society than we are. >> host: so, out of disaster comes freedom. so kevin williamson, thank you very much. >> that was "after words," booktv signature program for which authors of the latest nonfiction books are edited by journalists, public policymakers, legislators and others from a with their material. ..

>> i think we should have microphones everywhere here. [laughter] i'll read for a little bit, and then i'll take questions just like at every other reading you've ever been to. [laughter] why is there a glob of macrony salad next to the japanese chicken in my plate lunch? they left boston harbor with the next missionary bound for hawaii in 1819. that and only they serve chicken four days a week. it is a fine spot for a sunburn tourist from new york city to sit and ponder the implications of a lukewarm box of takeout

because nonof us belong here, not even the tree. like a lot of people and things in these islands, banons are imports from somewhere else, in this case, india. they shoot off sprouts that bore slowly into the ground and take root bulging into new connected trunks to support more and more until each tree is its own spooky little forest. there is a banyon in maui planted in 1873 to congressmen kate the 15th anniversary of the arrival of new england missionaries in that island. it was eight fetal when planted, and now it's over 60 feet high with 12 trunks spanning over 200 square feet. i was chatting with a woman who

worked there about the trees. she said the town gardener put in a lot of effort confining that tree to the square because otherwise it would keep growing until the tree cracked the foundations of every nearby building and toppling everything in its path. their tendency to crowd out and destroy its neighbored earned it the nickname strangler fig. [laughter] this was built in the post 1815 statehood architectural style i think as a brady brutalism. our park appears in an old black and white photograph on display there. the picture was taken in the summer of 1898, a few days after the sons of missionaries who had dethrowned the hawaii queen handed over hawaii to the united

states. the park is pitched with the tents of the first new york voluntary infantry. the spanish american war had soldiers stopping off in this suddenly american city on route to the philippines to persuade the people at gown point that south government really suspect for everyone. [laughter] they named their camp after the president who dispatched them there, camp mckinley. by august, the administration had invaded the spanish colonies of cuba, fill fifteens, and guam and annexed hawaii. the united states became a world power for the first time, became what it is now. hoorah for hawaii, roosevelt wrote when he heard we annexed the islands.

he was in cuba, and one of the end results of that con conquest was american ownership of guantanamo bay. the most important objective of all the maneuvers was possession of islands and ports. he and his friends had primed for these bases for years the way a normal man envisions his dream house. [laughter] all they ever wanted was a cozy little global empire with a few islands here and there apart a fleet of battleships. that dive bomber sank four battleships in pearl harbor and it's how i was interested in hawaii in the first place a few years back. the purpose of my initial visit was a quick jaunt to see the uss

arizona memorial, the monument in the harbor perched there of the 1077 sailors who died on the ship that day. unlike the flip-flop wearers on my flight, i didn't come for direct sunlight or fun. [laughter] i came to hawaii because it was attacked. after i checked the arizona off my to do list, i had time to kill and swung by the liluokalani palace downtown and wanted to look at the building that was the only palace in the united states. the guide led my group into the room where the white businessmen and sugar planters who staged against liluokalani locked her up for treason after the counterrevolution. liluokalani while in her imprisonment in the second room of the palace sewing a quilt on

display there. perhaps out of spite, little flags of the kingdom of hawaii stand guard around the square. she embroidered a scene of a cartoonish man struggling with an umbrella and the good chuckled over there, but i wonder if it's the fly leapt of a woman who lost her crown and it's not coming back. i should mention that i was there in december of 2003, the week before i arrived in honolulu, we captured saddam hussein hiding in his spider hole. when i was standing in the cell of a poll notion queen -- at that exact moment, the iraqi dictator was behind bars in a u.s. military compound guarded by pennsylvaniaians, not that

the queen, a constitutional monarch and accomplished musician famous for writing the love song and saddam a mass murder famous for gassing 5,000 kurds have much in common, but there's a link between the two overthrows, and american tendency to indulge in what trendy government lingo at the time called regime change. when the liluokalani guide announced the flag on the grounds was lowered and the american flag went up, she looked like she was going to cry. i couldn't help but picture the scene in the u.s. news when a u.s. soldier celebrated the invasion of baghdad by climbing up a statue of saddam and covering his face with the stars and stripes, a justture that was unfortunate as pr and improper flag etiquette. [laughter]

it was telling to spend the morning at a historic site like pearl harbor and the afternoon at another historic site we have forten entirely. the ground swelled outrage over the invasion of iraq sited the preemptive war as a betrayal of american ideals. the subject of the dissent was this is not who we are, but you were not where i was. it was hard to see the look in her eyes when she talked about the american flag flying over the palace and to realize from time to time this is exactly who we are. what's more, hawaii is just as roosevelt predicted, crucial to the american empire's preps in the pacific. pearl harbor is still the head quarters of the u.s.-pacific command as it was for all the wars in the pacific with japan, north korea, and north vietnam.

i started looking into hawaii part in the epic of american global domination. americans and their children spent the 78 years between the arrival of missionaries in 1820 and the american annexation in 1898, importing our favorite religion, capitalism, and our second favorite, christianity. in certain ways, the americanization parallels the americanization of america. just as the puritan before theirs set off into the wilderness of new england, the new england set sail for the islands, what they thought of as a spiritual wilderness. nine out of ten natives were wiped out by contacts of european diseases, so was the

population ravaged with other disease. just as the industrial revolution and the building of the railroads brought in the huddled masses of immigrant the to the united states, the sugar plantations founded by the sons of the missionaries required massive imports of labor from china, korea, jay pap, portugal, and the philippines making this a multiethnic place where every one is a minority, hint the plate lunch. this was air lifted from some church pot luck in air, usa, are served alongside an asian protein like pig, chick, adobo or loco moco, a hamburger patty served with a fried egg and it's the most obvious defect, not enough egg.

[laughter] sugar plantation workers used to share food at lunchtime swapping noodles for korea spare ribs and bread. this got passed down evolving into the plate lunch served at diners, drive-ins, and lunch trucks throughout hawaii. in 1961, the they published the rainbow drive-in where i bought my plate lunch. it was an army cook with the 100th infantry battalion, but volunteer soldiers in the 442ndreg mall combat team served segregated troops in europe in world war ii becoming the most decorated unit in military history and earning the nickname the purple heart battalion. their motto was remember pearl

harbor and their argument was they were americans, not as the u.s. government classified them and their family and friends. as aliens. they offered food and it reads like a list of what america is supposed to be like, a neighborly mishmash. barak obama, the president of the united states, mentioned his craving a plate lunch and listing rainbow drive as a potential stop. his mother and father met at the university of hawaii. he's our first plate lunch president. [laughter] i suppose the double sided way i see the history of hawaii as a painful tale of native lock come bined with a multiethnic saga symbolized by mix plates in

which soy sauce and mayonnaise congeal tracks the history of the united states in general. i'm the descend didn't of cherokees marched at gunpoint on the trail of tiers, but i'm also the descendent of swedish pes cants who lest for kansas and why the plantation workers sailed to hawaii. whenever i eat plate lunch, i think back to the lure of my swedish great grandfather's voyage across the atlantic. i guess the only food he brought with him was a big hunk of cheese and befriended a german who had the only food of saw sac. they shared their food. growing up, i came to know america as two places, a repatience country built on the destruction of its original inhashas been at that particular

times and a welcoming country of imgrants who care their saw sac and -- sausage and cheese. they published the poem the white man's burden about the new american empire of island colonies of new peopleses. four years earlier, when they visited washington, d.c. for the first time, he met theodore roosevelt and dragged him to the smithsonian to show off glass cases full of american indian arty facts. he wrote i never got over the fascination of the people more completely than any mod earn race had ever done honestly believed they were a godly little new england community setting examples to brutal mankind. of the five countries the united states invaded and or acquired

in 1898, hawaii is the only one that became a state. that said, i have come to understand that even though hawaii has been a state since 1959 and an american territory since 1898, a small, but defiant network of native activists question the legality of both and do not consider themselves americans as ale which is easy to pick up on when they march past you on the 50th anniversary of statehood carrying picket signs that say we are not americans. [laughter] so -- [applause] >> oh, thank you. [applause] so, if you have questions, a microphone carrier will find you .

>> hi, sarah. you mentioned your nephew a lot in the book, how is he doing and how old is he now? >> he's almost 11. how is he doing? [laughter] well, you know, i haven't seen him in awhile. i did just see him, i do like to travel with him. i saw him a few weeks ago when we went to mexico and guatemala, and, i don't know, he's quite a budding wordsmith. [laughter] he asked if he could sit next to me on the plane home. i was like, i don't know, are you going to be a pill. he's like, maybe only a chewable. [laughter] teaser. >> i'm real curious how you go about doing your research? what is your process from start

to finish? >> what is my process from start to finish? well, let's see. you know, i read -- i read a bunch of books first, a lot of, you know, i read some of the official histories, and then i read some, you know, primary documents or diaries, memoirs, that kind of thing. i had a lot of missionary memoirs this time. lucky me, and -- [laughter] , and you, know official diaries of the official players, and them i just start doing reporting trips where in this case i went to back and forth from my home no new york city to the islands seven or eight time and stayed for a week or several weeks where i would represent an apartment including one in the building that jack lord stands on top of in the opening credits

of hawaii's 5-0. this time a spent a lot of time in the mission houses, reading the papers, letters, and diaries, and then the state archives of hawaii which houses a lot of the government papers and the monarchy papers and the bishop museum archives, and they have various treasures and artifacts and also reading a lot of old newspapers on microfilm, the whiling newspaper, that kind of stuff, and then also going to historic sites and interviewing curators and tour guides and i did other interviews with various locals, you know, some of them independent activists, you know, one of my interviews is with a good friend of mine who was a missionary descendent,

that kind of thing. yes? oh, sorry. oh, sorry, microphone. [laughter] >> hi, sarah. i was curious to know if you saw the annexation of hawaii has having a modern ripple effect in somehow causing the birther movement? [laughter] >> correct me if i'm wrong, but i'm not aware i like saying that because i like english. [laughter] correct me if i'm wrong, but i don't know that they are entirely up to speed on this history of hawaii in the 1890s. [laughter] i believe they are focused and concerns are more prompted by anger at who the president is in trying to find ways to, you know, not make him be the president, unless i'm wrong about that.

[laughter] i don't really think there's too much. i mean, i guess the two things are vaguely linked in that if the united states had never annexed hawaii, a person born in honolulu would not be able to be president and therefore not garper as much loathing as the current one, but, no, i don't think they are that linked, but i'm not sure. [laughter] yes, you pick. [laughter] oh, mike grace. [laughter] >> i drove three and a half hours to be here with you. >> thank you. i'm from lore -- loredo. >> oh, that pin has my face on it even. >> it's close to my heart. anyway, the last wop with david letterman and is he like --

[inaudible] or like -- [inaudible] [laughter] >> david letterman? >> [inaudible] >> what did my sister say? [laughter] >> i think david letterman is a youthful hue row of mine, and he's actually a real reader who has always been nothing but nice to me and my books, so i have nothing but kind thoughts for the man which makes a terrible story. [laughter] oh, he's very nice to me, and helps me sell my books. [laughter] it's a terrible story. you know, i write nonfiction, and if you have to tell the truth -- [laughter] but thanks for driving. [laughter] the rest of you probably drove your hippy bikes here. [laughter]

>> when you have an idea for the next thing, do you have a bunch of idea and one sticks, or are you sitting around and like, oh, yeah, that's it. >> yep. [laughter] i mean it's different every time, but i don't have my next idea, and sure, i have a million idea every day, most all of them lame at this point. [laughter] you know it when you see it. like the last beak, my one about the puritans, i started -- i mean, i always wanted to write about the puritans, i mean, who doesn't? [laughter] i love the sermon the modern christian charity specifically and i thought about them for awhile, but then i really started writing the book after rornld reagan's funeral and the sermon was read there, and because it's the sermon where you get the image of new england

with a city pop a hill, it's a sermon about charity and generosity, and then it was so closely associated with president reagan, a president whose administration was not about charity and generosity, but gutting every social program designed to help one's fellow man, so it was just a little kick i needed, you know, to get cracking. i thought it was a good time to revisit that speech just because, you know, winthrope in that ser ron, he says, you know, we shall be at the city upon a hill, and to him, it was two-sided. like, yes, it could turn out the way we talk about the image now that, you know, this place eventually, the united states, then just new epg land would be a beacon of hope and light and to the world, but he meant it

two ways in that we can fail and everybody could see our failure, we'll be up there and everyone can see our failure, and he defines that failure as the colonists failure to take care of one another, so, i don't know. that's why that one. [laughter] >> sarah, i noticed on your food break, you didn't say anything about poy, and does jim neighbors still have his show? >> i don't know what's happening with jim neighbors in the last 40 years. [laughter] what about poi? poi is still a very prized food amongst the hawaiians. it's just not a staple food.

it's -- it's an objective almost religious devotion. it's the, you know, mashed terro root. i personally -- let's say i haven't craved it for awhile since i left hawaii. [laughter] but i mean, there is a whole story there. one of the people i interviewed, a doctor, whose grandmother worked for the last queen of hawaii, he walked me through the creation myth, i sat down to interview him and asked a question about the overthrow of the queen in 1893, and he answered by going back to the beginning of time. [laughter] as you can imagine, that was a long interview. [laughter] when he was talking about the beginning of time, he talked about the earth's mother mating with the sky's father and all that, and one of the objects of the union was this stillborn and

when that child was buried sprouted the first terro plant, and them the next sibling was the first human, and so the people saw the terro plant as an older sibling, and the number one sibling who has the job to take care of the younger siblings, so the terro is the staple food and not just what a cheese steak is in phillie. it's a member of the family kind of, so it's been very cherished for very long. then, you know, a lot of the -- it's -- it's a rare plant. it has been for the last, you know, century or so just because so much of the land that used to be use to grow the plant got turned into sugar plantations.

>> hi. >> hello. >> i know i didn't like these things. okay, all right. i know this is -- i have to say who is your favorite author? two parts, but, yes, curious? >> i don't really have one favorite. there are two i would turn to again and again when i'm writing like if i'm stuck apple i just want to revise myself and not just give up and, you know, eat cereal in front of television or something. [laughter] one is moby dick. i'll always crack it open and read it at random and the language is so weird and the

story so strange, it's just a jam-packed little book, you know? it's like cold water splashing at my face because it reminds me what a book can be, but it's different from the way i think and speak and write that it doesn't believe into my storying telling, and the other is charles adams, the cartoonish. i have a big collection of his books and i flip through those, and he's so delightful and strange and funny. there's something like on those two -- it's just like a can flick a switch in me, you know? >> i also wanted to ask, i'm doing a lot of research on my family and history, and i'm part cherokee, but are you thinking about a book?

there's so many books on you. well, i won't say that -- there's not enough, not the way that congress is going right now, so -- >> a book about the cherokee? >> uh-huh. >> oh, i wrote a long essay about the trail of tears in my essay collection, but i doubt i would revisit that, but there is a little bit, you know, i do revisit some of the history of that tribe in this hawaii book just because it's the same organization and thought in the american board of commissioners for foreign missions. they are the group that sent the missionaries to hawaii. they are also the group that sent missionaries to the cherokee nation ands westernized the cherokee and, you know, that same group started the school up in connecticut for heathen youths where all of these ships,

new england ships in the china trade came back with all these kids from all over the world, and some of them were put in this school including the boy whose basically the first hawaiian christian, and to -- two of the cherokee men who they studied as boys, and they were a couple of the ones who signed that treaty against the will of the rest of the tribes that gave the u.s. government permission sort of legally to start the trail of tears, so there is a real concrete connection, but that group of mission tears really got around. [laughter] here's one, i don't know. >> hi. >> hi. >> i also drove three and a half hours, but from corpus. [laughter] do you have any more about -- obviously libraries are an important in your research, and

as a former library yap because budget cuts are awesome, do you have words to advocate to tell how important libraries have been to your process? >> oh, in case texas legislators are watching c-span at 7 a.m. on monday morning. >> i thought i'd try. >> i'm not going to reinvent the wheel. yes, libraries are very important to me. that's where the books are. [laughter] you know, i spent the first 11 years of my life in a tiny, tiny, tiny town in oklahoma with no library. at the school, there was one shelf with books on it, and you could take those home, but you went through the books pretty quick, and when i was 11 years old, my family moved to a college town in montana that had

more than one library, you know, and that first summer, and they are sidewalks also. [laughter] we liked to roller skate, and so that first summer we spent -- i mean, moving from oklahoma to montana probably sounds like one, you know, stick to another, but it was a college top, and to us it was basically like we had moved to paris. [laughter] that first magical summer we had roller skates and sidewalks and we roller skated to the library every day and we thought we had moved to civilization. no oven, oklahoma. -- no offense, oklahoma. [laughter] when i was in high school i would skip school allot. that doesn't sound good. sphai in school, kids. i'd skip school and go to the library. [laughter] it's not just for my work as a writer. ofobviously, in this book

librarians at the institutions i mentioned in hawaii, i mean, some of that would be impossible without them, you know? the, you know, i can't tell you what you can learn from my cro film of -- microfill film of old newspapers, but a lot is digitized and available widely, so i mean, i can't even -- i can't imagine -- i mean, libraries are jo so crucial and vital and i don't know how to talk about life without them, you know? it's like, oh, there's not anymore eggs? oh, what? [laughter] so yeah, i wish i had something super zippy to say about it, but i think they are so important and, i mean, you don't know how great a library is unless you

were born into a town that doesn't have one, put it that way. >> thank you. >> sure. [applause] >> we lived in hawaii years ago, and i'm -- we knew the history and all that, but it's interesting how the natives are conflicted being americans, hawaiians, and it is a different state to live in. it is, like i said interesting how they -- they are not always considering themselves part the united states, but it cot to be very aggravating to have people visit and say, well, back in the states -- well, back in the u.s.. we said, you are in the u.s.. [laughter] although, they go back to visit, and here people say, well,

how -- now that you're back in the u.s., we said, we are living in the u.s.. we are in hawaii. well, hawaii is not really a state. things like that. >> uh-huh. >> back in 1959 and i guess you had a lot -- you heard that -- >> well, i watched, i think those shows jack par did in hawaii right after statehood, and he does ask this crowd of people what do you think of the united states, and they all yelled back, you're in it, you know? [laughter] i think some of that location and some of that is just a by-product of what happens when, you know, when a country on a continent colonizes a island

thousands of miles away from the shore. in some ways it's completely american, there's military bases everywhere, and it's exceedingly religious. there's a lot of really crummy commercial architecture which is a bit of a specialty in this country. there are so many things about it. i mean, especially, and then you have all the hotels and resorts. with the hotels and resorts and military bases, you know, there's a writer a like who wrote the two great contributions of the american civilization are annihilation and fun. [laughter] he was writing that about las vegas and a piece about, you know, all the old nuclear tests in the nevada desert, but i think that metric applies to hawaii as well, but then, on the

other hand, you know, it is still so much so much the sovereign up dependent country it once was. the language, the english and if you ask directions, they tell you malka or maki, malka towards the mountains and maki towards the ocean. there's so many vees tajes of its, you know, its culture that it is kind of lost in a way, you know? that's maybe why lost was filmed there. [laughter] i have a friend who i was -- he's a teacher, and i was speaking to him and some of his colleagues, and i was talking about some king and i was butchering his name, and the

pronapsuation, and i just said i hate saying hawaiian words in front of hawaiians, and my friend said it's funny you called us hawaiians. i said what are you talking about? you were born here, went to school here. he said, i know, his ancestors are from japan and germany, and just compared to -- it's like that in new york where i live, it's this very different place with people from all over the world and all this food, and everyone who has been there awhile considers themselves new yorkers. it doesn't matter where you are from or where your ancestors were born or your skin. it's just a jungle, and like fairly happily so, so there is something -- there is this kind of lost quality about hawaii and the identity of the place and

the people and that, i think, is, you know, a result of this kind of, i guess, it's sort of kind of americanization and what happened when the missionary offspring overthrew the queen in 1893. it was a severing from the hawaii past. you know, one of the other things she did while locked up in her cell is she translated the creation myth which is a genealogy that tells the story of hawaii from the beginning of time from, you know, the slime that created the earth up to her own ancestors, and i think one reason she did that after her overthrow is she's thinking about that and that long, long, long hawaii past that has just been, you know, severed, and i think there's still, you know,

it's like what is that called when you have something is amputated? lost limb syndrome? >> [inaudible] >> thank you. there's always going to be that there. i mean, it makes it a very fascinating place for that reason. you know? hi. >> back on the subject of book ideas, i've been interested to find out where you have the ideas -- >> book ideas, where i came up with the idea for my book on presidential assassinations. i don't know. [laughter] i don't remember. >> okay. >> i think i was writing a lot about president lincoln, and it just occurred to me in research.

i don't have a snappy story. [laughter] >> i find your style really dry and funny, so i was wondering if you have intertaped the idea -- entertained the idea of fiction because you mentioned that -- >> no. [laughter] that question comes up a lot is such an up cult to non-- insult to nonfiction. [laughter] just because something is true -- no, no, i'm not a liar. [laughter] there are times of other liars whose books you can buy here. [laughter] what i love about nonfiction is it doesn't have to seem plausible. nonfiction are things about, well, that can't be true, yes, it is. fiction, you write stories that seem like they could have happened to people who might exist. [laughter] you don't have to do that when you write about a weirdo like

abraham lincoln. one thing that happens as the first missionaries are leaving boston harbor, well, they are en route to come and christianize the hawaii yaps, and while they are on the water, the new hawaiian king decides to abolish the old religion. you put that in your fiction-type stories, that seems like, you know, like, no. that's too easy. the missionaries show up and they get the news. guess what? the old religion has been, you know, banned and outlawed, and there's nothing to replace it, and here we just sailed into a spiritual vacuum to sell our christian wares, and to them it seemed like it was a gift from god. you put that in a made up story, i mean, it just doesn't work.

it just is unbelievable. [laughter] like, you know, about the story of how john adams and thomas jefferson died on the same die on the 50th anniversary of independence, and it's july 4? you put that in a novel, that would be so laughable. [laughter] you know, it's fact, and therefore it can be as implausible as possible anyway. fiction? [laughter] >> i know i'm a groupy and i preorder everything you write just as soon as i hear it's coming out. >> thank you very much. >> however, this one -- >> oh? [laughter] >> this one, when it came out, it was the title, unfamiliar fishes, i had no idea what you were going to be writing about, and it's just like, where --

>> that's because i hate subtitles. go on. [laughter] what inspired you to use that title? >> oh, it is -- it's a quotation from a letter written by one of the first hawaiian writers, david mala, and he was almost 30 years old when the first missionaries arrived, and they taught him how to read and write. he was well-schooled in the hawaii tradition, but the missionaries from new england had to invent a written language for hawaiian, so they taught him and some other people to read. in fact, pretty much the entirety of the hawaiian population within a generation and within a few years, he was writing his book, "hawaiian antiquities" which is a

compendium on the hawaiian culture dying away thanks to the coming of the westerners, and it's a very beautiful, very useful book, but -- and he became -- he was very -- he was under the influence ever these new englanders, learned to read, write, became a teacher and minister, but being a writer, which is to say grumpy and pull of misgivings -- [laughter] and as the years wore on and saw white people drowning his homeland, and not just the missionaries, and mali, where he lived, was a stopping point for whalers in the golden age of whaling, so there's hundreds of whaling ships stopping in hawaiian ports at the same time, so as he saw all of these white people coming in, moving in, you know, dropping by, sailors on leave, they are parole not the ones to make the best impression. [laughter] he wrote this really sad letter

to the native friends. who he says something like i'll try to get it right -- when a big wave comes in, large and unfamiliar fishes come from the dark ocean and they see the small fishes of the shallows, and they will eat them up, and then he says the big men from the important countries come here and see that our people are small. they will devour us, so it was kind of prothetic. i like pulling unfamiliar fishes out of that just because my book is about these americans, and the americans who came to hawaii in that time in the 19th century, they are not like regular joe americans, you know? you got your bible-something killjoys. you have sailors on leave, and then a bunch of capitalists and conmen and other dreamers.

these -- something about just pulling that out in unfamiliar fishes captured that. it's about these keep of singular types who ended up there. >> time for one more question. >> sarah, your first book was a media study from a liner's point of view. have you thought about doing one with npr and your television appearances? >> oh, you want to read a diary of me like going on book tours and talking to interviewers? [laughter] yeah, no, that hadn't occurred to me. [laughter] i will say that you're -- that was my first book listing to the radio. that was a prison sentence. i have, you know, it's been more than a decade that i was, you know, let out on parole. you know, i had to listen to the

radio every day, and i don't know if you listen to the radio, but it was kind of trying as a project, but i do think there is something in that form, definitely captured the time, you know? the yeah i listened was 1995 and, i mean, i don't really listen to a lot of different kinds of radio so much anymore, but at the time i can't imagine it's gotten more violence, the talk, you know? like when i turned on the radio, i think maybe on the first day -- this is right before oklahoma city, before, you know, before -- especially with the right wiping talk radio that people started wondering, hey, maybe you shouldn't talk like that all the time, you know? the reason i wrote it was because of the 1994 congressional elections and the freshman congressmen when the

republicans took over the congress called themselves the ditto head caucus. radio was having a huge impact on the country and unaware of that impact. i heard on the first day a kid with the paper route calling in a talk show saying there's a kid trying to horn in on my paper route. the host said you have to get a gun. they said it in gist, but a week into it i was visiting my family in montana and there was so much snow that the streets were not plowed wet, and i went skiing in the of the night and it was wonderful, and then i came back, turned on the radio, and there was a person saying solving the problem of the welfare mothers and illegal immigrants by giving the welfare mothers jobs by

posting them at the border to gun down the illegal imgrants. when i say it was a prison sentence, it was very dark and violence and terrible things i had to listen to, you know, that -- so i don't, yeah, and i think we forget that or -- i mean, i don't know. i would like to forget it, but i can't, and then after, you know, oklahoma city, when that happened, there was something president clinton said that stuck with me when that happened. he said, you know, if there's talk of hate, stand up and talk against it, and that was something that was nice to hear after, you know, a few months of listening to violence calls to murder in between commercials. i don't see a recreating that experience, lovely as it was,

but i did -- i mean, it was -- i did, you know, it was my first book, and i learned a lot by writing and publishing it, and it's a very like dark and i think keep of angry raw book, but i think that comes from what i had to listen to. maybe we can have one more question? could it maybe be slightly more hopeful? [laughter] that's not from your question. that's me and the darkness. >> i have to work on hopeful i think. i was curious, do you see a parallel between the missionary effort you write about in here and the dulas brothers who enjoyed life in the 50s. >> i don't know who those are. >> joan foster dulas. >> i've been to that airport. [laughter] >> the overthrow of -- >> oh, some of the other american regime changes? >> yeah.

>> it's a habit of us ours. we don't like the guy running guatemala or iran? i know what we can do, or we don't like the guy running cuba? that p -- that kind of thing. i mean, it's one thing for a government to want to hope for foreign leaders who would perhaps, if not agent in our -- act in our interest, at least, you know, and the thing about the united states, at our founding, at the declaration of up dependence, you know, defines our belief, our theory of government is that it should be based on the consent of the governed, so by definition the idea that americans would go abroad and try and like monkey with other countries' rules is a contradiction, you know? it is at best hypocritical.

>> is that what you're talking about? also the religious fervor. >> the thing about hawaii, the original missionaries who came in the 1820s and 30s, they were not the one to overthrow the queen, it's their children, who were born in hawaii, most attended the school founded by the missionaries to educate the children, the school our president went to, it's the hawaii-born hawaiians, or hawaiian subjects who overthrow the queen, and to them, it played little role. she was a more devout christian than they ever were. the original missionaries had -- they were supposed to civilize the hawaiians as best they could, but they had strick instructions not to mess with the government or get involved

because political affairs of this earth, and they had to be concerned with getting as many hawaii yaps into the kingdom as possible. a lot stuck to that, but a few quit to go work for the hawaiian government, but they had to quit their jobs as missionaries to do that. there was one ex-missionary who helped with the framing of the new institution. there was one missionary who quit the mission to work in the judiciary because he objected to the fact that the herdquarters back in boston was taking donations from slave states. this is before the civil war. the actual missionaries did more or less stick to their plan partly because they just didn't have time to do anything else. these were burden-overloaded people who -- i mean, look at what they did. they wanted to make everyone

christians and because they are protestant, everybody has to read the bible. a, they invented the written language, and then rewrite the bible, and they translate it from greek and hebrew into hawaiians, publish that, teach everyone to read, run the schools, and preach their sermons, and, you know, because it's monarchies, they have all this other commands and demands that the aristocrats place on them, and they have to drop everything and sew dresses from the queens and chiefly women, and there's just so much new, and they had to build their houses and churches. they were so overworked and overburdened that they really didn't have time to, you know, do any talking, but their

children, their children did, and religion really had very little to do with it because like the man after the overthroe who becomes the president of the republican of hawaii, he and the queen, you know, they went to the same church, and he taught sunday school, and she was the choir, a solid christian, and, in fact, in her book, her memoir, i recommend it, she writes the book. it's her story, but it's also published in 1898 to argue against annexation, and she uses two arguments against annexation, well, several, but two being that this doesn't seem christian. she implies god will smite us if we do this to her little country. the other bun -- one is that it doesn't seem in keeping with the demands of

democratic and republican government, so, there's that. [laughter] i would like to thank you all for coming. thanks, austin. you've always been good to me. i'll be upstairs signing books. [applause] >> to find at more, visit the author an facebook at facebook.com slash sarahjane sarahjanevowell. >> i think it's fair to say you're the historian of the movement, and this book shows why because it's concise, witty, and dispassionate and the best summary of what happened since 9/11. this is a basic, yet hard to answer question which is what should we call the conflict of which you write?

the subtitle says the enduring conflict, but what do we call it? >> guest: first of all, thank you for the comments. i'm happy that you, such a really well-qualified author like yourself read the book, and that we're having this discussion. what should we call it is an interesting question. i don't think we have a language for it. you know, as i say in the book, president obama had an interesting question coming into office which was how to define the war formally called the war on terrorism. a lot wanted it as a global police action against terrorists, and that would have been naive. al-qaeda has been at war with us since 1998 by blowing up our embassies in africa. they declared war on us and war like things, and for us to pretepid it's not a war, we're