government but at a higher

interest rate. so, this was the first limited to commercial banks. but investment banks of course had to compete with these commercial banks said they created their own too big to fail. this was too complicated to fail. when we hear about exotic financial instruments, "credit default swaps and everything else, these are not so complicated. many of them have good innovations and beneficial to the economy and market signals and all kinds of other things, but one of the reasons for their creation is to escape or was to escape these reasonable, consistent limits on borrowing. credit default swaps, speculative, this is a way to speculate without having to put cash them. the same with securitizations, creating complex financial structures so that banks and other investors could achieve these aaa ratings and invest in the securities without putting a

consistent amount of money down to protect them in the economy from many mistakes in their assumptions. with aaa securitized mortgage loans or mortgage bonds for example, banks could purchase these bonds with just one eighth of the cash that would normally be set aside for any mistakes in their assumptions. so, by doing this, we made the entire financial system much more vulnerable to mistakes in these assumptions just as we had done in the 1920's. now, sometimes the federal officials recognized that we were not applying the old rules to new markets and they did just that. they applied the old rules to new markets in one example of this is in the 1980's, when paul volcker, the fed chairman at the time, recognize that the junk bond markets were getting ahead

of themselves speculatively and he simply got the fed to put the old rules, regulating, jafaar wing people could do for stock speculation, on this new market which was effectively the same thing saying takeover companies could only borrow half the price for a takeover. this provoked a tremendous outcry but it did mean that when the junk bond markets went through its turbulence in downturn in the late '80s and early '90s, the economy did not suffer the kind of catastrophe that we have suffered today. unfortunately most of the time, the government's in the financial institutions did the opposite. they confused what kind of risk-taking needed clear, consistent limits on borrowing and what kind of risk-taking needed discretionary surveillance. denefec thought that the financial industry had identified and quarantined all risk with no risk left.

we did need the sold limits and that is exactly what alan greenspan did in 2000 when he said that you don't need old-fashioned regulations for the new-fangled unregulated derivatives markets, including what would later become the credit default swap market. this was how half a decade later aig could make $500 billion worth of promises without -- with putting negligible cash down leaving itself again no room for error if they made a mistake in these assumptions. now, enron, but before i get into enron, two examples of how these reasonable prudent regulations that eroded so thoroughly that the financial system just was left without any market discipline to governate by the time we got into the 2000's.

1990, -- went bankrupt in greenspan was called under congress to testify about this. he said that it would be inconceivable that we would ever apply too big to fail to an investment bank. five years later, bearings investment bank in britain went bankrupt through a bad derivatives that. it could go bankrupt some of the normal bankruptcy process with its lenders taking his losses because it had made these bets on a regulated markets where it had put cache down in the markets understood where the risk lied. just three years later a hedge fund, long-term capital management, could not go bankrupt to the normal bankruptcy process because it did made the same derivatives bets on on making the need markets without putting any cash down so as bankruptcy could have blown up the economy. that is what regulators worry about that the engineered a bank bailout of this hedge fund, protecting its lenders.

the last milepost on our way to 2007 and 2008 was enron. enron was very neat distillation of the entire financial industry and that its business model was borrow tremendous amounts of money, use that money to purchase its own assets from itself at ever higher prices. this allowed it take tremendous profits which allowed it to borrow money. why could it borrow more money? it said it had insured its own debt and made it risk-free. this was a strange and fascinating business model. but, by definition enron was saying if we go bankrupt, don't worry we will pay for it. but, the strangest -- [laughter] the strangest and most fascinating thing about enron was that the banks that enron did business with, the bear stearns and laymen cosson's did not think this business model was very strange adel.

when people say, when could we have averted this crisis by doing something with bear stearns in 2007, by bailing out lehman, the last time to do anything about this was enron. after that these regulations have so eroded, the markets, financial markets were not subject to any reasonable discipline because they knew that market discipline meant economic catastrophe and that is that we get from there to 2007 and 2008. when the markets finally did correct their excesses' just as they had in the late '20s, but they could not do so without creating another great depression and that is how we got the nationalization of risk in the financial industry. the opposite of pruned regulation in the market discipline in finance is not free markets as we have seen. it is nationalization of one of the most important elements of the economy. who decides which businesses get

investment capital in on what terms? now, it is fashionable to say that the crisis has been a black swan, something that we could not have anticipated once in a 100-year event. the real black swan would be if we had gotten rid of every prudent regulation and all market discipline of finance and we have had a historic financial crisis. now, what does that mean? it is good news in a way. we know exactly what we have to do. we have to go back and apply the old principles to new markets. we don't need huge bureaucracies , micromanagement to finance by the governments, consumer financial protection agency's, systemic risk regulator. we don't need any of that to do that. if we had a systemic risk regulator five years ago the regulator what it said the ieee mortgages are just fine.

these are perfectly safe. there is no crisis, nothing to see here. and omniscient regulator cannot do any better than free markets at predicting in preventing financial crisis. in fact, it hurts the market's ability to do that because they do not operate under the threat of failure. all we need to do is go back to what -- the lesson we learned 50 years ago, consistent predictable borrowing across financial instruments that are similar to one another regardless of what the financial industry thinks of your risk. the government should not be assessing risk from the top-down, which is effectively what they have been doing. the financial industry should be assessing risk from the bottom-up with the government setting consistent limits on borrowing so when they are wrong, these firms can go bankrupt in the economy does not explode. if we have had these limits in place five years ago, we can

look at this from the supply-side and the demand side. from the supply-side of providing financing, aig could not have insured $500 billion worth of mortgage related securities and other securities while putting very little cash down. if they had to put tenet 20% down and would have thought twice. if they didn't think twice they could have gone under and the economy what it had some protection, just as with bearings 15 years ago. from the demand side, if you have limits on borrowing to nist becky lived markets, the housing market became a speculum the market in the hat to put ten, 20% down payment down, this market would not have gotten away from itself the way that it ended up doing because as prices rose, people would not have the cash to keep up with these rising prices. dampening demand across all price levels. with these simple rules in

place, we can go back to a consistent, predictable system where financial firms in global investors know that everyone is playing on the same level playing field with a fair chance and with the most important regulation of all, the market discipline, once again governing the financial industry. you can to say you were ending too big to fail. the markets will know if you haven't done it as long as failure means politically and socially unacceptable economic catastrophe. now, what does failure protect that is important economically? two things. one, that businesses and bad ideas should not survive into the future with the government's money. you have a company like aig who has very good divisions. the corporate structure failed at using these good divisions to make these tremendous banks that

ended up going that. sell these divisions off to someone who can manage them better. don't have the government-backed insurance company competing against the rest of the insurance business. and the second thing is fairness. the public can see that this is an unfair system. the public has been against bailouts every step of the way, even bailouts meant to help out of their own neighbors. this is not mindless, heartless populism. the public can see that this is not free market and the public is angry at goldman sachs, not because people don't like rich people and they don't want people to do well. it is just that they can see this is on fair and goldman is operating with the implicit government guarantees. and it does not been the problem for these banks to pay back their t.a.r.p. money. in fact in some ways it makes it worse because of these with t.a.r.p. people know there is government money there. now we have again an unseen government presence distorting

this economy. however, this is not something the public can do by itself. we do need political leadership here for washington to realize that reasonable regulation with the end being fair, consistent financial market discipline, that this is not a barrier to free market capitalism, that this is in the end a necessary prerequisite to free-market capitalism. so, with that i am very happy to take questions. thank you very much. [applause] >> i am howard, vice president of research for the men had institute in my job here today really is to point out questions for nicole. if i might start nicole come on your point about extending simple rules to new markets, do

you have some feeling -- there is legislation now being considered in washington both on the house and senate side. is in the of a consistent with the prescription you have offered this morning? >> no. [laughter] the one thing that is consistent was to build, one of the first bills that came out, which was put unregulated derivatives on the regulated market. however that seems to have disappeared somewhere and now we have chris dodd and senator dodd and representative barney frank going with this idea from president obama to create this systemic risk regulator. dodd's books berzon said just the other day, we need a system that predicts and prevents future crises. that is an impossible goal. old they can do is protect against the effects of future crises. >> okay.

the house rules are keep it in the form of a question, tell us a.u. are and wait for the microphone and i will start with the gentleman on the far right there. wait for the microphone. >> thank you. my name is roger mode. i would like to ask about three specific remedies to see if you or for any of them, bringing back glass-steagall, breaking up the big banks and imposing leverage requirements. >> okay, i will do the first to first roger because those two go together. imposing leverage requirements and breaking up the big banks. another part of one of these bills coming out of congress is an amendment to allow regulators to identify too big to fail financial institutions and force them to break up. but we can't tell which of these institutions are too big to fail in advance. few people what it said that bear stearns was too big to fail

seven years ago, which is how far in advance you need to do these things. if we credibly and too big to fail by protecting the economy from failure, and if we'd put consistence borrowing limits across financial instruments and financial institutions no matter what the call themselves, leverage will take care of itself through these, through reasonable regulations and through market forces, because lenders will know they no wonder have an implicit government guarantee. they will care more what they are doing with their money. the same thing was too big to fail financial institutions, lenders will do their own surveillance here if they know that these institutions can fail without taking the economy hostage. glass-steagall, we are used to living in a mark-to-market world, and we are not going back to holding loans on books for 30

years and booking the profits little go investors want to know what is going on. a better solution than going back to glass-steagall is to better protect the economy from prices, fluctuating prices and securitization markets because that is what kills credit worms credit to excessive. one way of doing that is burying capital requirements with liabilities. one of the most acute dangers is financial firms relying on short-term, the overnight lending, make them hold more capital proportionate to the amount of short-term lending that they have and you have better protected the economy. this idea comes from alan greenspan. in 1984, before he was fed chairman he was on an economist panel after the continental illinois rescue ndps said the bank should hold against losses depending on the type of liabilities that they have.

>> do any of the regulators currently have the power to implement the kinds of solutions that you are advocating? >> well, in the '80s, paul volcker had the power and a convincing clout to convince the fed to put the old bar when limits on the junk market's. in the '90s, alan greenspan had so much clout in congress that they took his word for whether underregulated derivatives needed to be regulated or not so in effect the fed has banned systemic risk regulators for two decades. where they have the discretion, sometimes they used properly and sometimes they didn't. where they didn't, they had plenty of gravatas to go to congress and ask for it so it is not a matter of not enough

power. it is a matter of failing to recognize that we need these consistent rules. >> i am ken silver whip research magazine. what do you think about ron paul's effort to what the fed and more importantly abolish the fed? >> well, he has sold more books than me so far. [laughter] but, i think this is an example of why, if reasonable politicians on both sides of the aisle don't come up with a reasonable solution, people are going to gravitate toward the sun reasonable solutions. we don't need to get rid of the fed. what we can't depend on monetary policy is their only regulatory tool which is effectively what we have done for 20 years. the monetary policy is wrong. the human condition for

hillah -- monetary policy to be wrong but we need limits on borrowing some mistakes on monetary policy don't create any asset bubble and one particular asset class that become so big that it can't fix itself without destroying the rest of the economy and of course we need to do better with monetary policy, focusing on the fed in what it is done writer prong there is a distraction in my view. thank you. >> hi, this is ray niles. what about getting rid of some of the regulations that i would feel less sort of the root cause of the problem and really in the 30's the guarantees for mortgage loans and the creation of fannie mae and freddie mac, securitization was invented by the federal government. y nike. of that? that led to over barring and i am curious of your thoughts on that. >> i agree with you

wholeheartedly, the government should create the consistence environment for these financial firms to do their business, not force certain classes of lending at the expense of free and fair and putin markets, which is what they have done, sometimes with words -- horse effect and other times. this idea of mortgages with no downpayments, borrowing 120% of the value of the home. there is this sort of myth that the ne ready made the banks do this but fannie and freddie certainly didn't help and they allowed this to look respectable. the government said it was okay and therefore it must be okay. fannie and freddie were too big to fail. this is the whole other area that goes along with inappropriate government distortion. thanks, ray.

>> janet norman. how do you you see citibank's future? [laughter] >> i used to work get citibank. citibank's future, this is -- they cannot succeed without market discipline and right now they operate without market discipline. just as importantly, they are distorting what other firms do, because they have got to compete against effectively government subsidized banks. so come here again this is a place just like keiji where you have got great business lines, great people in some places but you have got to the unlock these people and put them in the hands of managers who know how to manage the company and you have got to do that at the expense of bondholders, who freely lent

money to the company and should take a loss when their prospects turn out to be not with the lenders have thought. there is no justification for not having bondholders to the financial system take losses. then you are just back to the problem of too much debt. no regulation in the world can overcome this subsidy. >> hi, i am mark green. how do you think the too big to fail issue can be solved with a concentration of assets? the seven largest financial as a tuitions in the country control over 70% of the total assets and have a very big competitor advantage over the other 10,000. >> the first thing is not to make the trouble wars which is exactly what we have been doing over the past two years with failed banks, largely being

bought by these too big to fail financial institutions, and beyond that, this is a place where it will be a very slow evolution. we did not build up too big to fail overnight and we want ended overnight that once the government puts in place a credible system for failure, lenders will provide market discipline and push these firms to break themselves up. otherwise they will have to pay much more for their financing commensurate with the prospects for failure and for mismanagement as well. lenders will forgive mismanagement when they know that they are being subsidized by the government. they lend to the government directly and put up with plenty of mismanagement there. [laughter] >> marshall chaffee. when one considers that not only the debt holders of large

investment banks, but the equity holders were essentially made whole, one can surmise that it wasn't just the threat of systemic failure that induced the government to support those institutions. do you think that eliminating the risk of systemic failure through limits on leverage will eliminate the temptation to bailout those institutions for other perhaps more parochial reasons? >> well, they wouldn't have the excuse, and not that it is an excuse. there was real obvious risk and the reality of systemic failure but they could not go to the public or to congress and credibly say, we have got to pay everyone 100% on the dollar on aig's credit default swaps are the whole system will collapse,

so when you have got a predictable, consistence system of bankruptcy or some of the resolution as the fdic does, you eliminate the cover for doing anything for any other reasons or for the perception you have done it for other reasons, which is just as important. and, geithner could learn a lesson from dubai. dubai is saying why should we bailout to buy world which is effectively a bailout of sophisticated banks? we did the same thing with aig, because our partly because we were under this immediate systemic pressure. >> hi, irs though, the future of capitalism.com. would your limits on borrowing apply just to financial firms with insured depositors or to the whole economy and if so,

what is the philosophical justification for the interference in the right of contract, of a willing lender to loan as much money as he wants to to a bar where? >> thanks. the justification is that, you were right to land in borrow on an unlimited basis and were your ability to hold the entire economy hostage begins. multiplied across the economy borrowing without any room for error just results in nationalizations. we saw this in the '30's. we saw it again over the past two years. and, we can't, one of the lessons of the modern way of creating credit through securities is, you can't protect credits from the excesses of speculation just through the uninsured deposits. we have to have a consistent

amendment across these financial instruments because these are the instruments of credit. now you still have fluctuation, optimism, pessimism and you should but you can't hold the economy hostage. we have always had limits on borrowing, even outside of insured deposits. the margin requirements for stocks and for regulated derivatives hold wherefor these are held by firms with insured deposits or not. >> robert, the "new york post." forgive me if i did not hear this and if you answer this in the previous question, but you said that you didn't like the idea of getting rid of the fed. what about the idea though of auditing yet, which again somebody pointed out it started out as a fringe thing from ron paul and now it has gotten to the majority of signatures in

the house. >> one of the problems with all of the bailouts that we have done over the past 18 months is we have this secrecy, where you had the fed and the treasury pressuring bank of america possibly not to talk about the losses that it could incur with the purchase of merrill lynch, so all of this secrecy, the idea that the government and big banks are colluding to hide information from investors has led to these proposals to audit the fed, all kinds of others things. i think if we get out of the bailout business, people will feel more comfortable that there is transparency, consistent release of information, that the government isn't using its powers to favor certain institutions over others and some of this pressure will go way. as for the specific proposal auditing the fed, i don't think

is helpful because it looks like congress, the fed is always politicize. congress obviously votes on the fed chairman but we don't need more day-to-day political and-mean interference. confuses the markets as to what the fed, is it making his decisions based on the merits are based on its congressional audit. thank you. >> henry stearn, new york civic. nicole, what you states seems eminently sensible to me and i think to a lot of people in this room. is there anyone in washington it believes the way you do? [laughter] and is there anyone advising president obama, who thinks that way? >> the problem with the

president's advisors is they have lived for too big to fail for so long that some of them just can't conceive of another system. bajis think this is how things should be and you read this in the op-eds they write for the fd and other papers that the answer is to figure out how to make better too big to fail rather than end it and they have lived in the system where you don't have any consistent limits to protect you from your inevitable mistakes and they just think they are not going to make mistakes. when they do, they think they are so smart that they managed to extricate themselves from thence the stakes and there's no reason to protect themselves from the future mistakes. what is a lesson we are learning from this crisis? it is the same lesson unfortunately from washington's perspective that the learned from long-term capital management. we are solis marguia feeca doud how to get out of this and now they are saying look at this, we figured out how to prevent it depression so they are not humbled by this.

>> paul lantos. i quite agree. oe sounds quite plausible but you were saying but i am wondering where you actually sent these reasonable limits to borrowing? i heard you say 50% margin for stocks and later on you said 10% would have been fined for aig to put down for the ces boss. most people think 80% is a reasonable margin for mortgages. is there a method for actually setting these in a sensible way without too much protection? >> it should be consistent across anyone asset class or investment class or anything that mimics that and beslan class, so the keepers and margin requirements on stocks, i don't think the number -- could they

have done it 50 years ago, the 40%, 60%? the consistency matter so you don't gain the system and the lower requirements on the futures markets, these have been in place for a long time. they seem to have worked reasonably well for decades, so i would submit that derivatives that act like these derivatives with the lower margin requirements should also have those requirements as long as they are consistent across the asset class and for houses, anything that is above 20% you are just making the problems that raid mentioned worse, were too many people won't be able to afford a house and there is pressure for other ways of making them able to afford it. we had 20% down payment requirement for a long time. it worked reasonably well and i think we could go back to that as long as this holds across the

housing market and no one can say there is no risk here and therefore we can lower it and eliminate it. >> shahri segall. it sounds to me like a lot of what you are suggesting none too big to fail is actually application of classical antitrust analysis to some of our financial institutions. if that is the case, do we have a regulator or regulators who you would trust to apply that analysis in a relatively efficient way, so that we could achieve that goal of breaking up too big to fail? >> i think, if we have market discipline of these firms, it actually lessons the need for antitrust. you know, we see moreso in

britain right now then here, where the public is very concerned that these banks have too much consumer power, where you have got to wear three banks that set the whole market and looking at it from an antitrust remedy is another example of a government's solution to a government problem with there is a much easier solution, allow for market discipline and let the markets for some of these firms to break up. and if that doesn't work, we have got antitrust and everything else but let's try the obvious market discipline solution before we go to the secondary command-and-control government solutions. >> bill honeycutt, nicole. you have recently written about dubai and new york state. could you expand upon that a little bit?

>> sure. this is actually quite on topic, because we have to buy and abu dhabi saying we are not going to bailout our investment and of course this investment arm does not have sovereign guarantees. the government is effectively saying we decided we want you to read the fine print after everyone has invested. why are people surprised that this? only in a world in which the financial industry considers vail's to be an entitlement is this the surprising announcement. what to buy as saying is reasonable, you lend us money based on value rations. weep bark money on these ululation is. we have god to go and adjust the price and adjust the price of the debt. this happens or should happen all the time in the financial industry dealing with the consequences of your actions is part of the witness as it relates to new york.

we have these off balance sheets, quasistate entities not officially guaranteed by the government all over the place and people are depending on this too big to fail guarantee with state and local finances as well. nobody would invest in a lot of new york's boondoggle projects that they did not think that there is a bailout there from the state in a crisis and for that matter, people would not invest in new york and california debt that they did not think wall street didn't consider these to be too big to fail so we have these government distortions preventing states and cities from getting their spending in order. the same guarantee that comes from washington, it makes these, distorts these market signals so there unrecognizable. >> if your recommendations were

implemented, don't you think it would affect the way monetary policy works, because the fed has to be able to effectively and quickly manipulate the credit availability and if across-the-board limits on borrowing, wouldn't that create a barrier to the fed changing liquidity in markets? >> it would mean that the economy is better protected from mistakes in monetary policy, but it should not change the way that the fed sets monetary policy. in fact, it lessens the pressure on the fed to try to recognize asset bubbles and pop them before they happen. if you up got consistent limits on borrowing, people will not be able to keep up with the rising prices, with the cash that they have to put down and you will

see less fraud as well. the mortgage markets are filled with fraud. people would not have risked their own money on their own lives to the extent that they did if they had to put 20% down payment down. >> her book again is, "after the fall" saving capitalism from wall street and washington. [applause] >> thank you. >> there are copies available and i know nicole would sign them. [applause] >> with their wildest imagination did you were writing fiction you could not have made this story up. >> if you don't know already this is a baltimore map.

the original is on display in the jefferson building in the great hall. if you haven't been over there to see it already i strongly urge you to go do it. there is nothing like face time with the real thing. there is only one copy that is survived in the world. is this one. it is probably about that big. it is 8 feet by 4.5 feet so it is a reasonable facsimile of the real thing in my even be a little bigger so please go over there at some point. as john suggested i didn't know anything about this map or the history of cartography when i started. in 2003 when i was a writer at the atlantic in boston opening my mail i came across a press release from the library announcing for $10 million about what it called americans for sir, the baltimore map that map the gave america its name. that $10 million was the most ever spent on anything. it was also almost $2 million more than it recently been paid

for an original copy of the declaration of independence. that kind of got my attention. i had never seen a map of the library seemed to think it was the most valuable piece and the market even seem to think it was worth more than the original copy of the declaration of independence. so i went to find out more at this point i was thinking maybe i would do a short piece for the flynn. so i did some research, and got the basics of the story pretty quickly. early in the 1500's, in the eastern part of france in the mountains there was a small group of scholars. among them mapmaker and they came across one early sailors chart showing the coast lines of the new world, and they decided that what they were reading about in saying on these charts was not a part of déjà as most people assumed it was but in

fact was in new continents. people traditionally have thought of the world as having three parts, europe asia and africa. baltimore and his colleague decided this was a part -- fourth part of the world, hence the title of the book. because they had made that decision, then seemed to represent the fourth part of the world that needed a name just like the other continents had name and they came up with the name america. it is a great story. there's a lot more to it than that and i will get into more of a bit later but as i was looking at the map and learned quickly that it is significant for other reasons not just for the naming of america. if you look on the left there, that is the new world, south america and with north america up of it. this is really the first map to show north and south america the unambiguously surrounded by water, not in some undefined part of asia or undefined place that really is not identified at all. because it shows north and south

america surrounded by water it is a president bush to suggest the existence of the pacific ocean and this is something of a mystery because europeans are not supposed to have known about the pacific ocean until 1513 wendell boa caught sight of it from a mountain top. that is something that brings people back to the map and something peter is written about extensively. is not something i dwell on a whole lot in the book because it felt the mystery is almost more fun to leave as a mystery than to try to resolve. but is a great part of the story. it is not the only part of the story. there is more that is very significant about the map. if you live in africa for example, this is one of the first printed maps to show the full coastlines of africa. africa had only been circumnavigated by the portuguese in 1497, and maps were only beginning to show all of this. the frame at the bottom of the map here is broken.

it would have been pretty easy just to push the frame down a little bit. i think the point is pretty clear, this is a break with tradition, new knowledge and it is exciting. possibly more exciting than the stuff on the left. people tend to forget this but this is a great discovery because it means you can sail into the indian ocean and beyond. even beyond that fact though is the fact that the map shows a full preview and 60 degrees of longitude. is one of the first to do that as well. maps prior to this one tended to leave a certain portion of the globe unmapped, kind of implying on the back -- back of the map and the implication was generally that it was just kind of fun chartered oceanic space and you didn't really need to try to depict it. here is one of the very first pictures of the world laid out in a full farinas to 60 degrees and what we are seeing is a picture of the world roughly as we know it today. it is obviously not fully

correct. is distorted and full of misconceptions and deliberately odd juxtapositions, but it is basically a vision of the world that we have been refining ever sense and that to me was really what struck me. this is not just a map. it is a map that is declaring hey we can now see the whole world for the first time. so, a great story. i thought this would be a great article and it puts some clippings and an article idea folder that i kept and then i got sidetracked by the thing for a couple of years. shington did i start to try to think about the map again and did a good debate could it because i wanted to make a living in boston and not move to washington. excuse me. [laughter] ..

>> with the map kind of at the durham map as the backdrop. so, what struck me most was that it wasn't just one world that is depicted. it's actually many worlds and if

you change the perspective this way or that it's like a kaleidoscope and you can tease out different stories, different collisions of ideas, different histories as well and i want to do something that was sort of complex enough that it would do the math in full justice. even if you have never seen this happen before or don't know maps of this period it's easy to see i think what we are looking at. the north is a topic and the sparkle wasn't necessarily always the case we assume today the north is always at the top. but there's plenty of maps that didn't. over here is the east and this is part of what we now call the pacific. this is china, india, central asia, the middle east, africa obviously this is the most famous part of the map, north

america up here, the gulf of mexico here, the islands of the caribbean, this is the region columbus explored and then this big thin line is south america. the dominant visual impression you get from looking at the new world is this giant southern place and that's what was making an impression on europeans in the early days of discovery. it wasn't so much the western new world, it was obviously columbus pioneered a great new route across the atlantic but he thought he reached asia so he and just about everybody thought that he confirmed old geographical ideas. south america, which he wrote about in the late 14 nineties and early 1500's extended far into the south and part of the globe people tended to think there wasn't any land and and that made it big impression and

we will get back to that in a minute. what dominates the map than is the southern part and that's why the cartographer put the word american on the southern continent along the shores of america sailed along. america is here. i will zeroing in on it. it's what today would be considered brazil. that's the first use of work. these guys made the name of and then put it on the map. as i said there's much more to the map the and just the depiction of the new world and i wanted to do a book for a general reader somebody like me who was reasonably well informed but didn't know anything about the map or the history of world mapping would read and learn as much as possible from and i wanted to come up with a way of making it a kind of gripping narrative read as many of us to raise as possible. the way i came up with it for organizing all of that was to use the map as the diet and as

the backdrop to read the book is organized into chapters that move all of the chap. each chapter starts with a little detail of the map come starts about the 1200's in england at the three western edge of the known world of the time and then gradually moves across the map throughout the geography and into history as europeans gradually make their way out to central asia and into china, come back to europe and will follow the coast of africa and essentially lives across the land in over to the new world. >> this was a portion of the booktv program. you can view the entire program and many other book tv programs online. go to the booktv.org. type the name of the author were booked into the search area in the upper left-hand corner of the page. select the watch link. now you can view the entire program. you might also explore the recently on book tv box or featured video box to find

recent and featured programs. you're one-stop shop for everything c-span's at c-span.org/store. you will find our series of presidential libraries and nearly every season and program policy collection of books, print, coffee mugs and other c-span expressions. look for these and more at c-span.org/store. ha coming up next, booktv present "after words." an hour-long interview program where we invite a guest host to interview the author of the new book. this week george packer and christopher hitchens talk about george orwell in his work. mr. packer selected pieces that. the two recently published volumes of george orwell's's

writing "face an unpleasant fact." mr. hitchens as the author of why or well matters. >> host: welcome to c-span's booktv "after words" program. linus christopher hitchens and i hear of the unaccustomed rolof interviewer and producer of my friend and colleague, george packer, who produced two volumes of the essays of george orwell, picked and introduced and commented upon and so today orwell is the subject so i wish we had more. i'm guessing you will hundred dj tayler's book on george orwell. >> guest: i haven't. >> host: what a shame but it doesn't matter because all i wanted you to say from his book was something i have a feeling you agree with, taylor writes at one point when i read other people writing about george or

will i keep thinking this is my offer like you're talking about. do you ever get that feeling? >> guest: i do and you in dalia and at other people and some we don't know our part of a really fanatical group of orwell letters d its free personal and i started reading orwell media elite come in my early 20s but it was a critical moment when i needed a kind of model. i needed to know how does one become a writer so i everett st. through what was then the only collection of orwell's essays and journalism, the four volumes of collected essays, journalism and letters and read straight through like reading an autobiography. >> host: you felt yourself being personally addressed. >> guest: i felt close to those places, and i think those are where you get the closest to orwell, to his voice and what's

essential to what in his character is strong and worth emulating and i became a slavish emulators and imitator for a while in my 20s. i think it is a good way to learn how to write to find a writer you feel some affinity for and just mastered their prose style, their rhythms, get the cadences into your own nerve system and then try to find your own way into it but that's the closeness orwell produces and people like me and you and so yes we feel a little bit proprietary when we read other people writing about him. but not when those people get him right and i think's your book y orwell matters gets him right. use it in the book orwell the three basic questions of the trade center and right, and realism, fascism and communism, and that sums up his political

will and literary achievement as well as any single -- >> host: i always feel they derive from each other in terms of what he saw imperialism especially in the sexual repression and racism that involved. i think you found it quite easy to decode the fascism and the danger to it was some extent an extension of imperialism, not too early but to a good deal. >> guest: yeah. >> host: to a good deal in many ways that was the case. and then because it's funny he harley writes in a thing about fascism. he assumes everybody will know that it's evil and needs to be fought against. it's strange there's no analysis of it. he takes it for granted that it's completely unacceptable with its of the course of fighting against one that he discovers there are many people who came to be his allies who are not and actually there is a almost equally dangerous illusion taking place on the other side of the bureau. >> guest: that's right. and he turned the same withering

scrutiny on his own side that he had turned on an easier target nazi germany fascist italy, franco spain and that is when he made most of his enemies on the left and all the way to the end of his life. >> host: i should say some of this at the beginning for those of you who don't already mr. packer first came as a novelist writing from africa and france and like orwell he was capable of fiction as well as the essay by which i'd think that you are now probably reaching a large audience, mr. packer, especially from iraq and other parts of the world but especially iraqi and the new yorker as a great deal of attention and i believe we now have a collection of essays. >> guest: i do, a booklet interesting times, writings from

a turbulent decade but back to fiction you probably overpraised me. i did write to novels. they were red by about 35 people and will allow lot from writing than i did not learn to be a novelist i don't think. orwell wrote a batch of novels in the 1930's that were in such a tradition of anglo-american realism and i love them. i don't know how you feel about them they keep flying is marvelous. he is the one that really lasts the longest. but you just don't feel that orwell is working in his most natural rain in those models. you felt that the essayist sort of pushing through the illusion of fiction all the time. he has something to say. he has an argument to make. he has a proposition about the world all the time and he doesn't have the restraint and patience of a natural fiction writer and that is why we can be

grateful that he once wrote in i think why i write that if you've been left with his own devices he would have been a kind of nineteenth-century british novelist like his heroes, dickens but defense the turbulence of the 30's and 40's pushed him into becoming what he called a kind of pamphleteer -- >> host: i have to interrupt, one of the unconvincing things. >> guest: absolutely. i was going to say that because really it wasn't the defense to push and in that direction. it was his own inclination. >> host: it is a rare case of him being too conceited other words if it wasn't for all these products it has to be charles dickens will come on and it's a bit much. the burmese say he flattered them by writing three novels, and all farm and 1984. >> guest: i actually heard that line in burma last year.

or will is still a huge presence and burma. all the more now as a young generation who did learn english well growing up. they came after the generation of was schooled by the british. they've had their futures utterly delighted by the to tell the treen regime and orwell speaks to them not just because he wrote about burma but as you say because he wrote about totalitarianism, 1984 has so many echoes today and so you can actually find animal farm being sold discreetly in the books on the streets of rangoon and so he's a kind of -- he is re-emerged as a hero to the young gregarious rider after being condemned for his supposed imperialism. >> host: while we are on the [inaudible] which we might as well stay with i've been in north korea and when one goes as a reporter one hopes to avoid cliche so i'm going to try not to mention 1984

because everyone says it is an orwellian state, funny word of the state of the great thing about trouble to me as some -- >> guest: it seems to do the same thing over and over again. >> host: he found the state the same year that 1984 came out and it's as if someone gave him a novel in korea and said do you think we can make this work. he said we will give it our best shot. it's absolutely remarkable. >> guest: life imitated. >> host: when people in countries like this come across as the north koreans when they will they are amazed. the greatest perhaps ever paid to one right to buy another was by [inaudible] in the capture of mind when he wrote about the situation in the stalinist poland and said there is a book in circulation called 1984. you can only get it privately. it is circulated with great secrecy and fear.

and he said i personally was very surprised as we all were to find out he had never visited the soviet union. how could he get extra -- how could he get the texture without having had this experience. and remember 1984 is the circulation of the book within the inner party. so it's an extraordinary -- >> guest: that is the great question how did orwell know? he lived almost his entire life in england. he traveled but through your of the end of world war ii and he had his years in burma but other than that he was very provoking and confined to the island and yet he wrote in his essay on arthur koestler the british writers of his generation had failed to understand totalitarianism because they had not lifted the way that kessler, so lonnae and other continental writers had a. so he was sort of criticizing the what he called bolsheviks spenders of several for not feeling what it is to live under

that kind of regime. orwell felt it but he had the same other than his years in burma and his suffering and hard times in the thirties which they didn't have. he had the same education and lived in the same england they did and yet he did feel that and that is a bit of a mystery how he could have known it so well. >> host: i think that a possible solution and also slight correction in reverse order then or production first. lot of sense of fear of all that although he did spend a lot of time and the far east of medically as a policeman but it being the colonial caught a than insight indeed almost slave relationship useful in describing some of the again dirty secrets sexual underlay of totalitarianism. then he was in spain and and in barcelona the time the party did briefly to go free and there was the police terror and third and important he noticed all the truth about spain had been written out of the record and he

looked back on this negative all he was afraid this was becoming a habit now that if the leaders of some big never happened and it never did and you can see the germans 1984. >> guest: done partly by the father of your old nation colleague the father of a alexander cockburn. >> host: and by most communists, quite a lot of other people fell for the line that the party was the best of vendor of the spanish -- it's only very recently the archives with franco's system and stalin system have been opened and we do know what happened in those may days in barcelona and actually what was happening was in every detail true. he refused. but then the second point is about going on his first real book is written in french, it was originally a french book. he spoke in french, at least to

begin in the burmese languages. >> guest: he wrote the essays and sketches and english. he wrote a couple of little essays for a small french publication called [inaudible] back when she was in the paris. >> host: including barzilla -- >> guest: and the hero the manuscript of down and out which was rejected by t.s. eliot and some of the other major -- >> host: did any reject -- >> guest: it was rejected by -- i think it was elliott. in 1931 or 32 and he rejected a new then rejected animal for many years later -- >> host: as did [inaudible] one of the best rejection letters the savitt pasted in the hat that says mr. orwell, thank you for handling the manuscript

unfortunately is impossible to tell stories about animals and the united states. it's in the country of disney they could make such a fatuous remarks and they thought it was a story about the farm. >> guest: an animal farm became a very popular cartoon film so they were wrong about that. but just to get back to the experience of reading orwell and the essays in this book when i started reading him and i don't know if you had this experience, i didn't know much of fascism or communism or imperialism. i was looking more for in a sample of how a writer carried himself in the world and how to transform experience into sentences and how to do it in a way that didn't call more attention to the self and the experience, and again why i write orwell brooch good prose is like a windowpane, another

may be dubious claim, but helpful in the sense that his words are always pointing to the themes and not back to the self and debris feel so much about the character. there's something almost -- you feel you know him when he would read his essays. you feel you know how he speaks. you can hear his voice. you know his irritations. you know how he's going to react if he says something. he's almost a life with you even though there's a certain remoteness to orwell he doesn't let you in on everything in his life. he doesn't talk about his marriage very much in his riding. he doesn't talk about his child, richard orwell. he doesn't talk about his parents. some of the basic things american memoirs make just bowled out of are the subjects of a book after book are kind of limits. it is a bit constrained maybe by

victorian shoeless that way but nonetheless you had a strong sense of the person behind the words and that is what first drew me to what makes those essays were reading over and over again. >> host: i should return this by now for those of you watching this, this is george's first selection called propaganda and it's about orwell's essays and another called facing unpleasant facts, which is his more perlo mccaul stuff we might say. a comment on both the tiles. when orwell writes about himself jesus when i got started all i knew i had was little and power facing unpleasant facts and i think the power facing, i wanted to call my book that for a while, it is something almost biblical. >> guest: it is an unusual phrase, isn't it, as if it is an

act of force, it gives you some advantage which is true. he was able to look at things at times almost exaggerated the ugliness or the bad smell. he seems to seek them out with a kind of relish but nonetheless things in himself, in england, in democracy, in the literature. >> host: and in the working class. >> guest: which the famous line in his book about coal mining and coal miners, the working-class's smell which orwell said it isn't necessarily true but it's what million upperclass people think it's the reason why the class divide is such a hard thing to overcome in britain because it's almost physical. it's not just kind of mental snobbery and i think that line,

and my right that that line was really bothered victor who was the publisher of the book. >> host: the communists went on the rest of the life-saving this is what orwell thinks about the working class and they smeared with it but he doesn't romanticize when he some of the workers. that he's on their side. he doesn't romanticize at all nor does the romanticize the colonial subjects on whose side he also is. >> guest: absolutely. the opening lines of shooting an elephant which to me is almost the perfect orwell s.a. where you see his mastery of the form at its best and i use it to teach the essay a lot because the students see how he does it so clearly but at the beginning he says with one part of my mind ibm hated british imperialism and another part i felt the greatest pleasure would be to stop my bayonet into a buddhist priest that's and that's a kind of confession about himself and about the burmese this may be

painful personally but from a literary point of view very powerful because it invites the reader in and says i have all sorts of conflicting feelings and i'm going to own up to them and even make them subject of this essay. >> host: another thing you mentioned is residents by which he never says anything through he never tells us why he resigned from the burmese police. >> guest: that's right. >> host: but my guess is he was afraid if he carried on he would become a state list. >> guest: he had a streak of that in him. he wrote wants to understand fascism you have to have a streak of fascism. he was talking about jack london whose book the iron heel was a kind of prophecy of fascism but he might as well have been talking about himself, too and that, too is the answer to the question we were talking about earlier how could orwell have understood what was happening behind the veil of terror of stalinist russia, nazi germany

with a direct personal experience except as you pointed out in barcelona and i think it is partly because he had stern stuff in him. some of his british -- >> host: you see in the introduction most of his arguments were with himself. and there was well encapsulated because a lot of people if you like are naturally liberals or progressive and think it is just a nice way to be and he didn't think that at all. he had scored for this and i feel what's fascinating is is somewhat educating himself out of an upbringing where he had been taught to look down rather than fear, to look on colored people in the entire hezbollah material, to be very suspicious of jews which is clearly taken in a long time. >> guest: that's right, your book makes that clear.

>> host: excuse me. sorry, i get carried away. and then one very thing he doesn't cure himself of his absolute hatred and discuss for homosexual the. >> guest: that's right. he used that phrase the pansy left to talk of the spender and yes it was in the nicest side of him and there are women who think that he was a terrible misogynist and even that his misogyny, his inability to create convincing female characters for example juliet in 1984 is not the most persuasive part of the novel but that was part of why he ended with a dark vision of the world. this is the subject of the book by i think her name is daphne, the orwell mystique. i don't think it's right, that's giving totalitarianism not enough credit for being the darkness that was surrounding europe at the end of orwell's

life but it's true he has a strange attitude. you might almost say toward individuals on like a journalist today he doesn't spend a lot of time on characters in his nonfiction. you never get to know any coal miner by name. you don't get to know anyone in his outfit and talk militia in barcelona particularly well. you learn a few of their names. sometimes he just recites the mcginn on a roll but you don't get to the inside of there being three >> host: but there's the part of the soldier he meets in a sort of feels with the first handshake. >> guest: the italian militiaman. if that is a beautiful moment and then at the end of the poem that concludes that essay looking that on the spanish war left and that also says i didn't want to meet him again because

if i did it would ruin my first impression which is this is the sort of a flower of the european working class and that lady is the way his mind always goes away from the individual and toward the social type. towards the political and social significance of digging coal underground. >> host: the sort of thing to preserve his own distance. at one point he replies to someone who asks him if he would like to come to dinner and meet the famous poet of the period and he says no i think i may want to write about him and i find it much harder and i think what i'm going to say is disinviting but i find it harder to do that once i've met someone. very human and also very inhumane and saying i don't sort of trust myself. >> guest: because he knows that as he wrote in the essay on gondhi been human means attaching yourself to other human beings and being willing to be broken down and even

destroyed by your love for this individual. that essay is quite harsh about gondhi's in personal wealth for humanity and his cruelty or neglect of his own family. for orwell, this was a perverse in version of the proper order of things which is you love the individual, not mankind. he wasn't a saint or lover of mankind in that sort of way although he has been sanctified by some of people posthumously. so it's absolutely true that is where his feelings drive him but there's also a counter force that cuts him off from those attachments and i think it may partly be simply because they get in the way of writing and writing honestly so the individuals are missing. post to this a good illustration of the the point that you made which is orwell to start with a very aggressive opening sentence and one on gandhi as i know you

know says they should be guilty until proven innocent. >> guest: we could slap orwell open your. no autobiography to be trusted illicit reveals something disgraceful which is the beginning of his essay on dolly. i was aided by large numbers of people. the only time in my life i've been important enough for this to happen to me. yes. >> host: but i think with the gandhi introduction as well it shows something else which is his general distaste for the spiritual and he was doing something shady or creepy about that. it was the general content for religion. he had respect for it. he knows the bible very well. he quotes a lot clearly for the memory almost wordperfect or as good as. >> guest: at the key moments his marriage to eileen, she insisted on having it done in a church of england ceremony. he was buried in the church of

england graveyard. >> host: he liked the lethargy. >> guest: you feel it is a kind of cultural attachment to the words, cadences and traditions of the church of england which has absolutely nothing to do with having which he described somewhere as in the full version seeming like a practice in a jeweler's shop. so, yeah, he was not a religious man. there's no sign anywhere of they believe in the afterlife. >> host: i think that he had a strong feeling for the protestant revolution. and it shows in his attachment to milton. his favorite line was a line of milton which is there's a human instinct for freedom and he writes about a protestant sentries as he puts it in a positive way to trumpeting to the european enlightenment, and i think in 1984 and again the

struggle against the language that's been imposed upon people and the struggle to find out what is in the secret book under the party had there's a very good in our chief -- good analogy to have it translated into english and english revolution was important to him. >> guest: there is an essay called privilege of literature which is about the effect of not just totalitarian countries but the internal censorship that came with the totalitarian as asian of the british intellectuals and that essay begins the effect on literature, the effect on books she says books like some wild animals can't breed in captivity. it kills the imagination and that begins with a sort of scene from a gathering of ten, the writer's organization that were

well attended. it's an unusual case which he actually places himself at some sort of public meeting as a jumping off point for the estate and at this meeting no one is able to stand up and defend free expression. everyone is defending the right of the soviet union to do this to get it reminds me kind of the worst sort of identity politics when it invaded the writers organizations in this country in the 80's and 90's, suddenly the last thing anyone wants to speak up for this free expression. i think a good example which is very near to your heart is when solomon rushdie came under the fault will from the high iranian government and there was hardly any writer able to say this is an absolute atrocity executed. >> host: this kind to me. there were a lot of people who did very well. remember convening a very good meeting f. -- >> guest: if you were among the very first but back to orwell, that sas and continues to imagine what if milton were to come back today and attend

this meeting. he would be astonished and no one at the meeting in 1945 for 46 was able to defend the free expression with the unqualified force of milton 300 years earlier secure absolutely right that period was a kind of touchstone for him in the struggle -- >> host: so the title for your other -- thus "all art is propaganda" i have a question to ask. i know he wrote in wartime all right thing is no propaganda. it's another attack on the comfort and pacifism. >> guest: that's right. where does this come from? post-religious three >> guest: he says it several places. for example in his essay on dickens -- >> host: dorcy? life forgotten. >> guest: he does. he says it also -- >> guest: also brigands brilliantly. dickens is one of those authors

worth stealing. >> guest: and we can have a little pinball game of sharing. he might say in another essay called the man of a poem. for him it means -- and the reason i gave this book titled not all or it could have been written by you know the minister of propaganda joseph grosz or even the ministry of information and wartime england but that all art implicitly has a point of view. something to say about the world and as he says it is trying to push one's view in a certain direction. it has a persuasive function. if it's worth anything it has a kind of world view that it is advocating and i think it's not a resignation to the crudeness of wartime propaganda. it's more his sort of smoking out the art for art's sake crowd who would like to have hour to be a separate from the world of ideas and politics and even its

and he's singing especially in a time like his in the 40's it was impossible to be a serious artist and not have something to say about defense even if your writing three -- >> host: he makes that confession for himself. he says every line i've written the last 20 years on any serious topic, any serious line is written with the hope of the space socialism. >> guest: space socialism and totalitarianism. every writer is not point to be as explicit as orwell number we want them to be, but i think it is his technique as a literary critic and as a critic of a field he practically invented which is popular cultural criticism to find the in applied or hidden world view in what seems to be a kind of benign or not particularly pointed realm

of art or culture like the post cards but donald macdill postcards that are sort of semi pornographic or at least mildly risque sold in england at the time. >> host: [inaudible] >> guest: that is a great phrase or the boies weekly or duck detective novels in his essay, raffles. that is a good example what are you going to do with an essay that basically compares to different areas of the british detective fiction, raffles from the turn of the century and a novel called orchids from this wendish was rather popular around 1943 and the point that he comes to is there's a shift in moral point of view between the two. raffles' has a code which is not a particularly lovable code. it is the code of a hypocritical english gentleman but

nonetheless a code so there certainly looks that can't be donner whereas no orchids from his blandish the only code is power and the pursuit and that is what should be admired and the great passage in the essay where he says people appreciate power of the level which they can understand it and he has a boy and a kosko slump warships jack dempsey, a student at a business college warships lord somebody or other, the reader of the new statesman worships stalin. it's a difference an intellectual level but not the moral outlook and that is how he finds sort of i would say the moral implications of something that seems as trivial. >> host: in what you bring this up because it brings me into it quicker than i wanted to but something i wanted to raise. a lot of his writing about ethical codes and resonance and discussions on ruthlessness and

counter violence reflects hostility towards the united states to say look at the comex the british boys read. with the american ones coming in at dexter's and so on. >> guest: exactly. >> host: so we began by saying, well you begin by saying you've got three great questions for the triet century right but i add that he got one of them i think not totally wrong but the importance of america was something that he didn't write enough about it when he did it was rather sketchy and condescending. >> guest: you have a chapter or well in america which he never visited. he loved some american writers. mark twain -- >> host: sure. >> guest: -- jack london, henry miller oddly enough. but i think for orwell, america was -- >> host: thomas kane. >> guest: -- thomas kane, absolutely. british-born. but for orwell, america plus --

it didn't have the things he was attached to it that are the things winston smith in 1984 is clinging to for 70. the art traditions, the things passed on from one generation or another like the lyrics of a nursery rhyme or a song. old books and book stores that trade in old books. of course some of these things are available. >> host: googled country churches with brass rubbings. >> guest: the huge tree and the churchyard. for orwell, those things were sort of the bulwarks against the monolithic paving over of everything by not just totalitarianism but modern white. he hated concrete. he hated central heating. he hated most mechanical entertainment, advertising and all these things seem to becoming not just from the east

and soviet union but from the west and the united states and in this since there was something provoking -- >> host: he did this like antiamericans. >> guest: yes, that's right. >> host: which was becoming a disease of the left. >> guest: because i think he understood it to be an antiliberalism and refuge of a particular kind of slaughter the that you find on the left which sees america as the folder of good things. it's connected i think to the conservative version. but i think the point you made in your book and you are making now is absolutely right. he didn't see america as a guarantor of the things that he cared most about. culturally especially it was an alien and distasteful place to him. >> host: it is a pity that he died when he did because his friends at the review knowing that he wasn't well tried to get him to come to the u.s. first

for treatment. >> guest: i didn't know that. >> host: because it's an easy disease to get but he died this death and they said come over and you will like it and he would have been a great addition to the review and at one point he contemplated making the voyage, mississippi. >> guest: which is what he would have done. >> host: they must have orwell -- >> guest: his next book would have been about the mississippi. >> host: i've got something on the american -- jury suggestion if you might like get. you have difficulty telling with the opening sentence of 1984 is. >> guest: but what was striking 13? it was a bright cold day and the clocks were stricken 13. that's right. >> host: i was reading john adams the other day and he was writing how to get the colonies together and coordinate a revolution against the british power and he says will be difficult to get all 13 clocks to strike at the same time.

>> guest: there you go. >> host: at the ended the show how the attempt is made to obliterate all the possibility of even thinking about freedom from the language and making it impossible to even for really the fault and he gives an exit of the sentence that could be translated. with all of these truths to be -- [inaudible] there is a possible one certainly possible to and certainly one compliments to america -- >> guest: destruction orwell traveling through their early 50s america. the america of alito. the american of eisenhower years when the suburban country was happening, the highway system was being put in place, intellectuals were beginning to leave the partisan review and leave greenwich village and take some comfort and security in the

university's. it's almost unimaginable. it's like a different era had begun by that time and orwell to the field so completely to a previous era that was harder, more exact, more austere, and all of the abundance and comfort of the post war america i think would have left him pretty cold although your right he would have found places to love. the mississippi is one. maybe the west -- >> host: i would have thought new york, to iraq. probably not san francisco. >> guest: he didn't love london. i mean, he lived in london and worked in london and even made a point of staying in london during the blitz when other people were leaving but once london was no longer a press, its charm for him or of which tells you something about the way in which he actually pursued the hard experience actively rather than simply not avoiding it. and so instead he moved to one of the hardest places in the

british isles off the coast of scotland where he lived his last years probably hastened his death in 1984. but i don't know if you saw this, his son, richard orwell, his adopted son kind of maintain his silence for 60 years and we only knew he existed -- we didn't do anything about him and he gave an interview about a year ago. he is i think an agricultural engineer somewhere in england which is kind of what you expect it he describes being orwell's song in those years and far from being this gloomy apocalyptic jeremiah to tout teheran is, orwell was a lot fun. he took him fishing and boating and the width of these adventures and nearly got killed a bunch of times. it wasn't physically easy but orwell was completely turned to the natural world and to his son and shared his love of physical fitness and of nature with richard and it's for me it gives

me a lot of pleasure to know -- >> host: i didn't find it surprising at all because first he had a very bleak child himself and didn't like his father in fact when he mentions the analogy of a family for british society it has every figure except a daddy which is st. >> guest: family with wrong people in charge. >> host: he mentions distant cousins but no father. second, it is rare to find a joke in george orwell. when they do occur they are quite funny. they are very dry. i'm trying to think of one in animal form when the animals takeover one of the things they do is go to the smokehouse it take out the ham and give them a decent burial. i thought that was quite funny. in his essay on confessions of a book reviewer is extremely funny. >> guest: the picture -- >> host: the general is pretty bleak. how do you come out on the question of lionel trilling who

says of orwell the great thing about him is he's not a genius? that the extraordinary thing is how someone so relatively ordinary could by refusing to lie and working very hard and not care whether he lost a job or got his book published was able to change the. >> guest: in other words qualities and character alone are sufficient to become a great writer and become one of the most important writers of the century. yes and no. part of what drew me to orwell back in my 20s was the sense that this is available. this is not the mad brilliance of saul bellow. this isn't faulkner's arab desks. this is not -- this isn't even hemingway prose. this felt like natural pros. that is a conceit -- >> host: it doesn't make you

feel as though you are reading a book for the simple white lie bothered. >> guest: impossible. i can admire but i also can feel sort of discouraged. no, with orwell you feel encouraged. you want to go do-it-yourself. that is the feeling he gives me. you want to try to write an essay like that because the pros simple and it has the plaine style and it seems like the leading characteristic is honesty which one ought to be capable of. on the other hand, i think that the trilling fight go a little too far in the sense that decency alone, that is i think the word that he uses about orwell is a key orwell wd, common decency and it's an important one but orwell was an eccentric orwell was a difficult man. he had -- full of contradictions. he wasn't so simple and good i think as trawling what have you

think and do a little earlier to some of his antipathies and he was a man of violent dislike and in some of his earlier work before i think he calmed down with a certain amount of self insurance denunciation was characteristic mode. so, he's not so -- she's certainly not a saint and he's not simply a good man whose qualities of character allowed him to write great books. but those -- there's enough truth to that that he is sort of a model available to everyone. >> host: it's difficult to imagine him being afraid. >> guest: x ackley or if he was afraid whether physically or morally, he then would have noted it and forced himself to overcome. >> host: we've lagat about ten more minutes and what i thought i would do is take up the idea of dickens being a writer worth

stealing as orwell called him and talking up the attempt to appropriate orwell used to describe the totalitarian state is in some since someone who stands for principals. >> guest: that is the u.s. are like, the positive use. >> host: he is often invoked and he was invoked against his will somewhat in the early days of the cold war by people who thought that the animal farm in 1984 was a attack on socialism which she didn't want -- >> guest: that's right if he had to write a statement saying i support of the labor party and it's not an indictment of english socialism is a warning of the tendency of all modern political fought to move towards to talk with tourism. >> host: and he was affirmatively english to assure the english were no better than they were. >> guest: that's right. >> host: the best way we could take this even though i sense a

different time we both of you would favor the removal of saddam hussein from power. and negative orwell was in our minds at different times and certainly i know of other people who -- is it worth asking do you think what orwell would have thought? >> guest: just to finish the little history you started, he was also claimed by norman parts of commentary and wrote an essay called orwell had fled from basically if orwell had lived he would have been a neocon, he would have been dormant ha'aretz three >> host: that i feel i can pronounce because part it's thought that orwell would have taken the american side in indochina and i think i could be certain that is not so. >> guest: because his antiimperialism. >> host: he was colonial especially that part which he knew and he actually mentions when he's in paris at the end of the war revival of the left opposition type, and how

stalinist paper and one of the great essays that is printed about the offering french colonialism in indochina which is the ancestor of the american -- i think he would have regarding it -- >> guest: he would see it as a colonial war and for that i think you're absolutely right. iraq is different. it's not a colonial war. you know, in a way there is -- it's very hard to say and it's a little dangerous to claim that we can speculate because we have to. there's two different arguments made about that. one is orwell would have seen in saddam hussein's roel other than perhaps north korea the nearest thing to the world she imagined in 1984. you say that the totalitarianism is a cliche. iraq is a great example. saddam hussein was a big brother. he had a big brothers mustache. his face was on posters all over baghdad.

it was on television all the time. you could not escape the eye of saddam's secret police. >> host: they used to say they thought they knew what he was dreaming. >> guest: and he was inside and even after he was overthrown they felt they continued to suffer from bob affect of decades. host we saw it in action and the pornographic a lot of power will never be more portable -- >> guest: and saddam hussein's son was the sort of human incarnation of the pornography incarnation with rape and all kind of crime, so that was easy to say that orwell would have seen that regime as it was three there would have been no defenses of sovereignty or state sovereignty were of, you know, that this somehow was an antiislamic war or antiarab war. he would have seen that as a totalitarian regime which is what it was three on the other

hand -- >> host: i would say not so secular -- >> guest: toward the end he used islam for his purposes, that's right. the other side oft is the language used by the bush administration both before the war and after the invasion which in many ways was mendacious, euphemistic, mr. yadin, bad language, the kind of bad language that allows that political fault which is the subject of politics and the english language may be the best known of orwell's essays and i think orwell might have been merciless in stripping away the rhetoric of george bush, cheney, donald rumsfeld and karl rove for that matter and so which orwell would have had his vote, the antitotalitarian orwell to would have seen iraq exactly as

it was and have known to stand up against saddam hussein was to stand up for the kurds, to stand up for masses of iraqis who did not want to continue this way and he would have understood something one learned about which is mostly iraqis were relieved to have that regime -- >> host: let's not forget. >> guest: exactly. that's been forgotten. all the other side, the orwell who hated political lobbying and propaganda. exactly. so it's hard to say. >> host: consistency. >> guest: is what do you think? >> host: it's also hard because he never wrote anything about -- he was very skeptical of the foundation of the state of israel which was the argument going on in the closing years of

his life. he wasn't very drawn by the promise of the zionism and he was sympathetic to palestine. >> guest: do you think that he believed democracy and the freedom that milton stood for could take root in from all western countries? is there evidence that he and the universality -- >> host: i am quite sure. there's one thing, we'll have a couple of and it's i'm sorry -- where the illustration he writes to his friend, his indian friend who only buy a couple of years ago, a budding novelist and essayist who gets attacked for writing in english using the language and gets locked in england for being a sort of white indian or to nationalist in other words don'torry about this you're bound to get both of those things but i tell you what i think one day there will be it a part of english literature, special subset written by indians in english and of course no you can't go into a decent

bookstore and c546 plant in the indo-pakistani writers. >> guest: writing in english. >> host: very often better than english people. >> guest: said he would have been kind of following in des moines -- >> host: he's in the input literature from [inaudible] >> guest: so certainly there is -- he wasn't a little englanders in his view of culture and his view of expression. but one pernicious idea that this resulted from -- >> host: -- i am not a great master of ceremonies because there was a conversation i wouldn't be saying you have to convince this in less than one minute. i will give the last word. >> guest: it is people who don't look like us can't do this. and that is a terrible mistake and i don't think orwell would have fallen into that trap of imagining freedom is only for

white people which is -- >> host: what he for it and as a to the effect which the title i'm not going to risk closing on. >> guest: i know the when you mean. >> host: can i say it's been real? good luck with your books. >> guest: it's been fun. and all the best to you, too, kristopher. >> host: thanks for coming.